This document discusses engagement strategies for users and employees. It defines engagement as "a process through which people can interact with an organisation in a meaningful way for mutual benefit." Engagement is most effective when it is a systematic process that is meaningful to participants and leads to positive outcomes. The document examines case studies of engagement strategies at Barclays bank and the Suma co-operative. It also discusses metrics for measuring user and employee engagement. Overall, the key lessons are that engaging users and staff are mutually reinforcing, and that consistent engagement can improve organizational culture and service outcomes.

1. HOW DO YOU
ENGAGE
PEOPLE?
The dos and don’ts of user and
employee engagement
Ed Mayo
Co-operatives UK

2. Prelude: my own story, a life in engagement
This presentation draws extensively on my work over time with
colleagues at these organisations and initiatives

3. ENGAGEMENT – KEY
CONCEPTS

4. Engagement - defined
‘Is a process through which people can interact with an organisation in
a meaningful way for mutual benefit.’
So any organisation can ask…
• Is it a systematic process?
• Is engagement meaningful for those who participate?
• Does it lead to positive outcomes?

5. The engagement
triangle
Source: National Social Marketing Centre

6. The engagement journey

7. VALUES …AND THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF
ENGAGEMENT

10. Values in an organisational context

11. TWO CASE STUDIES OF
ENGAGEMENT IN A BUSINESS
SETTING

12. • In 2012, Barclays was fined for its
role in manipulating the LIBOR
interest rate.
• Antony Jenkins came in as a new
CEO, to engage staff and move to a
new culture based on ethical
values…

13. What happened next?
• He commissioned a $21m independent investigation.
• “Barclays should set clear targets against which to assess progress
on embedding the values necessary to build a strong ethical
culture.” Anthony Salz
• Within three years the board had changed its mind - what they
wanted was to boost earnings.
• In 2015, Barclays was one of six global banks fined US$5.6 billion
for rigging the foreign exchange markets. Foreign exchange traders
had used chatrooms, with names such as ‘The Cartel’ to influence
the value of major currencies.
• ‘If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying’ was the comment of one
Barclays’ trader in a chatroom.

15. • SUMA, a fast growing worker co-
operative
• Based on values of equality

16. “Suma is in an industry that is traditionally quite male-dominated. We
think about where we advertise and how we write job advertisements –
such as using pictures of women doing manual work and driving trucks.”
Emma Robinson

19. USER ENGAGEMENT IN
HEALTH AND PUBLIC
SERVICES

20. The case for engagement in health
• "We are not tinkers who merely patch and mend what is broken... we
must be watchmen, guardians of the life and the health of our
generation, so that stronger and more able generations may come after"
Dr Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910)
• “[A scenario where in 2022] levels of public engagement in relation to
their health are high: life expectancy increases beyond current forecasts,
health status improves dramatically and people are confident in the
health system and demand high quality care.”
Derek Wanless 2002

21. How engagement can support health behaviours
• A social marketing campaign run in Sunderland started
from insights around engagement and disengagement
of pregnant women
• With actions such as new communications, a look at
opening hours and training for health staff, the initiative
led to a ten fold increase in the uptake of stop smoking
services by pregnant smokers
• And a comparable increase in those setting a quit date
and quitting smoking while pregnant
In more detail:
• the value of social marketing is not depe
Givin
Universi
Social
women
• 10-fo
and n
• settin
comp
*betwee
r.j.lowr

22. Trying something different? Foundation Trusts
• NHS Foundation Trusts were created in 2003. It was a ground-
breaking new legal structure called a “public benefit corporation”,
in part modelled on traditional co-operative societies.
• For the first time in the NHS, this introduced the concept of grass
roots membership (patients, public and staff)
• Monitor reports that over 50% of trusts say that members have
influenced what they do, on issues such as communication and
the development of new services
• Whether members feel that they have a voice is not a question
that the regulator asked…

23. The top ten membership networks in the UK
1. Building Societies 25 million
2. Co-operatives 17.5 million
3. Neighbourhood Watch 10 million
4. Sports clubs 9.1 million
5. Mutual insurers 8 million
6. Trade unions 6.4 million
7. Christian churches 5.5 million
8. National Trust 3.7 million
9. NHS Trusts 2 million
10.Wildlife Trusts 1.1 million

24. Member engagement
At its best, membership is a high engagement relationship, offering a
sense of identity and control.
Good membership is a two-way relationship between an individual and
an institution. The best membership organisations do five things:
• keep them informed,
• give them a say,
• treat them with respect,
• allow them a vote and
• offer them opportunities to get involved.

