Connecting your people and business is vital in fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration and superior customer experiences, all of which impact bottom line growth and improves productivity.
With staff becoming increasingly digitally-savvy, social media users from diverse backgrounds, employee engagement has quickly moved from a nice to have, to a must have.
Maurizio Pettorino, senior vice president for Salesforce, took to the mainstage to explore how to create a great workplace and company culture, drawing on the experiences of Salesforce’s manufacturing customers.
According to a five-year study across a number of verticals, the companies with the best workplace significantly outperformed their market average – some by as much as 200%.
At the same time, employee expectations are rising. Gallup’s 2016 global Employee Engagement study revealed:
- Competition for Talent – two-thirds of millennials were considering leaving their employer by 2020, so it’s key for businesses to bring in the best talent to drive innovation.
- Mobile Mindset – 92% of employees said having efficient tools positively affects their work satisfaction. Employees are used to 24/7 connectivity and self-serve convenience, they expect work systems to be as intuitive as the tools from their personal lives.
- Engagement Crisis – globally, only 13% of employees feel they are engaged. Employee engagement is decreasing, leading to very real retention issues. Businesses, therefore, need to invest in personal relationships to improve the employee experience.
“We are witnessing a very clear employee experience gap,” said Pettorino. “At home, people are using technology to become more social, mobile, connected and smarter. At work, the exact opposite is largely true.”
Salesforce’s own study in April 2018 found that 75% of employees say their personal technology has changed their expectations of work technology.
According to Salesforce, the winning formula is:
Culture + Tech + Data = Employee Engagement
To illustrate how that works in practice, Pettorino offered a case study with Coca-Cola.
The global drinks manufacturer faced three challenges and had correlating ambitions to overcome them by leveraging digital, app-based technology:
- Siloed organisation – break down barriers and drive collaboration across different function level
- Slow decision-making – digitise the workplace and drive transparency to enable pro-active decision-making, where it matters
- No feedback culture – need for clear accountability and a constructive, performance and development-oriented culture
The results over four years confirm the impact of cultural transformation:
- 2011: a hierarchical organisation with slow decision-making and no feedback culture resulting in flat employee productivity and low employee engagement.
- 2015: a networked organisation with real-time visibility and a performance-driven culture resulting in a 30% increase in employee productivity and a 10% rise in employee engagement.
“The Coca-Cola story offers some very clear lessons for all business to consider,” said Pettorino. “Kick-off your transformation with a simple, intuitive solution adding value to a maximum number of employees, and use technology to generate cultural change not the other way around!
“Focus on collaboration by investing in a platform connecting all employees and provide them with transparency and quick access to knowledge and support; the platform should focus on improving productivity through process automation and self-serve. Gamification, for example, could help drive adoption and engagement.”
Delve deeper!
The Manufacturer has recently created a trio of short insight-driven videos with Adam Spearing around the crucial topics of connectivity and employee engagement:
What does the future of Employee Engagement look like?
– With workers now very much in the driving seat, it is absolutely vital that businesses invest in their workplace culture and employee experience.
Empowering employees through collaborative systems will improve productivity – connected business applications play a vital role in fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration and superior customer experiences.
How can manufacturers connect with customers by enhancing their entire operation? – How is digital technology helping to strengthen manufacturers’ customer relationships, enhance supply chain collaboration and ultimately, drive revenue?
Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit has been bringing together senior industry executives for more than a decade, and is the biggest manufacturer-to-manufacturer conference in the country.
It is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Digital Manufacturing Week, an annual celebration of UK manufacturing excellence that takes place every November in Liverpool. This year saw 887 delegates attend Manufacturing Leaders’ Summit (up 45% on 2017) and 5,322 visitors to Digital Manufacturing Week (up 36% on 2017).
