How we power people engagement through our LEAP® model

A group of Leopards is a ‘Leap’, so it’s in our nature to understand how to harness the power of people and help organisations to work as one pack, whilst balancing the understanding that every workforce population features diversity of perspectives, motivations, and interests. 

What’s wrong with existing models?

Not everyone is engaged at work for the same reasons, and traditional people-engagement strategies have attempted to impose an identity on their colleague community without recognising that there is huge diversity in what motivates people and how they behave. 

Poor engagement can lead to team dysfunction, quality issues and high team turnover, so organisations get massive pay back by figuring out what will inspire colleagues to really buy in to contributing to achieving organisational goals. 

Attempting to clone colleagues and impose that they all align around a narrow identity, may not be successful. In fact, it may well disengage colleagues who don’t want to feel forced to behave and act in a specific defined way. 

A fresh approach to people engagement 

In contrast, our approach is centred on playing to the strengths of the colleague community, recognising that every colleague can contribute in their own way, to achieve the organisation’s mission. The behaviours that need to be articulated to help organisations to fulfil this mission will vary, subject to role type, individual skills and motivations.

Our approach is to use LEAP®.

Aligning your people to your purpose

It starts with defining the organisation’s purpose, helping to lead the colleague community and ensure there is clarity of mission. Through engagement, we inspire colleagues to understand how they can play their part, and then finally we create an Action Plan. This ensures that every colleague can clearly focus on the thing they can do within their own skillset and capability, coupled with their own interests, to contribute to the overall mission.

The advised approach

Our recommended approach varies and is subject to:

• The colleague community size
• Industry area
•  Geographical footprint
•  Channels to communicate
•  … and factors in hard-to-reach, EDI, demography, and life stage of the organisation

We develop strategies to help organisations make the LEAP®; but the key to success is through the programme delivery. 

Organisations don’t make the LEAP® on the back of one engagement activity. This is about taking the organisation on a journey with a series of engagements that enable momentum and ensure new colleagues who join the journey feel engaged from day one.

Supporting tactics

We can draw on a variety of serious games, workshops and activities to help organisations to make the LEAP®. Our recommendations are always bespoke and become ownable property of the organisations.

On a practical level, our recommendations around workshop facilitation are also influenced by who is in the room, the number of delegates and the physicality of the workshop space.

Client experience

The Gambling Commission

The Gambling Commission is an arm’s length government agency responsible for regulating the Gambling Industry. To enable the organisation to respond to changes in the gambling industry, the Gambling Commission has developed a clear mission narrative — the Commission Story.

Leopard was briefed to develop a bespoke workshop delivered to the Gambling Commission’s entire 300 colleague community at their Colleague Conference, held at Birmingham Town Hall in January 2023.

• Our workshop started with an ice breaker — human bingo — to get the audience engaged.
• This was followed by a ‘superpowers’ activity to help colleagues understand the different strengths they all bring to the table.
• The third activity explored the behaviours which could empower the Gambling Commission colleague community to help tell the Commission story, using facilitated discussion and live voting.
• Finally, the workshop concluded with the generation of an Action Plan, so everyone leaving the conference committed to up to six actions to help tell the  Commission Story in their own individual way.

Our work with The Gambling Commission was shortlisted for a CIPR Excellence Award 2023.

Leicestershire NHS Trust

A succession of reorganisations had disenfranchised colleagues within Leicestershire NHS Trust, resulting in just 18% of staff feeling day-to-day frustrations were addressed and only 36% feeling valued for the contribution they made.

We were briefed to provide an internal communications programme that would change minds, encourage more proactive behaviour and provide simple tools and training to help staff communicate with each other more effectively using the Listening into Action programme.

Our first step was to embed reporting of progress made by each team through the Trust’s Intranet and weekly e-bulletin with inspirational and uplifting stories.

On the front line, we empowered ward sisters and nursing assistants to create engaging bulletins and posters for their colleagues, and addressed an issue that use of jargon was a barrier to reach other departments.

Wider tactics included running engaging people events, content creation, toolkits and management of internal displays. Sixty-three teams completed their missions to make a change and more than 1,200 staff proactively took part in the initiative.

The staff survey showed that, following the programme, colleagues believed they could make a difference. Each member of the Pioneer teams became an ambassador for change resulting in an 8% swing upwards in positivity about working for the Trust in the staff survey.

Our programme also won Best Internal Communications Campaign in the Chartered Institute for Public Relations (CIPR) Midlands PRide Awards 2014.

If your organisation needs help to take the LEAP®, get in touch.