Transcript

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

The more you engage people, clearly they perform better.

STUART MACKENZIE, Managing Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

Companies that have a highly engaged workforce are seeing an increase of 20% in their income.

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

It's not so easy to just go out there and recruit people of talent and of quality.

It's expensive to get rid of people and it's expensive to bring people in, so you might as well develop the people you've got.

The potential is in the company very often, but you need learning and development to help bring that potential out and add value to the business.

People give that extra effort. They got that extra mile to satisfy customers.

STUART MACKENZIE, Managing Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

Engaged employees take less sick leave, they're more likely to stay with the organisation, and in a small company, those are major considerations.

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

A lot of people look at other areas. They change the systems, they restructure, they reengineer. In the end it's about the people and what you do with them, and can you get people to act differently?

We've spent 20 years now working on behavioural change in organisations, whether it's for Hewlett-Packard, DHL, Aviva - very big brand names but also small organisations aswell.

We'll go in there and help people to rehearse new behaviours and act differently in line with the culture change people want to make in the organisation.

STUART MACKENZIE, Managing Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

Employee engagement is basically about treating people as human beings; treating them well, valuing them, involving them, developing them, and actually inspiring them.

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

One of the key aspects of engagement is, 'do I, when I work in an organisation, feel I make a difference'?

STUART MACKENZIE, Managing Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

People have to feel valued. They have to feel valued for their individual contribution to the company. Involve people as partners in whatever the task is.

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

Any attention you give people, and bring out their skills and develop them, allows them to make a bigger impact in the organisation.

STUART MACKENZIE, Managing Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

You need to find out what matters to them, and link that to your organisational goal.

MICHAEL MAYNARD, Founding Director, Maynard Leigh Associates:

Obviously it makes a difference if you engage people, but how do you do it? What we've done is our talent engagement. It's how to unlock people's potential. It's just got a mass of ideas, there's ideas for action on every page.

It's everything from getting managers to find out what's going on, to the way you run meetings. An approach people can take. Any manager can pick this up and have a go at it.