IT & Engaging Your Workforce

How can technology prevent or at least curtail the silo mentality and encourage a more collaborative workplace?

1. Engage staff from all departments. Listen to them and make sure IT is treating them like great customers — after all, that is what they are!
2. Avoid proliferation of redundant collaboration tools and the like. Try to adopt technology standards to help provide consistency across the organization.
3. Share kudos to execs and management teams who can successfully establish a unified, common goal and understand how the various parts of a whole intertwine. Half the battle is won. Then move on to execution and implementation to motivate people through collaboration.
4. Don't try to solve organization-wide “silo” mentality through technology by itself. Brent Gleeson, A Forbes Magazine - - Contributor calls out that “it’s the responsibility of the leadership team to recognize this and rise above to create effective, long-term solutions that are scalable, executable, and realistic.”
5. One other thought is that IT should not hoard data or other resources that could be useful to business success. Obviously, you need strong controls and to established ownership, but... I can't tell you how many IT directors, CTOs or CIOs were "displaced" by keeping the business data and information locked down unless the POTUS passed an executive order.

How do you balance the demand for people to use their own devices with the need to become more security conscious?

1. First — adopt and support BYOD if you can. You'll make a lot of people very happy. There are several things to consider before opening the BYOD door in your organization,
2. Adopt clear policies — Avoid deploying technologies that may or may not be relevant to your business needs.
3. Continually train employees on policies and the real risks that exist with BYOD (or any other device security for that matter)
4. Backup policies by enforcement and management technologies. These will help define and enforce your BYOD policies. There are several to choose from.

How do you accommodate a younger workforce's desire for more automation? What areas of a company can be updated/automated to appeal to the younger professional?

• First and foremost, invest in your employees across the organization. Give them relevant end-user technology and don't be afraid to try new things.
• According to the Employee Experience Advantage, by Jacob Morgan:
• "An analysis of 250 businesses indicates that Companies who invest in Employee Experience outperform those that don't. For instance, they are 4 times more profitable than those that don't."

Pretty convincing stuff!

Top companies include:

1. Accenture
2. Adobe
3. Airbnb
4. Alphabet/Google
5. Amazon
6. Apple
7. Cisco
8. Facebook
9. Hyland Software
10. LinkedIn
11. Microsoft
12. Riot Games
13. Salesforce
14. Ultimate Software
15. World Wide Technology 

Here are a few things that are very important to employee experience and the parallel to IT / technology:

• The hiring experience must be seamless (application management software)
• Training and Onboarding (learning management software)
• Enabling remote work and coworking (collaboration & communication tools)
• Navigating the workplace, accessing information (digital signage & wayfinding software)
• Incent employees to grow and learn (gamification platforms)
• Easily booking workspaces (room reservation software)
• Personal growth (performance management software, employee feedback tools)
• Ensuring equipment and software / systems work properly (maintenance management software and helpdesk systems)
• Checking in visitors (visitor management software)

If you want to have the biggest, most positive impact on younger workforces, technology needs to carry its responsibility and support facilities management and human resource departments in your company. Without IT, validating and implementing new technology solutions would not be complete.

Challenge the status quo, think outside of the box, dare to be different and above all — deliver the best possible user experience through technology as you possibly can.

Before mid-day, employees generally use at least six technologies. If any one of these six are slow, not available or just old — that's going to increase the frustration level and lower the employee experience.

What should a company look for in identifying champions of change within their organization?

Effective champions of change:

1. Possess a willingness to listen to new ideas. They are open to feedback; new ideas and they often are quite creative (not always though.)
2. Are good at networking and interacting within the organization.
3. Focus on solutions rather than complaining about things that don't go well.
4. Understand their department or the organization.
5. Aren't afraid to take risks, they know that we can learn from things that do not go well.
6. Will ask for help if they run into a problem.
7. They speak up and give feedback to leaders.

Perhaps asking questions on the successes/lessons learned rolling out large change and handling resistance will help with engaging people in the process of change.

Select a good group of change champions from across all your organization's departments.

Understand where the pushback will come from and anticipate / address upfront.

Don't assume that you know more than your customers. Involve them upfront and validate the change using real data.

Communicate, communicate, communicate! This is a must! Over communicating is better than under communicating and sinking your project or taking on a serious black eye.

Give frequent updates — good or bad. Transparency can tear down walls and kill bad assumptions.

Don't get emotional.