Many companies and leaders are struggling to find ways to engage with their workforce and bring about real dialogue. The whole task seems rather daunting and no matter how hard they try, leaders can often feel remote and out of touch with their people. Maintaining this remoteness can risk losing the commitment and energy of those people who are real stars; the ones that add real value to the business. Leaders might not even know who these people are, or what it is that makes their contribution so special. They may not know the role they as leaders might need to fulfil in order to keep these people engaged and contributing.
Todays leaders know the importance of communication, but they need to be innovative and creative in how they do this. Finding ways to get two-way dialogue going and maintaing it is key in our fast moving world. Along with the roadshows, regular communications and the management-by-walkaround methods, new technologies offer a whole host of new possibilities.
Salesforce.com did exactly this (see overview from HBR here) . By developing a Private Social Networking tool ‘Chatter’ (a secure mini-blog site, very similar to Twitter) they were able to facilitate dialogue between the top executives of the company and the 5,000 employees in an annual management meeting. The result was an instant response from staff to ideas, and instant understanding from Executives of what issues were concerning their people.
New technologies give us the potential to bring leadership accountability and transparency into much sharper relief. They offer low-cost, real-time ways of collaborating across disciplines & geographic boundaries. Whilst this cannot replace the good old fashioned face-to-face engagement, they can go a long way to enhancing it and lengthening the impact and influence of those meetings, especially in complex, multi-channel, matrixed, global organizations of today.
Have you got experience of using new technologies to engage your workforce. Would you like more ideas on how to engage and energize your workforce. Contact us here, or email us on feedback@agents2change.com.
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