Chair Report

It was a pleasure once more to be working with the EBM team and chairing the 2018 Employee Engagement Summit. A great start with a packed room and people standing at the back – not bad for a very sunny Friday at the start of a bank holiday weekend!
Our keynote sessions started with Professor Isaac Getz – we started the day thinking about hens laying golden eggs and how we treat them! Some great points about basic principles of engagement – being fair, keeping our promises, encouraging curiosity and respecting the individual. Professor Getz also pointed out that if we are gardeners, and things don’t grow in our gardens, it must be to day with the environment we are creating.
Creating and nurturing a respectful, happy and positive environment and culture was also the main theme for our second keynote – Rick Jackson at DH L Express. Rick was very much making the point that engagement is a way of working, rather than a destination reached.
We then had an alternative point of view from Professor Bruce Rayton from the University of Bath, reminding us that people are at the heart of all efforts and we need to have better conversations around the cost of engagement on our physical and mental wellbeing (the research from my own organisation, Engage for Success, shows that this can be a particular issue in the charitable and not for profit sector where people engage with a cause to the point of burn out).