In the last couple of weeks I stumbled upon the term ‘Employee engagement’ in some blogposts. The term almost sounds redundant, as one would assume employees are engaged by principle.. Research shows otherwise. Employees apparently are not engaged in their work. In 2007, a study shows that only 21% is truly engaged, implying those who work a bit harder for the sake of the company. A staggering 38% is not engaged at all. Gary Hamel suggests that this is not on the agenda because most managers are not even aware or simply do not care. See the exhibit below for an illustration. The question is, what is the benefit of having engaged employees? And what is true engagement? Let’s find out.
All projects we undertake with our clients have one thing in common, there are multiple parties involved. Before officially launching the project to all parties, already many people from different companies are involved. When launching a project, the most important group of people are connected as well. This group is the largest, and has therefore the greatest influence.
Usually they are the personnel of a large company, or a large group of individuals, but always connected somehow. They can have real power. However, the power they can possess can only come to surface when all parties involved are great in collaborating with each other. One of our responsibilities is to try to create a situation where collaboration can really occur, to unleash the power of the large group. What is collaboration really, and what is needed to really make it happen?
Most co-creation projects incorporate a sophisticated website to be the basis for the mass dialogue that comes with a successful project. Although we always like to think hybrid, mixing cyber conversations with brainstorms in real life, it is definitely of great importance to employ a best-of-breed software platform. It should facilitate your project in the best way possible.
It is very attractive however to make the infrastructure for your co-creation project the center of your attention. Quite convenient also, since configuring a website is a process you can easily control. It takes your mind off a far more difficult task you face: How to attract a committed audience and how to motivate it to contribute to your cause with ideas, experiences and lively discussion.
A platform will not do that. Elegant lines of code, html and flash programming do not attract or entertain crowds into co-creation. Even the most beautiful of designs does not convince people to let go of skepticism or resistance.
Communitize.. Typically a verb only a non-native speaker would invent.. Since I (more or less..) coined the term, I guess am free to choose whether communitize is an active or passive verb: Do you communitize or are you communitized? I decided on both. Communitize is something you can actively strive for or it is something that simply happens to you.
So what does it mean? Communitizing expresses the current shift of organizations experiencing the limits of functional stratification, the evaporation of their boundaries and the surge of value creation networks.
The succes of a cocreation project depends on a wide variety of factors, the incentivation of your community members not being the least important one. We’ve seen many different approaches worldwide, ranging from rewards in hard cash to the more implicit remuneration in the form of awards and public honor.
Motivations of audiences may differ per project or purpose. We found in our projects that community members are delighted by us adressing what interests them most: an in-depth discussion and follow-up on the ideas and experiences they shared. Merely sending out gifts did not do the trick, it once even backfired. The gifts were seen as a business transaction, a cold reward that did not do justice to the personal and intimate dialogue people experienced during the course of the project. The disregard for the relationship that had grown was felt as a profound disappointment.