Take a Look at Yourself and Make a Change
HCI’s 2013 Employee Engagement Conference is off and rolling, and at the end of day one, I know two things to be true:
- 1. My brain hurts from all the fantastic information from today’s presentations.
- 2. Effective employee engagement is about the individual.
It’s obvious that employee engagement hinges on employees – but in their quest to formalize and implement programs to address engagement, organizations often aggregate employees into groups, inadvertently disregarding some of the unique things that motivate individual people.
Compounding this issue is the smartphone in your pocket, your Facebook profile, Twitter handle, Instagram username, Pinterest board and a host of other platforms, feeds, and devices that have brought our here and now culture front and center. The stream of information and ability to connect at our fingertips is unmatched, and yet it can result in people feeling more isolated.
Monika Fahlbusch of Salesforce.com helped kick off today’s event with the profound advice to, “Be human first.” Relationships are built and maintained between people, not titles, so HR leaders need to be wary of the way they approach their role in relation to others. Being human first is about embracing your own personal brand, and embracing how your personal brand affects what you do and how you do it.
This self-understanding helps make the case and pave the way for organizational initiatives that support it. Salesforce.com has allowed employees to establish and participate in their own online discussion groups, including one that is called Airing of Grievances that serves as a forum for any employee to share their thoughts about organizational issues they might be experiencing. (Don't fret - the equilibrium is still maintained with the Singing the Praises group and their contributions.)
Further elaborating on this concept of humanness, Chris Malone from Fidelum Partners talked about the resurgence of the relationship between merchants and consumers; the face to face relationship that many companies were built on in the past hundred years. His research found that 80% of human behavior is guided by the perception of warmth and competence of a person or organization. Simply put, relationships – their presence and richness and lack thereof – have a profound impact on outcomes – personal and organizational.
Organizations today are facing a call to action when it comes to establishing, maintaining and increasing levels of employee engagement. The statistics and stories from presenters today made that fact very clear, but more importantly, they helped provide a framework for what can be done to address these challenges.
Hearing from Dunkin Donuts, The Ohio State University, Pandora, AT&T, and Nielsen today is upping the stakes for tomorrow, but I’m confident that Adobe, Deloitte, the Luck Companies, and others will not fail to impress and contribute to the discussion. Keep following HCI and all of the nuggets of conference wisdom on this blog and on Twitter with #hcievents!