IN TOUCH : How to get engaged

Lack of workplace engagement is both endemic and costly with one survey estimating annual financial loss due to disengagement of managers and employees in America at around US$300 billion. So – how to ramp up the engagement quotient?
The answer, according to Hubert Rampersad, is technique for bringing together personal and organisational objectives – or linking human capital to business success. Author of Personal Balanced Scorecard: the way to individual happiness, personal integrity and organisational effectiveness, Rampersad is in Wellington next month to explain how.
His workshop (being run as part of the 11th World Congress) explains how anyone can apply principles of motivational alignment and individualistic scorecard techniques to engineer an organisation for increased staff engagement, continuous learning and improved individual and overall performance.
He says research on happiness in the workplace suggests that worker well-
being plays major role in organisational performance and that there is strong relationship between worker happiness and workplace engagement. The Gallup Management Journal survey found that workers who felt ‘engaged’ were more likely to get on well with their boss and workmates, enjoy work challenges, feel less frustration and less stress than the disengaged and are happier and more secure in their roles.
His Personal Balanced Scorecard (PBSC) takes personal approach to work and non-work performance through process of self examination. It encompasses personal mission, vision, key roles, critical success factors, objectives, performance measures, targets and improvement actions all divided along four perspectives – internal, external know-ledge/learning and financial.
Basically it draws on what is important to individuals to provide base for continual improvement – and for aligning personal ambition with shared organisational ambition.
“People do not work with devotion and spend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with,” says Rampersad. “Clarity and uniformity of personal and organisational values and principles are therefore essential for the active involvement of people.
“Research has show that when an individual has some input regarding the shared ambition that affects his or her work, the person will be more supportive, motivated and receptive towards organisational change.”
Managers often contribute to worker disengagement by handing down instructions without sufficient regard for their impact on recipients.
“In our consulting practice, we see many supervisors needing to take crash course in the people aspects of meeting organisational objectives and in the complexities of strategic performance improvement.”
• More information at
www.Total-Performance-Scorecard.com