The Velvet Revolution at Work

What drives or delivers engaged people? Employers need to focus on creating the right conditions. Employers can't impose engagement: people need to choose to engage themselves. In The Velvet Revolution at Work, the follow-up to his best-selling The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer, John Smythe explains that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves. Using models, examples and anecdotes from his client research he goes on to demonstrate exactly how to design an engagement process; one that is integrated with your business strategy and that is sustainable.

Contents: Foreword; Introduction; Part I What is the Velvet Revolution at Work?: The velvet revolution at work - why now? Defining employee engagement; Introducing the primary levers and supporting enablers of engagement. Part II Strategy Delivered through People: Delivering Strategy and Change through Participative Interventions that Engage the Right People: Getting started and negotiating business outcomes; Your default approach to engagement: enabler or disabler?; Negotiating who should be engaged: the power of the peach; Designing and running engagement interventions that deliver fast commercial and cultural results; Sustaining the benefits of an engagement intervention; Creative dynamics that liberate breakthrough ideas. Part III Beyond the Intervention: the Engaged Organization: The evidence, Jerome Reback; Helping leaders at every level to engage their people - capability, Jerome Reback; Brand needs engaged employees to deliver the customer promise; The impact of employee engagement on internal communication; Digital technology needs the right culture to be an enabler of engagement, John Smythe with Ben Hart and Max Waldron; Objections to employee engagement; Epilogue: employee engagement: social movement or fleeting fad?; References; Index.