A report of Learning Edge Conference
This year’s Learning Edge was all about ‘Engagement’. Our panellists, expert speakers and group discussions covered different aspects of how we can best engage with others: motivating and aligning employees, delighting customers and improving our relationships with shareholders and the many others who interact with our organisations. Starting from an understanding of the value of doing this, company speakers presented examples of what they have done and what can be learned by others. The basis of this exchange was an understanding that ‘Engagement’ is not an ‘enabler’ – it is a result that needs to be sustained by good initiatives. It only makes sense to set ‘Engagement’ as a goal when we are sufficiently clear how this is supposed to contribute to the organisation’s objectives: engagement for performance.
Opening the conference, we heard from Rudy Provoost, CEO of Philips Lighting how his company has set clear objectives for the company for 2010 – requiring significant improvements in profitability and revenue growth. ‘Engagement’ is a real objective, defined with measurable goals for customers and employees. Managers are assessed on their ability to improve the level of engagement of their teams. One simple measure – the net promoter score – is used to assess the effectiveness of customer focused initiatives, and replaces a raft of measures that were judged to be too internally focused or unnecessarily complicated. ‘Simplicity’ is the leitmotif for improvements in Philips and we heard that the concept of Engagement is key to the delivery of its strategy.Vittorio Cesarotti, Professor at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, gave a passionate call for us to respect the goal of ‘Engagement’ as a source of energy, driving commitment to change and the search for innovation. The risk is that this energy can be dispersed or easily lost: it needs to be channelled through a process of ‘Alignment’, explicitly linking actions and strategic focus.
Engagement by itself could be value destroying and ultimately demotivating to employees.
Chris Lebeer, CEO of EFQM, reminded us that ‘Engagement’ is fundamental to EFQM: our members benefit from one another’s commitment to share experience and learning. As part of the EFQM’s rejuvenation, the foundation has succeeded in engaging a leadership group of committed companies within the Pact programme, each agreeing to sponsor the development of new learning for the network. Our interactions are aimed at different levels within the organisation – the Learning Edge promotes exchange among those tasked with implementing strategy, and the Executive Roundtables provide a platform to engage business leaders in our work.
There is so much experience among the participants at the Learning Edge that discussions are often surprising, revealing new 
perspectives or examples on how others have tackled an issue. We decided to channel some of this energy into a form of joint problem solving that we call ‘Peer Assist’. This session demonstrated how small groups of people from diverse backgrounds, working under time pressure, can deliver a valuable insights on such problems. We set four discussion topics to tables of ten participants, and rotated the problem owner every fifteen minutes. The issues discussed implementation challenges of making new processes work, or how to motivate and align employees to a strategy. At the end of the one hour long session, we heard enthusiastic
reports back from the tables how the discussion had been valuable, and how the technique could be useful in their business context.
Philips is a pioneer of business excellence in Europe, and demonstrated how far the commitment runs within the organisation to motivate the frontline in the goal for continuous improvement.
Members of the internal prize winning team from a glass plant in Lommel, Belgium ran a short theatrical presentation on how they had improved aspects of their manufacturing process. The accepted wisdom of internal engineers was that it could not be improved, but a cross?functional team of plant workers set about challenge, and eventually found annual savings worth more than €160,000 to their plant alone. The improved handling of recycled material shows comparable benefits at similar production sites. The team was rewarded for this innovation at a prize ceremony held in Dubai in May 2008 attended by the CEO and other senior managers. The incentive for the team was the trip itself, and the prestige of winning: no money or bonus is attached to the competition.
An important aspect of the Learning Edge is to encourage exchange between individuals, and smaller groups. In the afternoon of the first day four parallel sessions proposed a choice of learning on employee engagement initiatives that had been shown to be successful in Volvo, Ricoh Europe, Eurocontrol and Philips. Groups of up to forty participants reviewed how the brand and the company vision, team competitions and processes of mediation could all serve the purpose of more effectively engaging with employees.Building closer relationships with customers is a prerequisite to better understanding and
responding to their needs. Turning customers into enthusiastic promoters of your products requires an even higher level of engagement. On the second day of the Learning Edge we turned our attention outside the organisation, and to how companies are responding to the changing relationships with customers and shareholders in particular.
Reinier Jens, Executive Vice President, Europe and North America, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, reviewed the challenges for Philips in managing global account relationships and maintaining a consistent relationship with the customer around the world. Big customers are getting bigger, and are driving new forms of commercial organisation at a global and local level. Global key accounts are tracked throughout the organisation: the chairman himself meets with top customers on a regular basis and the responsibility is cascaded throughout different levels of the organisation.
In the parallel sessions that followed, speakers from Philips, Villa Massa and Grundfos led discussions on how examples of engaging with customers from within their companies could be applied elsewhere. The groups reviewed practices in key account management, co?designing products and services with the customer, how to build a solutions approach to selling products and the applicability of these ideas to the small and medium sized company.
Engagement can be a highly dramatic topic, and to prove the point our partners Schouten and Nelissen commissioned a pair of actors to demonstrate how interactions between members of a team can be good or bad, or just downright funny. Improvising on stage, with suggestions taken from the audience, an actor playing the role of ‘manager’ sought to improve his relationship with his co?actor ‘employee’ and a ‘customer’, taken from the audience. Backed with a pianist for dramatic musical effect, the actors made us laugh at our assumptions and, through caricature, challenged us to re?evaluate our own behaviour toward peers.arning Edge summary 29 June 2008, Page 3/3Professor Sylvester Eijffinger of the Tilburg University of Business Management, had a hard act to follow, but impressed us with his insight into the changing nature of relationships with shareholders, both in the domains of public and private equity. Management teams need to concentrate on ensuring that they have a sound and consistent strategy, and that they are capable if implementing it. Increasing activism among shareholders requires companies to respond by reinforcing management controls and developing credible mechanisms to demonstrate the effectiveness of how strategy is being implemented. As a final challenge to the audience, the professor told us of his observations from a recent sabbatical in the US, where the wealth of newly successful entrepreneurs is commonly used to support both good causes and the promotion of the next generation of entrepreneurs. This form or solidarity is rare in a European context.
Speaking from within the ‘Evoluon’, a building designed in the 1960’s by Philips to showcase the future applications of science and technology, Chris Lebeer closed this year’s Learning Edge: “I would like to thank Philips and our partners Schouten and Nelissen for their support. Built on a heritage of twenty years of structured exchange and learning among our members, EFQM has a bright future demonstrated by the engagement of all our participants to making this event a success.”
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