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Nine questions we're asked about Engage & Grow

Writer's picture: Rachael BullRachael Bull

Engage & Grow is not like any other employee engagement and team development programme and it can take some explaining how it works. Here are the nine most common questions we're asked about Engage & Grow to give you a better understanding of what really goes on...


  1. How did Engage & Grow begin?


Engage & Grow began on the sports field. It was founded by a self-proclaimed ‘failed’ Aussie elite athlete called Rich Maloney who moved into coaching sports teams and did ridiculously well turning them into high-performing championship winning teams. It wasn't long before businesses started approaching him and asking him if he could do the same for their businesses.

And that's how Engage & Grow came about.


Now we've got more than 250 coaches across 75 countries delivering a whole range of coaching and leadership programmes that do the same thing - help create high-performing, champion teams that are great at what they do, and love what they do.


2. What does an E&G programme look like?

Every Engage & Grow programme is entirely bespoke depending on the organisation's KPIs, size and budget. But our most popular programme is our 12-week programme, so let's focus on that.


In a nutshell, this is a group coaching programme where a chosen group of leaders and employees (between 5 and 12 people) come together and participate in 12 weeks of neurologically designed activities and exercises that create huge behaviour change, both within the group and out in the wider organisation.


That's one of the key fundamental differences between E&G and other employee engagement business improvement strategies - it's actually changing behaviour. And no matter what you’re trying to achieve in your business, if you want to improve any area of it, or you want growth or change, you can’t without changing people’s behaviours. That’s what we do.


3. How do you know what to do in the programme?

Before any programme starts, we agree what the KPIs are for the programme. KPIs that organisations have had in the past include wanting their people to work more collaboratively or be more innovative, or take more ownership and be more accountable, or for middle management to step up. Another really common theme is business leaders wanting to be able to step back from the day to day and focus more on the strategic priorities of the business and growth, rather than fire fighting and continually getting sucked into the day-to-day.

E&G covers anything to do with the ‘heart’ side of the business - the people side - so the culture, the leadership, the communications, the relationships, the behaviours, all that sort of stuff.


Whatever your priorities are, whether that’s a big change programme or ambitious growth plans, it’s absolutely crucial that you have a ‘people’ focus to that, otherwise it’s going to fail. That's the part that we help with.


So we get clear on those KPIs. And those KPIs dictate the programme. Once we've got those KPIs, the very clever E&G algorithm creates the programme based on those KPIs.

We also do an engagement survey of the participants that will be joining the programme to give us a really clear idea of what the engagement score is as a percentage. So we've got that benchmark where we're starting from, which we can then measure against as we progress through the programme and at completion. It means clients can see the ROI themselves, and it proves how powerful the programme is for employee engagement.


4. Who gets involved?

The 12-week programme is for between five and 12 people - it's really important that leadership are there to show they’re taking this seriously and it's important to them, but it shouldn’t just be leaders, it’s important there are people of influence from across the organisation. This is not about leadership deciding what needs to happen and telling people to do it. It’s about people coming together and having those meaningful connections, those important conversations about what needs to happen, what’s getting in the way, how we can do things differently, what needs to change, what’s working really well. Hugely powerful conversations that are often avoided.


5. Why 12 weeks?

We meet once a week, ideally at the same time, for 12 weeks. The reason it's 12 weeks is for a couple of reasons:

  1. It takes 12 weeks to create behaviour change. It’s like going to the gym - if you went once every three months, you're not going to see any difference. But if you start going once a week, and did some exercise at home alongside that weekly gym trip, you're going to start seeing a difference. It's building up that consistency through repetition.

  2. Over 12 weeks we're starting to create that behaviour change every business needs. By the end of the 12 weeks, the repetition of doing things a different way is feeling pretty natural. And ‘doing’ is the operative word here because there's no theory at all. There's no pens and paper - there's no theoretical-based learning, it's all very much action.


6. What's this action all about?

Well, in the first session, we get really clear on what the business is trying to achieve. Is the organisation wanting to become number one in its industry? Does it have a particular revenue target it wants to hit? Does it want to help a certain number of people?

And that is the core focus of the entire programme because everything else comes back to that: what are we trying to do? The rest of the programme is how we go about doing that.


7. What happens in the sessions - and outside the sessions?

As I mentioned, every programme is different depending on the organisation’s KPIs. Each week we have different agenda items of exercises and activities, all neurologically designed to create the winning team the business needs - and we build on those agenda items each week.

An important part of the programme is the small but powerful actions each participant decides they’re going to do each week between the sessions. These actions are small - something that will take five minutes or 20 minutes, not something that's going to take a whole day or a whole afternoon. It's about small, incremental steps. Again, it goes back to the gym analogy - don't try and run a marathon when you can't run a 5k. Don't try and run a 5k when you haven't ran for 10 years. We make sure the actions are small because there’s a far greater chance they’ll get done and, each week, the participants build on those actions.

Not only does it mean that up to 144 purposeful actions are taken over the 12 weeks that will help achieve those business KPIs, it also builds the accountability muscle. The group are accountable to each other - completed actions get green marks, uncompleted actions get red marks, and the group as a whole gets a red mark unless everyone’s done what they’d say they do.


Of course, nobody likes getting a red mark and as the weeks go on, that pressure builds up because they don't want to let the side down. Pretty soon everyone has green marks next to them, which means that the whole group has a green mark next to it. That's really powerful accountability.


They do what they say they're going to do - and that permeates out into the day-to-day behaviour of the wider organisation. People do what they say they're going to do. That's massively powerful.


8. What about employees who aren't part of the core participant group?

They’re certainly not left behind. In fact, as we progress through the programme, the core group can invite other colleagues along so they can see what's happening and see how things are progressing. And of course, the actions that the core group will be doing out in the business between the sessions will ensure that the impact is felt across the organisation. So with one of our 12 week programmes, the impact can be felt by up to 200 people, even though you've only got five to 12 people in the core group. Its impact is vast.


9. What results does Engage & Grow bring?

A couple of examples that really stand out to me:


  1. An engineering company in the UK completed the 12-week programme and it brought a lot to the surface, particularly that the owners were micro-managing and the team wanted to take their own initiative and more ownership. The programme created the safe space to have those honest and open conversations and the environment to map out how it might look instead. The outcome? The two business owners’ working hours went from 55 down to 30 hours a week and revenue went up by 31% at the same time. All because of the conversations and the discussions that were had and the behaviours and changes made as part of our Engage & Grow programme.

  2. Another organisation’s leader said that the Engage & Grow programme turned their company vision and mission from words on the wall to a living and breathing culture. It’s really powerful for organisations that have got a clear idea about the type of organisation they want to be and the type of workplace they want to have but haven't actually been able to turn that into reality.

  3. A plumbing company in Melbourne, Australia, saw a massive increase in sales as a result of the Engage & Grow programme. Employee engagement skyrocketed and, as a result, the guys working there started spotting potential business opportunities out on their daily routine rather than it all being on the owner to do business development. They also really started to connect with each other, and to trust each other, and they realised how much they had in common and how much of a difference they could make. The result? After the first programme their sales went from AU$0.5mill up to AU$2.4 million. They loved the programme and its results so much, they did it again, and halfway through the second programme, sales went up to AU$6.2 million.


This sh*t works!


Our 12-week programme is our most popular but there are other programmes that are shorter and available at a lower investment - drop me a line on rachael@engageandgrowcentralmids.co.uk to set up a free strategy call to discuss what you’re trying to achieve at your business and I’ll advise the best way to go about it.


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