The Velvet Revolution at Work

John Smythe, a founding partner of the Engage for Change consultancy, specialises in organisational communication and engagement. He was an organisational fellow with McKinsey, undertaking research into employee engagement, and has held senior public affairs posts for three American corporations: Occidental Oil, Bechtel Corporation and Marathon Oil. After leaving SmytheDorwardLambert in 2003, a consultancy acknowledged to be the thought leader in organisational communication, McKinsey and Company invited him to take a visiting organisational fellow role, undertaking research among sixty corporations and institutions in Europe and North America into current approaches in engaging leaders and employees in driving strategy and change. The research is available from Engage for Change. Earlier John was behind a start up in the same field called Wolff Olins/Smythe (1985-1989). He published (with Colette Dorward and Jerome Reback, fellow founders of SmytheDorwardLambert) Corporate Reputation, The New Strategic Asset in 1989. John is author of The CEO - Chief Engagement Officer: Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance (Gower, 2007).

Contents: Foreword; Introduction; Part I What is the Velvet Revolution at Work?: The velvet revolution at work - why now? Defining employee engagement; Introducing the primary levers and supporting enablers of engagement. Part II Strategy Delivered through People: Delivering Strategy and Change through Participative Interventions that Engage the Right People: Getting started and negotiating business outcomes; Your default approach to engagement: enabler or disabler?; Negotiating who should be engaged: the power of the peach; Designing and running engagement interventions that deliver fast commercial and cultural results; Sustaining the benefits of an engagement intervention; Creative dynamics that liberate breakthrough ideas. Part III Beyond the Intervention: the Engaged Organization: The evidence, Jerome Reback; Helping leaders at every level to engage their people - capability, Jerome Reback; Brand needs engaged employees to deliver the customer promise; The impact of employee engagement on internal communication; Digital technology needs the right culture to be an enabler of engagement, John Smythe with Ben Hart and Max Waldron; Objections to employee engagement; Epilogue: employee engagement: social movement or fleeting fad?; References; Index.