The fine line in employee engagement
Take your team with you
How important is employee engagement in the planning process? Most companies are lucky to have a consistent process of cascading direction, let alone engaging employees in the conversation leading up it. A few companies go the other extreme of doing strategy planning with half the company in the room. This is certainly dependant on the industry, the corporate culture and the personalities of the leadership.
While there are no hard and fast rules about how to best do your planning, there are a couple of common pitfalls to pay attention to.
Executive spirit walk
This is pretty common. Most companies have an executive planning session off-site, and when they come back, they declare the output but don’t involve employees in the journey or experience to any degree. People try to align to it, to the degree they can but they don’t totally own it. Don’t believe it? Walk around and ask people to describe what the strategy and business plan of the company is. It’s like Moses going to the mountain to meet with God and coming down with the 10 commandments. Sounds harsh, but this is based on the assumption that executive have all the answers.
Assuming that people don’t want to have input
It’s pretty clear that you’d be walking into a dog and pony show to try and involve the entire organization in a strategic planning event. That being said, it’s a huge mistake to assume that people wouldn’t get really excited about having input to the corporate direction. It’s important to tap into the collective best thinking of your subject matter experts across the company as input to the executive planning. You will be amazed with the excitement and engagement this creates. If you’re going to do this, you have to follow it up by showing people how their input was used so they know you’re not wasting their time.
More often than not, people are disengaged because they’re more interested than we give them credit for.