Monday, January 5, 2009

A Great Engagement Tool!

Earlier this year I read a great book called “The Dream Manager” by Matthew Kelly.

The book explains how companies can achieve extraordinary results by helping their employees fulfill their dreams; this concept is a great engagement tool.

First, it helps managers better understand the hopes and aspirations of their employees. Secondly, in many cases, there’re things the company can do to realize these dreams. Third, it can build the manager-employee relationship.

After I read the book, I asked Isabelle Lavigne, Rideau’s VP of People & Culture to interview each and every one of our 250 or so employees. We call them career development interviews. The interview is about the employee and what they want… not about Rideau.

The response has been fantastic!

We found out we had people who wanted to be marketers, account managers and in certain instances, we were able to achieve their goals. We found out one person in our call center was studying finance at night… that person now works in accounting.

We’re now going to hold career development interviews annually.

Of course you can’t satisfy everyone… one person wanted to be a chef and we’re still a bit away from an executive dining room, although we’re working hard on that!

One really cool thing that came out of the interviews… we found out that many people wanted to improve their language skills or learn a second language. So we offered lessons. Guess what? Over 70 Rideau employees are taking language lessons after work!

That’s engagement…

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