Conference Breakout Sessions Topics
Organizational Best Practices Conference: Achieving Results Through Employee Engagement
Breakout sessions topics will include:
Achieving Organizational Success by Engaging Diverse Employees
Built for Talent
Creating Excellence in Project Management
Driving Employee Engagement: What You Can Do
Employee Engagement - Changing a Culture
Engaged Problem Solving by Leaders and Followers
Engaging Yourself
Estes: A Journey to Engagement
Keeping Teammates Engaged During Turbulent Times: The Bridgestone Way
Linking Measured Behavior and Brain Dominance to Development Planning
Research on Employee Engagement: St. Ambrose Doctoral Studies on Networking, Generational Understanding, and Mentoring
What's Important to People on the Job
Achieving Organizational Success by Engaging Diverse Employees
Madhu Sharma
Presentation Overview:
In the global economy today, we are dealing with increasingly diverse customers and suppliers. At the same time, the demographics of the available talent pool are also changing significantly. Attracting and engaging a diverse work force is a key to growing your organization successfully. This session will examine the business case for diversity. You will learn how to assess different dimensions of diversity in your organization. The interactive session will increase your awareness on factors affecting recruiting of diverse candidates and will give you hands on training on different tools to engage a diverse work force.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand cultural competency
- Understand workforce
- Learn how to engage diverse workforce
Target Audience:
- Managers and Leaders at all levels in the organization
Built for Talent
Edward Lawler III
Presentation Overview:
In today’s tough economy and global business environment, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain a competitive edge. However, it is not impossible!
Talent is potentially the most powerful source to give you a competitive advantage, and it is available. But how should your organization be designed to make talent your key source of competitive advantage?
Ed Lawler will show how your company can combine the right organization, the right management practices and the right talent to gain and sustain a critical performance edge – even in challenging economic times.
Target Audience:
HR and General Managers
Creating Excellence in Project Management
George Hollins
Presentation Overview:
Many people consider project management to be the ability to use a Gantt chart, a schedule or simply plugging data into Microsoft Project.
Professional project management is much more than this. In this presentation, veteran project manager George Hollins describes how professional project management includes the use of standardized, predictable systems. Standardized systems allow project team members, sponsors and clients, as well as entire project organizations, to “speak the same language”. Hollins describes how standard project tools, communication protocols and “open-book management” concepts help make projects more successful – on-time, on-budget and on-quality!
Learning Objectives:
- Planning reduces pain
- Systems and discipline enhance predictability
- Communication promotes success
- Tracking and sharing numbers avoids disaster
Target Audience:
This presentation will provide an overview of professional project management for organizational leaders and managers. Project managers involved in various industries and disciplines representing all project types will benefit.
Driving Employee Engagement: What you can do. A case study on Employee Engagement at John Deere
Dr. Mindy Moye
Presentation Overview:
- Examine leading research on employee engagement
- Business case for employee engagement
- What drives employee engagement at John Deere?
- What are we doing to further drive employee engagement?
Learning Objectives:
- Better understand the current research on employee engagement
- Understand what drives employee engagement at John Deere
- Learn ways to increase employee engagement in your organization
Target Audience:
Those individuals who would like a better understanding of the current research on employee engagement and would like to learn about ways to increase employee engagement.
Employee Engagement - Changing a Culture
John Elmore
Presentation Overview:
The challenges of changing the culture in a high performing organization from one that is more short term focused, to one that has greater long term opportunities in the changing environment.
Learning Objectives:
- Value of Employees
- Understanding what is important to your employee group
- Talking the Talk - and then Walking the Walk
Target Audience:
Organizations who are trying to change a culture
Engaged Problem Solving by Leaders and Follower
Dr.
Tom Bateman
This presentation will suggest that leadership training and development focuses on so many personal and interpersonal behaviors that it sometimes overlooks the importance of sheer competence in the form of effective problem solving. Problem solving includes both thinking and doing, and pertains to both negative and positive problems in the form of opportunities. We will make the points that competence in these pursuits is more important than a charismatic personality (in fact, it contributes to charisma), and that leaders need to effectively distribute the problem-solving leadership throughout the organization. We will actively discuss the key activities in effective problem solving, negative and positive examples, and engaging followers in the key problem-solving activities.
