Location: Milton Keynes
Time available: Six months from March 2010
Cost: Tickets are £675 plus VAT per delegate
Have you ever wanted to get inside the head of a disengaged employee to see the world of work through their eyes? Well that’s exactly what’s on offer at Best Companies’ latest endeavour – an innovative £1.8 million “experiential learning environment”, designed to help managers and leaders improve employee engagement in their organisations.
Based on a former Greenfield site just outside Milton Keynes, the Art of Engagement was built from scratch in just eight weeks and is, according to its founders, a worldwide first.
Much as I hate to compare it to such a well-known white elephant as the Millennium Dome, the event has been built along similar lines with a series of interactive zones. But that’s where the comparison ends. While the Dome was criticised for lacking a sense of purpose, the Art of Engagement is based on years of survey data.
Each of the zones represents one of the eight factors that Best Companies has identified as key to driving workplace engagement. So in zone “My Company”, participants, kitted out in white lab coats (a great leveller), sit inside a large model of “Ed’s head”. There they watch a film, seen from his perspective, of the workplace experiences that lead to his sense of disengagement.
Over in “My Team”, delegates learn to work together through a series of timed games, while in “Personal Growth” they are challenged to pot a plant basing their decisions, such as pot size and which plant to choose, on their own goals. And my personal favourite, “Leadership”, has participants gather round an interactive table for several rounds of game-play where they are challenged to see how they would respond to real-life leadership dilemmas.
A couple of the zones are a little disappointing, especially for someone like me who can happily while away a few hours on the interactive displays at the Science Museum. In “Well-being” for instance, you sit in an egg-shaped pod to watch a short film on well-being, and “Giving Something Back” demonstrates best practice through static displays.
But overall I think the Art of Engagement will be a very effective way to bring employee engagement to life, especially when you consider that there are also “doing rooms” where participants can spend time brainstorming ideas, and a strategic theatre where they come together to explore their experiences and build action plans based on what they have learnt.
So far only a few companies are signed up but as the name behind the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For lists, the organisers have an enviable list of contact organisations. Over the next few weeks the 1,000 businesses that went through the latest accreditation programme will be invited to send a couple of representatives to Milton Keynes to see what it’s all about.
Still, £1.8 million is a “big punt” as Jonathan Austin, founder and CEO of Best Companies, puts it, and the Art of Engagement will need to attract a much wider audience than this if it is to be a financial success.
The timing, however, should prove to be in their favour. The MacLeod Review helped push engagement up the national agenda and organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the impact the recession has had on engagement levels. “As much as the climate is difficult it [engagement] is what organisations need at the moment,” says Austin. In that he is spot on. We are not out of the woods yet as far as the economy is concerned and just how motivated and committed our employees are will make a big difference to the speed at which organisations recover.