August 31, 2022
Julie Charron-Latour, Projects Director – Continuous Improvement Lead at NSI, explains how to use technological changes to successfully engage employees.
Employee engagement is about bringing a work team together towards a common goal. The actions deployed to reach this goal must be beneficial to the company, but also to each team member. The implementation of technology is a relevant lever for employee mobilization because it creates a common goal and responds to personal motivations.
Define a Real Common Goal
We note that many companies undertake technology change because everyone else is undertaking technology change.
Here are some common examples of common goals with little engagement:
- We are implementing a CRM because we need a CRM
- We need a project management tool
- We need to send out newsletters
Instead, we invite you to define what the business goal is. Hint: it should start with the following words: reduce time, increase relationship, simplify steps, facilitate coordination, etc.
By linking your technology change to a business goal, your message is much more engaging, for example:
- Double your sales
- Faciliter la coordination entre les gestionnaires de projets en réduisant le nombre de emails de moitié
- Facilitate coordination between project managers by reducing the number of emails by half
- Increase the opening rate of our marketing campaigns by 30%
Translate this Common Goal Into a Personal Goal
For many employees, motivation will come from feeling empowered to take action. At NSI, we make changes with the people who do the work, not just the management team.
For example, the champion of a CRM implementation could be an employee who is NOT the sales manager. His role is not to make all the decisions alone, but rather to be in charge of coordinating meetings with us to reach a consensus.
By making team members responsible for the project, you ensure not only their personal commitment to the project, but also to the solution.
What to do After the Initial Implantation?
Don’t bury your head in the sand. After an initial implementation, your team will ALWAYS need some level of support and assistance. This is another opportunity to create engagement.
Here’s the trick. While some are motivated to build something new, others will prefer to support their colleagues. Put them in charge of facilitating weekly or monthly sessions to collect areas of improvement, share experiences and propose new ideas. This is called bottom-up.
At NSI, we believe that these moments between team members are also an excellent pretext for sharing very short training content (less than 20 minutes). Setting up a bottom-up meeting and short training sessions are the secret ingredients of proactive and sustainable management.
Do you want to succeed in your digital transformations and mobilize your troops? The NSI Solution team will be pleased to share its expertise and experience of more than 15 years working with SMEs in Quebec and around the world.
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