Learning Objectives:
- To identify the major sources of effective leadership
- To analyze the keys to successful problem solving (and opportunity-seizing)
- To consider how to distribute the leadership via a culture of problem solving
Engaging Yourself
Dr. Tom Bateman
This presentation will be about self-management and personal effectiveness, based in part on the premise that many managers pay so much attention to organizational resources, projects and other people that they neglect themselves. We will discuss how people often manage themselves more mindlessly than thoughtfully, and discuss specific topics such as the suboptimal goals that people often pursue, various traps that people fall into, time management and stress management. We will end with some ideas about why people often fail to take appropriate action and suggestions for moving from merely having a good idea to actually taking action. Overall, the point is that we often don’t engage strategically in effective self management, but it can be done.
Learning Objectives:
- To give participants an opportunity to think about themselves rather than about “everything else.”
- To highlight the need for strategic thinking in the service of effective self management.
- To offer suggestions for time and stress management.
- To suggest tactics for bridging the gap between knowing what you want to do and actually doing it.
Estes: “A Journey to Engagement”
Kent Pilcher
Presentation overview: The following is a draft outline. The outline is a story of Estes’ development over the last five years and its approach for the next two to three years.
1. Why Change: 5 Years Ago
- Introduction and background
- Inconsistent results
- Motivation: Company and individual
- WIFM?
2. Major Renovation: “Hope is not a Method” (Gordon Sullivan)
- Survey/establish a baseline
- Ground level: Each position and every person
- Process development: Common alignment
- Determined benchmarks Company: Best in class; standards
- Personal: Base and incentive pay
- What next? How will culture = metrics?
Demming: “Eliminate fear” = why not?
3. Rebuilding Goals
- Trust (begin with values)
- Overcoming resistance to change (Known and Unknown)
- Company pride
- Community perception
- Keen sense for
- Individual success
- Company success
- Creating “safe” areas; “moving up the ladder” (risk/reward)
4. Rebranding: Communicating a Culture Change
- Four key values (begin with values)
- Needed to “feel” different (internal)
- Wanted to perform differently (internal and external)
- Tag line: “Advocates”
- Revise mission and vision
- Tools:
- Internal: staff meetings, spot awards, newsletter, department meetings, coaching.
- External: Newsletter, advertising and direct marketing
- Small wins add up!
5. Results: Three Years of Success
- Exceeded benchmarks; volume, margin, employee performance
- Customer and market (internal and external)
- Become clear; about the people
- Learning from realization and doing
6. Trial and Error Along The Road (Expect to be Surprised)
- Demming: “It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.”
- “Today Competes with Tomorrow” (Limited Energy and Time)
- Reflections
7. Next Level
- Where are we, where do we go?
- Focus on future
- Next milestone – five to seven years
- Sustainable improvement
- Deeper empowerment and engagement
- Projects Company Department
- Individual
- Led by Senior Management; working at all levels
8. Lessons Learned (3 – 4 themes)
Learning Objectives:
1. Why should I consider change?
2. How to approach assessing your department or company to determine if you
should change.
3. How might I initiate this in my department or company?
4. What might be some areas of risk?
5. What might be the benefits?
Target audience:
Individuals or companies who are considering the questions, “how might we obtain more consistent results and, as part of the process, create a better company and more fulfilled employee/individual.
