It's not just business, it's personal

The two biggest challenges facing organisations both now and going forward are recruitment and retention. As a result of the mass retirement of the baby boomer generation our corridors will be filled with the challenging 'Generation Y'. Highly fought-over (some 80 million boomers will retire and just 46 million Generation Yers will join the workplace over the next 20 years), Generation Y will be looking to define their work environment - and a very different environment it will be.

This is a generation born with big thumbs. They have been raised in a technology rich environment. They are used to instant access and communication, collaborative working and have the desire and ability to express their own opinions. This is part of their genetic make-up.

The challenge for organisations will be to engage and communicate with these employees and those already in the workforce. We all know that it is only by having a highly committed and engaged workforce that organisations can achieve the competitive advantage to thrive in the coming years, but what was good enough a few years ago will not deliver engagement today and in the future.

The model of engagement has evolved. We used to be content with 'telling', essentially this was one-way communication that informed but required no feedback. We then moved onto 'selling' with CEO roadshows and managers trained to 'sell' the company vision complete with newsletters and posters. The next phase that is starting to be explored is 'inclusion' where organisations look to involve their people in the development and delivery of their strategy. The final stage is 'co-creation' where employees are personally committed and have ownership of the success of the organisation.

Now organisations are recognising that just as much effort (and yes that means budget) needs to be spent on the internal brand as is spent on the external brand - and that these two need to be in alignment.  Paul Middleton, Managing Director of internal communications specialist Yellow! (http://www.yellowcom.com/?p=24) says: "Look at Tesco. Their strapline of 'every little helps' has got equal resonance both internally and externally. World-class organisations understand that they need to treat their employees like customers, and that means applying the same rules: understand their needs, involve them in the brand and invest in communications and measurement."

A key part of engagement is communication, and if you look at most organisations' current communication, it is often ad-hoc and at worst it's non-existent. Newsletters that are often infrequent, out of date and irrelevant sit unread on people's desks or in their inbox and posters in corridors that are neither seen nor read.

The corporate intranet, an electronic media channel, has fallen well below expectations in terms of delivering both employee engagement and self-service. A recent consulting engagement revealed that one large HR department received 650 supports calls a day with 95% of the information requested already available on the company's own intranet, it’s just that no one thought of looking there for themselves.

The corporate intranet is a potentially powerful media channel and in many organisations today it is grossly under utilised. It could be likened to a television channel, if the content is good you will get viewers (users) if it’s not, then you won’t.

If the Intranet is used simply as a channel to disseminate information, the content will be mainly static, uninteresting and boring.  Therefore, just like your television, it should have different channels for different elements:

• Information – Company and personal
• Processes – Company people management processes
• Lifestyle – Social interactive services

The intranet will need to include Information such as company policies and procedures, rules, directions & maps and also frequently asked questions.  It should also contain a personal profile, and financial information including salary and pension.

The intranet channel needs to provide single sign on access to Business Processes such as internal job vacancies, annual appraisals and on-line training. In some recent research that Qikker commissioned, we found that over 70% of organisations still use paper based processes although they are aware of the business benefits that online talent management processes provide.

Perhaps the most important aspect is delivering employee lifestyle services such as competitions, blogs & forums, swap shops and surveys.

It’s the interactive Lifestyle services that will engage socially and emotionally with employees and keep them coming back. This is the hook and the key to making the company intranet and employee self-service deliver real benefit to the business.

Euan Semple (http://www.euansemple.com/) who was the head of knowledge management solutions at the BBC, started in 1999 to deploy a system to connect the organisation's 28,000 employees. Although it could have been an astronomically expensive system, Euan started off with a cheap piece of bulletin board software for a couple of hundred pounds. Called talk.gateway this sits alongside the BBC's Intranet and features Q&A and Discussion categories.

Today there are about 250 different interest groups including a forum on Adobe software that has 3,500 members.  Rather than expensive training courses, these members help solve each others problems or questions - an innovative way of connecting people for the benefit of the business.  The system has now developed and now includes blogging sites where interested users helped to develop the BBC's own policy on blogs.

Organisations now have the ability to create their own 'virtual' community through this portal.  By making it alive and dynamic, the organisation can start to reap the rewards of collective collaboration and engagement that is so powerful in other aspects. 

There is an exciting opportunity for organisations to create a 'People Portal' that truly becomes the central highway of communication and a habitual single point of access for all interactive HR services.

If companies ignore this opportunity to collaborate and engage with staff, and try to switch on a 'parental control' mechanism they will alienate current and future employees and therefore limit their competitive advantage.

Contact Details

Name: Mark Barlow
Position within company: Managing Director
Telephone: +44 (0) 845 2600 222
Email: info@qikker.com
Web: http://www.qikker.com/