Hands up if you work for an organisation with over 100 employees?
🤔 How’s staff engagement and inclusion?
🤔 How involved are you in decisions that affect you?
🤔 How do you find out about decisions that affect you?
Most colleague conversations I overhear (lean into) in cafes come back to a gripe about poor communication of one kind or another. The point isn’t what one party or the other did wrong, the point is the spiralling mistrust, depletion in motivation and impact on staff wellbeing that these missed opportunities have.
When we’re talking about employee engagement and communication, we’re not just talking about changes such as whether staff will have to start paying for parking or annual leave carryover policies, (important thought these are), we’re talking about a culture where staff WANT to be included and involved.
As a big believer in my own unconscious incompetence, like many founder CEOs, I learnt the hard way and didn’t know what I didn’t know.
What I did know is that I wanted to involve the team in most decisions and while figuring out how to do this, the team were making their own minds up and showing me the way.
Their confidence to do lead came from a culture of safety, a strengths-based working environment, inclusion, belonging and transparency – all from the moment of their interview to the moment of walking the inclusive walk in the hardest of times.
So whilst we absolutely cannot and should not involve everyone in everything, including recognising the burden of this on people who basically are great employees but ‘just’ need a job, we can ask the team what THEY want to be included and involved in, trust them to know and ask what they need to be in place to be able to lead on this.