what we solve
engagement & morale
When morale stays low, even good people disengage, and after a while they start to vote with their feet. Word gets around and recruiting top candidates becomes increasingly tough. You've suddenly got churn which is eroding the average quality of your knowledge workers, falling productivity, and escalating learning curve & recruitment costs.
Not such a rare concern - 55% of Graham Keen Partnership's assignments in the last five years have involved our addressing:
- Senior management, management &/or staff engagement levels
- Morale
- People retention
There is no point in addressing morale issues in people by making them more upbeat and positive, without also working on contributing organisational factors.
Our approach is to diagnose the source and drivers of the issues. Usually somewhere along the line people have got into the habit of blaming external or internal circumstances, or looking to someone else (the boss, the staff, the clients, "them"…) to make it all alright.
No-one in such a state of learned helplessness is going to be able to fix things, so one of the first steps we take is get everyone to own the issues and the need for solutions. Then our clients can start making progress, with one word of caution.
We can usually win client leadership one more chance to put things right from their teams. This requires leaders to embody what everyone else has agreed to do. Any lack of congruence between leaders' behaviour and the new way will quickly lead back to staff disengagement, this time with no cards left to play.
Accordingly we need to teach leaders everything we know about sustained behavioural change, influencing skills, and leadership values to make sure they keep true to the shared objective.
The last piece of the jigsaw is to ensure that everyone knows how to access at will their own top levels of motivation and positivity, in the same way as when we are ramping up Zest for life.
