Employee engagement

Having spent lunchtime juggling plates, folks, drinks, napkins and eating whilst standing up and talking to suppliers, it's time for a session on employee engagement, as opposed to customer engagement. Something I'm really interested in, and want people to feel part of a community that they can collaborate in and influence when they come to work. Lets see if I learn anything I can put into practice.

Why is employee engagement important?
Done well, engagement promotes better business performance and work efficiencies. Better customer and partner relationships, great innovation, improved quality, quicker problem resolution, improved knowledge sharing, richer more diverse culture. And, a better place to work.

It should be based on:
Trusted relationship with manager
Opportunities for learning and growth
Understanding and sharing the organisation's mission
Understanding individual's role and responsibilities
Sense of belonging and a shared culture.

Who's usually involved in employee engagement schemes?
Executive team, HR
Who's not?
The employees, the IT department
Not only should they be, they should be synergistic partners

IT needs to partner with the business to promote engagement:
Revisit consumerisation
Reach out to shadow IT
Understand demographic shifts
Become a stakeholder in the changing nature of work
Team with leadership and HR teams on engagement efforts

IT has a lot to contribute, but it needs a new mindset. We need to rething our approach to architecture, governance, support, identity, compliance.

Need to strategically use consumer computing tools and styles for business purposes. Think about people, networks, communities.

Think about all IT projects as engagement initiatives:
Upgrade the email client --> Rethink the inbox
Deploy social networking --> Optimise engagement
Application development --> User experience design
Deploy corporate systems --> Create an App Store
Respond to BYOD --> Lead BYOD

Case study:
Auto manufacturing firm used micro blogging tool to socialise the Helpdesk
Questions posed into twitter like space, private to the company
Any employee can answer questions, not just technicians and Helpdesk staff
Data is mined by helpdesk to augment FAQs, knowledge base and their own understanding of service
Collective knowledge of community is leveraged giving better insights into problems, and to gather information and opinion on future plans

Any engagement initiative should:
• Provide a common framework for diverse IT initiatives
• Supply a common language to talk to the business
• Deliver greater ROI from existing and new IT investments
• Provide a unifying theme across IT and shadow IT
• Provide new challenges as workloads shift to the cloud
• Foster new approaches to partners and customers
• Create new partnerships with leaders and human resources

But IT itself must become more engaging ...






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Location:London,United Kingdom