Marketplace and business imperatives mean employees today must be more entrepreneurial and more involved than they were a decade ago. Demographic trends mean large segments of the workforce will soon be retiring, and a lot of organizations are struggling to find ways of better engaging their workers.
B.C.’s largest employer is the B.C. government, with some 30,000 employees, and it faced the same challenges as many businesses, albeit on a larger scale. Its solution was appropriately larger and was so successful that other big organizations are now studying it as a model for the workplace of the future.
THE PROBLEM
In 2006 Jessica McDonald, then the deputy minister to the premier and B.C.’s top bureaucrat, realized that the B.C. government workforce faced big challenges. Many of its baby boomer employees would retire over the next decade and be replaced by new employees better suited to a more democratic and open style of working. Also, the government workforce would likely shrink in the future. The government needed a way to not only recruit new employees but engage existing ones.
THE SOLUTION
McDonald hatched a plan to transform the way the government acted as an employer. She would convert the government’s existing employee Internet portal, which provided official information and resources related to working for government, into an intranet, an internal network accessible to all employees that would enable more two-way communication. Soon the new intranet, named @Work, was launched, but although it enabled some employee feedback – through such things as polling and access to more media, including video – it was essentially still a one-way conversation based on the old-media model of the employer broadcasting information out to its employees.
However, in 2007, when @Work editor Robin Farr archived all the past articles that had been posted, intranet traffic exploded. Within a month, there was a 2,800 per cent increase in hits to the site. Quickly, the site evolved into being more conversational. Employees began posting comments in writing and videos, not only on articles published on the site but on issues of concern to them. Eventually, the commentary section evolved into a discussion forum in which some employees began to reach out to other departments, creating a form of cross-functional teaming that breaks down departmental barriers to better solve problems.
The intranet also features a popular section for employee interview videos, where they comment on their jobs and are invited to deliver what the site refers to as their “two cents’ worth” on diverse subjects such as climate change or the best qualities of a co-worker.
By allowing workers to create their own conversations, @Work became a sensation within the civil service, receiving up to 700,000 hits a month. More interesting is that other governments and organizations are flocking to B.C. to see how they can copy it. The site’s success was featured on Ragan.com, a U.S. website aimed at corporate communicators, and Farr now speaks at conferences in the U.S. on how to better engage employees through intranets.
LESSONS
• Let it go. Old-school command-and-control methods don’t work with today’s workforce. If you want workers to be engaged, let them talk to each other.
• Lose the corp-speak. People will only respond to an intranet if it speaks in their language. They want conversations, not messages.
• Break down the silos. Intranets can create effective communities, but to do so they must allow people to speak with others in their larger community, not just a few who share their outlook.
Check out Tony's blog at The Insider: bcbusinessonline.ca/insider