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The engagement exchange

E. BALAJIWhy employers should encourage and assist employees in engaging with management,their co-workers and external stakeholders.Employees' anxiety for status updates via tweets, blogs and social networking sites is a frequentfinding in employee surveys these days. The millennial workforce expects to use the same tools andmethods of networking that it uses in its social life, to create business value even in professional life.

Social technologies have given birth to a counter culture that asks employers to make employeeswilling co-creators. However, it raises some questions: Whether to go the social way? If yes, to whatextent? Why? Personally, I am for social engagement even if the engagement sometimes happensduring office hours. However, I am also for coordination, monitoring, mentoring, governance andthe alignment of social engagement to make it fruitful for both the business and the employee.

The social media should solve customers' problems and create knowledge. Ultimately, social

engagement should become part of value co-creation that is the challenge.

I am convinced that businesses need to act like organised engagement exchanges' that promote,mentor and align employees' engagement with other internal and external stakeholders. Employers

will have to host the conversations, networking activities and collaborations between employees andexternal stakeholders. The three engagement areas worth promoting are: engagement withmanagement, with co-workers, and engagement with stakeholders.

Engagement with management

Today organisations offer their employees the chance to contribute in corporate thinking anddecision-making that was once confined to boardrooms. Companies such as IBM and NEC, through

their extensive co-creation exercises, are successful case studies for engaging employees in creatingmanagerial value that governs everything from what goes into the product to management oforganisational functions.

After about 100 years of its founding, IBM co-created its corporate value in 2003. Using a co-creation platform, IBM asked its employees to re-examine the company's core values. This initiativeresulted in IBM employees creating corporate values that shape everything IBMers do and everychoice they make on behalf of the company and their clients.

NEC, Japan, conducted dialogue sessions' and town meetings' at every workplace to co-create theGroup Vision 2017 and Core Values.

Engagement with co-workers

Today's employees knowledge workers identify themselves not so much with their job titles aswith their professions. The chief characteristic of knowledge workers, as Peter Drucker observes inone of his books on the knowledge economy, is that they identify themselves with, and are more loyalto, their professional practices such as quality management, marketing and customer relations thanto their organisations.

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Companies have to identify the professional identities of their employees and help them nurturethose identities through collaboration within and outside the organisational boundaries. To quoteNobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, it is the identities that offer a sense of belonging to a communityand are a resource, like capital. Hence, social media should be considered a business resource social capital that can be practically applied to day jobs.

Already many organisations have seen the merit in introducing social tools on the corporate Intranet.Enterprise application and product lifecycle management tools come with Facebook-like interfacesthat enable organisations to co-create value in all phases of wealth generation and distribution, with

both internal and external stakeholders. This means employees say production guys can notonly mail, but tweet, blog, status-update, alert, mobile upload, submit, rate and comment tomanage a project or develop a product.

Engagement with stakeholders

Employees also want to authentically engage with the society on behalf of their organisation increating shared value. They are required to collaborate with external stakeholders to justify theirroles for instance, a customer relations executive would need to engage with customers, potential

customers, lead users, and even ex-customers, to gather ideas and insights that would help thecompany increase customer satisfaction and market share. Hence, businesses can map their externalstakeholders right from Government, media, suppliers, customers, partners and civil societyand match them with the roles of employee groups and think of creating opportunities forinteractions between them.

Companies such as Dell, Intel, GE, and Starbucks have gained enormous brand value by letting theiremployees engage either individually or collectively with external stakeholders for generatingmore revenue, ideas, and for honouring their contract with society.

To sum up, the business benefits of having an engaging and empowered workforce in terms ofattracting and retaining talent and customers is being proved beyond doubt. Instead of resisting thechange, businesses need to actively evolve organisational approach, training, and governance for

engaging employees with management, co-workers and external stakeholders that will not only helpthem advance their business interests, but also help the employees further their professionalaspirations the ultimate way to boost the employment brand.

(This article was published in the Business Line print edition dated August 15, 2011)