25. Measuring member engagement – key metrics
 Member retention
 Trade, absolute and as a proportion of sales, frequency
 Democratic participation, voting and attendance at events
 Feedback and response to surveys
 Member satisfaction, sense of voice
 Social media engagement

26. Measuring social media engagement
 In the field of social media marketing, engagement rate is a
standard metric
 It measures the share of your audience who interacted with your
content
 So on Facebook, for example, this is the people who liked,
commented, shared or clicked on your post divided by the total
number of people who saw your post.

27. What makes for
good user
engagement?
These five factors account for two thirds of the variation in user satisfaction across a range of public services.
Source: Ed Mayo, Playlist for Public Services, NCC

28. Organisations need short feedback loops for engagement

29. Engaging with information
• Dame Sheila Wallace is a pioneer in education. As a head teacher,
she would send out pupils’ attendance records to parents.
• Some parents were getting the wrong message. Comparing them
to school results, they thought that 85% attendance was something
to celebrate. In reality, it is one year of education in seven missed.
• So she changed the letters, colour coding them red, amber and
green.
• Parents views changed overnight. They wanted to know how their
children could move from red to amber, and from amber to green

30. Five As for Engagement Information
• Accurate, up to date, useful and practical
• Accessible in language, format and tone
• Adaptable for individual needs and circumstances
• Available at different levels of detail at different times
• Aligned and consistent with other sources of information
“Simple words…we need to understand what they are telling us.”

31. The capacity of users to engage: health literacy
• Health literacy is the capacity of an individual to find, interpret and
understand information and services to improve their health.
• Between 43 – 61% of English working age adults routinely do not
understand health information
• Patients are less likely to seek information if attempts to do so or to
engage in discussion with health professionals have been rejected
or dismissed.
• Cochrane Review of ‘decision aids’ showed a 23% decline in the
use of the most invasive surgical procedures (hysterectomy,
prostatectomy, coronary bypass surgery), without adversely
affecting patient outcomes, satisfaction or anxiety

32. Engagement
and user
power, or...
the fruit tree of
participation

33. The longer users are engaged, the more they shift
from individual to collective incentives
The collectivistic approach is drawn from theories of co-operation (see Figure 3).
interprets human behaviour very differently, assuming that participation can be
motivated by three variables:
1. Shared goals: people express mutual needs that translate into common goals
2. Shared values: people feel a sense of duty to participate as an expression of
common values
3. Sense of community: people identify with and care about other people who
either live in the same area or are like them in some respect
Figure 3: Collectivistic Incentives
This approach generalises that the more each of these three variables is present, the
PARTICIPATION
SHARED
VALUES
SHARED
GOALS
SENSE OF
COMMUNITY
ure 2: Individualistic Incentives
PARTICIPATION
COSTS SATIATION
OPPORTUNITY
COSTS
POSITIVE
NEGATIVE
BENEFITS HABIT
Source: Simmons, Birchall and Prout, Our Say: User Voice and Public Service Culture, NCC

34. We engage more if we feel we belong
• Internal identity, how we think about ourselves, and
our interactions with those around us, is key to our
sense of self.
• Some identities are ‘received’ (father, wife, only child, single
woman, single man), others are social and are strong drivers
of behaviour.
• Identities are fluid, over time layering multiple identities to form
a complex whole. An individual’s relationship to an
organisation is part of this.
• The most meaningful engagement with an organisation is
when the individual feels a sense of belonging through that
engagement.

35. What gets in the way of engagement?
The most common reasons for service users not to speak up is if they
feel that:
 They would not be listened to
 They would cause bad feeling
 They do not trust staff
 It would take too much time
 Staff ‘do not talk my language’
 They would be made to feel small.

36. EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN
HEALTH AND PUBLIC
SERVICES

37. The case for employee engagement
• Improved business results
• Lower absenteeism, staff turnover
• More rapid flow of ideas for innovation
• Employees that have a ownership stake, as in a co-operative, raise their
productivity at twice the level of workers in other enterprises
Source: CASS Business School

38. Measuring employee engagement – key metrics
 Being proud to work for the organisation
 Caring about the future of the organisation
 Putting in an effort or commitment beyond what is normally
expected
 Understanding how what they do, or their team does, contributes to
wider success