Keeping Teammates Engaged During Turbulent Times: The Bridgestone Way
Dr. Michele Herlein, Patti Brown James and Fran Jones
Presentation Overview:
This presentation will first provide an overview of the 109 year-old Bridgestone organization. We will define what employee engagement means in our organization and share a time when we held true to our principles during a very challenging organizational situation – a very public product recall. We will describe the lessons that our organization learned and how they are helping us to ride the turbulent economic times we are now experiencing. Specific examples of our practices/locations that have encouraged high employee engagement will be compared with other practices/locations with lower engagement to demonstrate the idea that engaged teammates are more productive teammates that produce individual and organizational results.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn what employee engagement means to Bridgestone Americas
- Understand organizational practices that lead to loyalty and engagement even in turbulent times
- Share organizational character lessons learned, that are being applied today, from the Tire Recall in 2000
Target Audience:
- Managers, Directors, Vice Presidents, and other executives that are interested and responsible for building a healthy high performing department, function, division and/or organization.
- Individuals in the Human Resource support functions including, organization development, training and development, leadership development, and employee relations that support leaders in building a healthy high performing organization.
Linking Measured Behavior and Brain Dominance to Development Planning
Jenny Sharp
Presentation Overview:
The audience will explore the criticality of pairing organizational goals with vital behaviors to take a “pulse check” baseline, measure individual behaviors within the team, and conduct a needs assessment. The audience will further see the linkage between measured behavior through 360 rounded feedback and brain dominance. We will examine an organization’s quest to go beyond training, to individualized development planning to meet the personalized needs of its team members. Sample case studies will be examined and discussed.
Learning Objectives:
- Measuring vital behaviors for success in the marketplace
- Linking behavioral outputs with individuals’ way of thinking (brain dominance)
- Moving beyond static leadership programming to dynamic individualized development planning
Target Audience:
Open to anyone – focused on organizational leaders and organizational development professionals or any in training and development
Research on employee engagement: St. Ambrose doctoral studies on networking, generational understanding, and mentoring.
Dr. Shelly McCallum, Dr. Dave O'Connell, Dr. Dave Siebert, Dr. Maxine Wade
Presentation overview:
This presentation, facilitated by Dr. Dave O’Connell of St. Ambrose University, features the dissertation research of three recent graduates of the St. Ambrose Doctor of Business Administration program. Each study explores current questions about engaging employees at work.
Dr. Maxine Wade presents “Factors to Consider When Desiring to Engage Protégés in Formal Mentoring Programs.” This explores the importance of five characteristics on the likelihood that individuals will initiate mentoring relationships. Those factors are gender of the protégé, gender of the mentor, ethnicity of the protégé, organizational level of the protégé, and organizational level of the mentor that may impact the willingness of the protégé to initiate a formal mentoring relationship.
Dr. Dave Siebert presents, “Inter-generational conflict: What is it, and how do we respond to it?” Different generational values can lead to conflict on the job. Based on the results of a series of structured, in-depth interviews, this session will identify the kinds of conflicts that occur and why, with special emphasis on how managers respond to it.
Dr. Shelly McCallum presents, “Networking Behaviors and Career Benefits”. The presentation will involve a brief review of dissertation research conducted in the Spring of 2008 with a leading midwest health care system. The survey research considered associations between networking behaviors and workplace variables including career satisfaction, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Research methods and results will be addressed.
Learning objectives:
- Understand the factors related to employees’ willingness to initiate mentoring relationships at work
- Understand how generations see one another at work
- Gain insight into the importance of social networks
Target audience:
Anyone concerned with building collaborative high-performance work systems, seeking to leverage learning within and across careers.
What’s Important to People on the Job?
Paul Slaggert
Presentation Overview:
I use a short survey, have the participants complete it themselves, then work as small groups and gain consensus on prioritizing the list of job factors. We then look at the results and compare them to a long term survey on the topic. We conclude with pulling out the learnings - primarily to understand that most supervisors do not know what is important to people on the job and second, that the three top factors are all under the direct control of the supervisor. If managers can't understand what's important to people on the job, then they will not be able to motivate and engage their employees.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand what employees want in a job
- Discuss similarities or differences between employees and managers perspective
- Learn key motivators of staff regardless of level or responsibility
Target audience:
Anyone with supervisory, managerial or leadership responsibilities or aspirations
For More Information
Contact Allison Ambrose, 563/333-6155