Enterprise 2.0 and Employee Engagement

I was at Michael Specht’s unconference session at PubCamp last night. He’s right, unfortunately, the conversation was dominated by too few. But I’m glad he’s written a summary. I was particularly interested in some of the statistics quoted from the Watson & Wyatt research report:

A further 2007/2008 Watson & Wyatt research report on communication best practices found that organisations with a “most effective” communication programs provided a 91% total return to shareholders from 2002-2006 compared to 62% for least effective. Improved communication effectiveness is associated with a 15.7% increase in market value. While finally organisations with “most effective” communication had an employee engagement level 4 times that of “least effective”.

I agree with Michael’s argument that communication & customer focus are areas that Enterprise 2.0 can help. But I’m concerned that these discussions always seem to focus on technology being the answer — the silver bullet — to solving organisational problems. I’m not saying that it doesn’t play a role, but I believe that Enterprise 2.0 is more about creating a culture of participation and collaboration. Technology can be an enabler of that, but on it’s own, it’s not going to work.

There are plenty of things we can do in organisations to improve employee engagement without getting embroiled in debates about whether or not people could or should access social tools inside/outside the firewall. Here’s an idea: why not encourage people to walk from their desks and actually talk to someone (yes, a real human) instead of sending an email? Why not arrange a brown bag session and invite some like-minded folks to join you? How about some well facilitated meetings to help people have conversations and learn how to collaborate?

There are many, many small things you can do that will make a big difference. I’ll use an example from last night (although this does relate to technology). Someone — I think it might have been Alison Young — decided that it would be a good idea to write her twitter handle on her name tag. And everyone followed suit. This led to some interesting connections and conversations. Simple idea - big impact. Be a positive deviant (shout-out to Matt Moore for this link).

What other simple things like this could you do in your workplace that might make a huge difference? Oh — and borrowing an idea from the 2020 summit — make sure some of your ideas have a no cost option - they’re a much easier sell!

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