Street Smarts

Focusing on the latest trends in internal communication and employee engagement

Brainstorming

It was Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling who said the way to find a good idea is to start with lots of ideas. That applies as well to engaging employees – through brainstorming. Pitney Bowes uses brainstorms to help develop new products and services like health-care programs and to solve problems.

Here’s how the world’s leading provider of mailstream solutions does it with its Advanced Concepts and Technology group. When engineers, anthropologists and inventors in the 10-member group brainstorm, they each have their own collection of photos, videos and notes that they’ve taken while observing companies and people. Some members even have taken acting classes to better re-enact scenarios. The group follows brainstorming rules: There are no bad ideas. The group must come up with 50 ideas in 20 minutes – and ideas flow quickly.

Enter electronic brainstorming: More companies are making it easy for employees to brainstorm online, through so-called “wikis” that allow individuals to add an idea easily. Research even shows that online brainstorming, which lets employees participate without contact, is more successful than group brainstorms. Ketchum has found that to be the case.

They both get high marks for generating enthusiastic engagement from employees.

Experiments

A recent Gallup study makes clear that engaged employees inspire innovation. So how can you get employees passionate about driving their organizations forward? Through experimentation, insists IDEO, the noted design firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., known for its innovative solutions to client challenges.

IDEO managers work with a lineup of “experiments,” projects that include short-term ones intended to create new ideas, medium-term ones aimed at moving an organization into new directions and long-term ones that deliver fresh insights about the future. These structured projects have a beginning and an end, and they start with a hypothesis or brief considered interesting and important. They each have a team and a budget. And their environment is idea-friendly.

Often, teams work via video rather than PowerPoint; they build stories around people instead of data or objects. And they let consumers tell the stories by capturing them reacting to prototypes or scenarios. IDEO believes experimentation communicates to employees that they’re expected to try new approaches, and that failure isn’t fatal as long as it sparks insights that propel the organization toward innovation and growth.

One “experiment” you can try for engaging employees involves an advanced form of “show-and-tell.” Have employees returning from a conference or an international trip share the most interesting things they learned at an informal lunch with their colleagues.

Day One

Train your managers in how to hire people and make them feel a part of the family or you’re more likely to lose out when it comes to employee engagement, motivation and productivity. A Watson Wyatt Worldwide study of the human resources practices at 50 large U.S. companies found significant differences in financial performance and employee engagement between companies that focus on the details of how they hire, orientate and integrate new employees and those that do not.

Nearly two-thirds of organizations with a highly engaged workforce provide interview training for managers versus one-third of companies with a less engaged workforce. Those with highly engaged workers also spend an average of 35 weeks to bring a new hire up to speed versus 15 weeks for those with lower levels of engagement. How does it help financially? Typically, a significant improvement, in employee engagement, which Watson Wyatt didn’t define, sparks a $95 million increase in revenue for an S&P 500 organization.

Key techniques to try: Focus on improving communication both to managers who hire and to new employees themselves, and simply explain to new employees why they were hired. This gives them a clear understanding of how their skills can be used productively.

Happiness

Pleasure + engagement + meaning = happiness. That’s the formula for happiness that a new school of psychology – called “positive psychology” – has developed. This new recipe emphasizes human relationships, flow and meaning and provides an interesting insight into what really makes up happiness. Proponents maintain it is possible to make someone a little happier, as much as 10-15 percent, if someone works at it.

Employees, of course, must be really engaged and engrossed in what they do to be happy; in the jargon, it’s called “flow.” You’re in the flow when you forget about the clock because you’re so absorbed in the work you’re doing. Employees can try some exercises to make themselves happier. They can challenge negative thoughts, analyze whether they need to be negative, play to their strengths, and count their blessings for the things that are going well in their lives.

Caution: You can become so engrossed in your work, you become a workaholic – and less happy!

Collaboration

A primary challenge of this new century with its increasingly global workforce encompasses improving the engagement and productivity of scattered groups of knowledge workers. That’s why mastering the art of collaboration is gaining more attention, although it doesn’t come easily. It’s no longer enough to be a team player.

Organizations today now have the technology tools available to aid such collaboration, notes the Canadian Management Center. They can benefit from online innovations like wikis, eRooms, sophisticated videoconferencing systems and mobile devices. Network analysis proves useful, too, to understand how employees collaborate and network with one another and with customers. In one such analysis, a biotechnology company discovered which collaborations improved performance and which triggered collaborative breakdowns that stalled the sharing of best practices.

Collaboration can trigger conflict so some firms such as Intel and IBM provide conflict-management training. Besides training, IBM managers receive intranet information to better coach others on how to resolve disputes.

Volunteering

Organizations eager to better engage their millennials – those employees born between 1978 and 2000 – should actively support social causes and volunteering. Why? Because engaged millennials are an organization’s most loyal brand ambassadors.

A study released in October 2006 from Cone Inc. and AMP Insights based on responses from 1,800 young people ages 13 to 25 underscores the significance that the nation’s 78 million millennials (also known as Gen Y) place on organizations that do just that. Within this demographic group is a growing emphasis on volunteering and community service.

The study found that millennial “doers” aren’t afraid to refuse to work for an employer that lacks a sincere commitment to social issues. Two of five (42 percent) who volunteer weekly describe their “ideal” work environment as a place that helps them make the world a better place, outranking a high salary (41 percent) and flexible hours (37 percent).

A growing number of companies – including McKesson Corp. and BearingPoint Inc. – use software to track millennials’ and other individual employees’ volunteer hours, including nights and weekends. Some employers even factor the data into employee promotions.