Our Story

Pamela Frost, creator of the iREAP™ Employee Engagement System

Pamela Frost is the developer and creator of the individual Role Engagement Alignment Profile (iREAP™) – a system which explores alignment of an employee’s motivations as they fit their role, their engagement within the organisation, and the risk / opportunities for current engagement for both the individual and the organisation.

Pamela is also currently working on research into the concepts of role engagement life cycles and the relationships between engagement, workplace productivity, absenteeism and burnout.

“After 12 years of working as an internal human resource consultant for various organisations in the energy, education and telecommunications sectors I decided to start my own business, which I called “Because”. The choice of the name Because was very deliberate; it is about the idea of people having a ‘cause’ and sense of purpose and enabling people to make a difference in their own lives, in their families, workplaces, communities and the world they live in.

Initially the work of Because concentrated in the outplacement field where I was coaching people in career transition between organisations.  Having worked with hundreds of people I was amazed by the incredibly high number of people who were leaving organisations because they felt disillusioned, disengaged, burnt out and frustrated by how they felt their organisations had treated them.  It seemed that many organizations took the term ‘Human Resources’ literally, treating people as a resource to be expended and used. Many organisations appeared to be draining people’s energy, commitment, talents and capabilities and employees were leaving feeling that their psychological contract had been compromised or even violated.

At the same time, in the early 2000’s, there was a strong push in business for cost cutting, more profitability, innovation; essentially being able to deliver products and services faster, better and more cheaply to the market. These pressures and priorities are still relevant today. At this time I was beginning to think that there had to be a better way of creating synergies between people’s needs to feel appreciated, recognised, valued, supported by their employer and the employers’ needs to be competitive, efficient and profitable.

The solution lay in focusing on employee engagement and getting the “psychological contract” right to create win-win solutions for both parties. The aim was to achieve a position where people felt they were appropriately paid and rewarded, were fully using their talents and creativities, were able to engage their passions, contribute ideas and obtain a sense of purpose and meaning from their work. Essentially this meant that they would willingly contribute more of their discretionary effort and this could work wonders when linked to the organisational challenges of being leaner and more efficient.  So instead of organisations extracting engagement, they could concentrate on creating the right conditions to elicit increased engagement.

It was not a challenge convincing employers of this argument.  Intuitively they got it.  What they lacked however was a practical tool that could:

• Measure nebulous concepts such as motivation and engagement.
• Make attributions as to how much productivity improvements could be leveraged through initiatives that increased employee engagement.
• Identify what to do to increase engagement for an individual, a team, section and organisation as a whole.
• Encourage people to take personal responsibility for their engagement rather than taking an entitlement attitude and expecting managers to do it for them.
• Demonstrate a return-on-investment (ROI) and be able to provide measures and improvements back to their senior executive and boards

In 2003 such a practical tool did not exist.

There were plenty of engagement surveys and tools that purported to measure engagement and provide feedback to clients.  However, they were modelled on climate surveys where the organisation received aggregated anonymous information on drivers and levers for engagement, risk areas, and hot spots and so on.  What was missing was an individual diagnostic report that would deliver individually based psychometric feedback AND aggregated organisational feedback.

In addition, such a tool would need to use a simple and powerful conceptual framework that was easy to understand and interpret by the respondent and the organisation.

As this tool did not exist, I decided to design one myself.  Hence the individual Role Engagement Alignment Profile™ (iREAP™) was born and evolved over the next 9 years.”