Engagement seminar September 2009 – Communicating with remote and geographically-scattered employees

Couravel’s fifth engagement seminar at the RSA was jointly hosted with Hilary Scarlett. It focused on the SMART working and how companies were managing engagement with remote and part time working. Clare Prochaska for Logica and Sue Pearce from the London Borough of Hackney spoke. Click here to see the slides. Key topics discussed “roundtable” were:

• The importance of strong and visible leadership support to champion new ways of working
• The need for leadership to understand their role, and the examples they set, as essential to achieving a return (perhaps using specialists and visiting other companies/sites to show the way)
• The fear of the unknown acting as a block – many enjoy new ways of working once they try it (we had the example of people complaining that hot desking may be suspended)
• The dilemma of balancing the need to comply (with rules about how we need to work) with the need to innovate and to encourage risk taking – the need to establish clear boundaries about what we can and cannot do in the new operating environment
• The need to apply basic principles of good management communication in order to facilitate change – i.e. be clear about outcomes desired, how performance will be measured, what you expect from people, behaviour that is unacceptable
• The importance of trust underpinning effective change (and the lack of it getting in the way) – so the need to be clear about key messages, consistency between words and actions, leadership visibility and candour, etc