39. Department of Health
(excluding agencies)
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Employee engagement index 60% 55% 53% 53% 57% 58% 57% 45%
My work 76% 71% 73% 74% 75% 77% 75% 69%
Organisational objectives and
purpose
82% 72% 68% 66% 76% 77% 76% 61%
My manager 69% 68% 68% 67% 69% 71% 70% 65%
My team 79% 78% 78% 78% 80% 81% 80% 77%
Learning and development 55% 43% 42% 39% 47% 52% 53% 43%
Inclusion and fair treatment 78% 75% 76% 76% 77% 78% 77% 66%
Resources and workload 73% 74% 73% 72% 74% 73% 72% 67%
Pay and benefits 50% 48% 40% 34% 35% 32% 32% 29%
Leadership and managing change 43% 34% 34% 32% 39% 40% 38% 27%
Response rate 79% 67% 73% 75% 70% 69% 80% 67%
Chart notes:
Each chart shows trend lines for the main departments.
Bold lines denote the organisation featured on this slide.
Departments without trend data (BEIS, DIT and DExEU) are
depicted by spheres in 2016.
2009
2016
Engagement
index
2009
2016
My work
2009
2016Objectives and
purpose
2009
2016
My manager
2009
2016
My team
2009
2016
Learning and
development
2009
2016
Inclusion and
fair treatment
2009
2016
Resources and
workload
2009
2016
Pay and
benefits
2009
2016
Leadership and
managing change
With a 25% drop over a decade, Health is the least engaged
of all main departments across the UK Government…

40. Employee engagement in public services
• At one event, with social housing tenants and housing officers… when
asked, for a warm-up exercise, “if you were an animal, what animal
would you be” one tenant chose a lion. The reason, he said, was “I
want to be a lion, so I can maul all these council workers to death.”
• One (new) housing officer initially left the room in tears, feeling that
tenants were victimising her. The only emotional support from her
colleagues was: “oh well, you will learn not to care anymore. If you are
sensitive and too compassionate, then you are not made for this job.
You have to build a wall of stone around your heart.”
• Services are rationed and frontline staff act as gatekeepers.
• The term ‘frontline’ is apt in a public service context, because all too
often, it is warfare out there.

41. Health and care as a purpose can be something
that motivates staff
• “People have a stereotype image of hospital cleaners with scruffy
curlers, headscarves and a fag hanging out of their mouth: it’s not
like that. We are all professional people and we all do far more than
our housekeeping duties. That’s because we care about the
patients.” Housekeeper, West Suffolk
Source: Unison

42. Those best at employee engagement have shared
values and a clear purpose
• The key factor in engaging public service staff is whether they work
for an organisation that is focused on user needs and good at
meeting those needs.
• This is the single most important factor that explains whether an
employee is satisfied with their work, committed to doing a good job
and likely to talk well of what they do to others.
• The ideal engagement culture is therefore one in which staff are
feeling in tune with and valued by colleagues and customers and
working for an organisation focused on user needs.

43. Leadership for employee engagement
• Psychoanalytic theories of work suggest that people need a clear
concept of their ‘primary task’ if they are to function well.
• In reality, it is not always clear to staff what the values and goals
of the organisation are.
• Leaders can make clear what path to take through the confusion,
but they need to be clear themselves where the conflicts are –
and to walk the talk.
• Otherwise, front line staff are presented with unresolved conflicts
and carry much of the confusion day to day.
• The lower in the hierarchy you are, the more confused or
degraded those values and goals can appear.

44. Co-operatives are an ideal organisation model for
high engagement care and co-production

45. What gets in the way of employee engagement?
 Unmet expectations
 Lack of opportunities or development
 Lack of recognition
 Poor work / life balance
 Poor working environment
 Poor line management

46. What gets in the way of employees… engaging users?
 If a doctor sits down on their bed during a visit, then patients believe
they have stayed longer with them than a doctor who stands for the
same period of time.
 Isobel Menzies Lyth has explored the psychology of staff working in
hospitals and mental health institutions. She suggests that it is
psychologically and emotionally challenging to have to deal day to
day with death and the intimacy of people’s private physical
conditions and staff need emotional defences to cope.
 So, some clinicians adopt a cold and distant attitude to the people
they serve. They don’t sit down.
Engagement is an emotional agenda.

47. What gets in the way of everybody engaging?
 Stop Start attempts at
engagement…
 If you are going to do
engagement, do it
consistently
 NHS England –
please take note!

48. CONCLUSION

49. The engagement
value chain

50. Towards a culture of engagement: the three key
lessons
1. Engaging users is not a trade-off, because a user focus is key to the
satisfaction and motivation of staff.
2. Engaging staff is not a trade-off, because empowered staff are
better able to satisfy service users.
3. Engagement works. We need to harness its potential to improve the
daily public services that are so essential to people’s lives.

51. Resources and contacts
Values in business
https://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/values
For advice on co-operatives
https://www.uk.coop/the-hive/
Ed Mayo
@edmayo1
http://www.edmayo.coop
With all my thanks to Frankie Mayo (Illustrations)