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How To Keep Your Employees Engaged

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In 2005 David Bolchover took it upon himself to find out what actively disengaged employees do when at work (and also when not). Scouring the research, he found that:

  •   1 in 3 people have taken illegal drugs at work: ecstasy, cannabis, and cocaine
  •   1 in 5 people have had sex at work
  •   70% of porn site hits happen during working hours
  •   The actively disengaged have twice as much time off sick (and many of them are to be found at Alton Towers, apparently)
  •   1in 5 people describe themselves as constantly surfing the net, while a majority of people estimate they spend the equivalent of a day a week on non-work websites at work
  •   7% send more than 20 personal emails a day
  •   1/3 of young professionals confess to being hung over twice a week at work; and
  •   A quarter of people have fallen asleep at work

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Positive Deviance: Learning from, and creating, exceptional performance

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What is positive devience and why is it a good thing?

Positive Deviance is an exciting methodology emerging from an understanding of organisations as complex adaptive systems. It helps organisations learn from those who manage to achieve better than normal outcomes from within the same resource constraints as their colleagues.

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Cultivating A Positive Culture

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What is a positive culture?

Cameron’s research has revealed three key distinguishing features that define a positive organisational culture. Essentially these are: an interest in learning from success to exceed standard performance; the cultivation of graceful behaviours such as helpfulness, patience, humility, forgiveness; and a bias towards spotting and affirming the good in people and situations.

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Ten Tips for Effective Strategic Development

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What is Strategy?

Strategy is often thought of in organizations as a plan for achieving a specific future. The plan is created by a small group of people who then inform others of the vision of the future and the plan to get there.

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How Working With Strengths Can Improve Performance

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Our strengths are those abilities we have that are hardwired into our ways of doing things. They are a combination of genetics we inherited and the environment in which we were raised. By the time we are adults some neural pathways are much more practiced than others. We have habitual ways of being and behaving that we find effortless: indeed almost irresistible. These, in essence, are our strengths. We might use them for good or evil, with or without much skill, but they are our go-to, default way of being in the world. While they can and frequently do get us into trouble when applied badly or inappropriately, they are also our greatest asset. And yet....

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Five Ways to Get Your Team Working More Effectively

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Teams are the building blocks of organizations. Teams are groups of people who work together to achieve things, but not all groups are teams. Teams are characterized by interdependencies, in other words team members have to work together to get things done. While this interdependency creates the potential for the whole to be more productive and creative than the sum of the parts, it can just as easily be a recipe for frustration and conflict. How can you help your team get the most out of working together?

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How Does Positive Organisational Behaviour Turn Into Positive Organisational Performance

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Positive organisational scholarship researcher Kim Cameron reports that flourishing organisations, that is organisations that are success as well as being described as great places to work, exhibit three key cultural characteristics.

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‘I wouldn’t have started from here’ - The Challenge Of Bringing Emergent Change Insights To Planned Change Projects

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Planned change approaches inadvertently encourage people to give up trying to contribute to the change conversation or to influence how it happens. They can become passive, demotivated and demoralised, waiting to be told what to do. It is when the downsides of this approach become apparent that people find their way to me, presenting their challenge as a problem of dis-engagement, poor morale, people needing support during change.

Using your Positran Strengths Cards

According to Professor Alex Linley, “a strength is a pre-existing capacity for a particular way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is authentic and energising to the user, and enables optimal functioning, development and performance” In fact, the strengths concept is so central to positive psychology nowadays, that the knowledge and utilisation of one’s strengths is considered to be one of the most direct routes to personal and professional fulfilment.

Using Your Positive Organisational Development Cards: 10 Ideas To Get You Started

So you've got some of our Positive Organisational Development Cards - now what? We have produced a list of 10 ideas for ways in which you could use the cards to add value to your work with different audiences.

Introducing The Positive Organisational Development Cards

The Positive Organisational Development Cards each cover a key concept from the field of positive psychology. 

The concepts reflect key findings from positive psychology research of things that make a positive difference to organisational life. Each card lists the benefits of the concept, provides three questions to stimulate discussion, and is followed by three pointers for development. Each is introduced briefly below, arranged in four groups, to help you follow them and get an idea of any you aren't familiar with as well as to help explain them to your audiences.

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Leading Through Uncertainty: Seven principles for practice

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Many leaders are currently facing the challenge of leading in conditions of great uncertainty in an unpredictable environment. Yet much leadership and change guidance is predicated on the assumption of a relatively stable or foreseeable future – for which plans can be made. Here are some principles to help leaders continue to offer leadership even when firm predictions are hard to come by and plans are difficult to make.

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How To Avoid Triggering Resistance To Change: 5 Benefits of Co-Creation

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It is true that, on the whole, people aren’t widely enthusiastic about change that is forced upon them without consultation that appears to make their life or working conditions worse. It is also true that people will buy the idea that if they point out the problems that the proposed change will cause, they will be labeled as a troublemaker or worse. Given this, they may stop saying anything. This compliance is often confused with ‘buy-in’.

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'How do you create a sense of urgency in positive approaches to change?'

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This was the question posed to me recently by an HR Director taking up a new post with a big change agenda. He was attracted to the idea of positive change, but working with an organization with a long and successful history, he was challenged about how to galvanise the workforce into engaging with the necessary changes. I thought it was a great question and it has stayed with me.

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Don't be a nodding donkey - how to listen appreciatively

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How might the spirit of appreciative inquiry, the desire to ‘grow more of what we want’ help create more effective listening? And how this might help reposition ‘active listening’ as a systemic, dynamic, creative act.

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Why make organizational change so hard for yourself? 5 myths busted

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Leaders and managers are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their management role. Myths abound about the challenges of doing this. Here we lay five to rest.

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What engaged employees want and how to find out if they're getting it - from a report by Roffey Park

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Roffey Park research suggests that there are three key components to employee engagement: my job, my organization, my value. Their report ‘The human voice of employee engagement: understanding what lies beneath the surveys’ gives a full and readable account of the factors that make a difference. A key finding is that pride is at the heart of employee engagement.

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Performance management and appraisals - common pitfalls and how to do it successfully

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Too often appraisals are seen as a human resources owned and driven technical process. Understanding performance management as a social process helps us to realise that the important and key components are the quality of the relationship and the communication. From this perspective the paperwork trail becomes a supporting mechanism rather than the driving mechanism.