An increasing number of business people on social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter do not use their actual job titles as the main descriptors of who they are and what they do anymore. Instead, they list a series of skills, capabilities, or achievements that reflect their versatility. This reflects two major changes going on in the workplace: everyone is a passive job seeker and most people are open to trying new things.
To take advantage of these trends, companies have to focus on literally engaging people on a personal level through new methods of motivation and career development, such as active collaboration, on-going expertise sharing, and just-in-time training. This is critical for the success of contractors and outsourced staff members as well as they are expected to transparently represent the client business as their own in most cases today.
So to prevent an employment exodus and increase engagement across the extended enterprise, in this paper HfS outlines four very basic organizational people principles and practices around engaging with people as individual human beings:
» Vision and values.
» Transparency and trust.
» Communication and collaboration.
» Presentation and promotion.
Enterprises – and individual professionals for their teams in the absence of senior leader recognition or support company-wide – that address these simple principles will likely find better retention and engagement alike.
