Two UK companies are seeing employee engagment initiatives reap dividends

Virgin Media has strengthened its network of employee engagement champions to shape policy within the organization while Network Rail has introduced a leadership programme that has led to increased staff engagement. Virgin expanded its programme after it met with unexpected recent successes including widescale employee involvement in the development of the company’s reward and recognition scheme.

The network of engagement champions is set up through national, divisional and local bodies known as ‘voice forums’. Virgin Media’s national voice forum meets every eight weeks and is involved in the engagement agenda.

“Anything we’re working on in terms of engagement, we’d take to the national voice forum and they would look at the proposals and give feedback and we’d trial initiatives with them,” said Gemma Webb, Virgin Media.

Meanwhile Network Rail’s leadership programme has led to increased employee engagement, reduced signalling errors and a fall in absenteeism rates. So far 1,000 managers have been through the two-day programme, which encourages them to be more coach-like.

Network Rail analysed the number of incidents per hour against the individual signalling manager’s level of engagement and found that the less engaged managers were, on average, responsible for double the number of incidents. Absenteeism fell by a quarter among those who had been through the programme.