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Enterprise Video Broadcasts Increase Culture, Engagement and Productivity

CMMA Blog

Why has video broadcasting become one of the most vital tools for any large-scale enterprise? It comes down to three key benefits that can boost how a business connects with its own employees: Culture, Engagement and Productivity.

An astounding 50% of the global workforce will be Millennials by next year (2020), according to PWC – and they have a totally different approach to learning and entertainment from previous generations.

This is a maturing generation of highly educated people who watch YouTube videos to learn how to tie a bowtie or make the perfect craft cocktail. They binge-watch TV shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime. They catch up on the latest news or sports highlights with Twitter videos. Quite simply, it is more natural for them to watch a video than to read an email.

For large enterprises, this is creating an exciting new need to develop great video content, and to encourage their own staff to use the medium to become ambassadors for their own company.

Belgium’s largest bank, KBC Group, with more than 16,000 employees in Belgium and 42,000 worldwide, massively improved the quality of their internal communications using video. They have also taken it to the next level by encouraging staff to share their own videos including presentations and training materials.

Let’s look at the three key benefits of using video extensively across the enterprise, as they relate to KBC Bank.

Culture:

• Diversity & Inclusion – KBC wanted to harness the talents of all their people and help them feel included, well-trained and up to date on management decisions.

• Transparency – it was vital for the Board to be open and honest about the direction the company was headed.

• Trust – after the 2008 crash, trust in the banking sector was at an all-time low and KBC wanted to demonstrate how they do things differently: encouraging their employees to become ambassadors was a great way to do this.

Engagement:

• Alignment – KBC was able to provide unprecedented communications initiatives both internally and externally so that all employees understood the company direction.

• Purpose – this gave a new purpose to employees, with open, honest and engaging communication across the organisation, helping management and staff understand that their role at KBC is bigger than their job.

• Retention – the video programme helped to improve retention of talented and motivated staff. KBC’s video programme helped with engagement which is proven to help with retention.

Productivity:

• User Generated Value – KBC encourages staff to make their own quality content with easily-accessible portable video equipment, enabling every employee to become an ambassador. This has resulted in a huge upsurge in bottoms-up video with a 1500% increase in video production and distribution over five years.

• Training – both HR-driven and employee-led training is more accessible to all employees, thanks to video.

• Time to Market – KBC is moving quicker in its operations, while video distribution times have dropped from two hours to just two minutes. The KBC example is just one where Kollective has worked with a large enterprise to transform their communications philosophy and methods with hands-on support and technology.

The KBC example is just one where Kollective has worked with a large enterprise to transform their communications philosophy and methods with hands-on support and technology.

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Diversity and Inclusion Within the Workplace

CMMA Blog

It’s June in the Bay Area and there are rainbow flags on almost every building as we celebrate Pride month. There are Pride events happening all over the world celebrating the impact that LGBTQI+ people have had on the world. Over the past few years, we have seen a massive influx of corporations showing their support with Pride-themed campaigns, products, advertising and presence in the parades and celebrations.

It is wonderful to see these big brands support Pride, but if they only wave a flag during a celebration is that enough? There are some great tactics for these brands to engage with this community throughout the year, but how do big businesses drive this support for all underserved communities within their workforce? I believe businesses need to start from the inside before they can publicly pledge that they are supportive. But how?

Business Benefits of Diversity and Inclusion

Before the board or executive team of any business is going to invest in a new strategy, they need to understand how it will benefit their bottom line. A Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) movement has many benefits that go well beyond a politically correct PR move. When seeking talent, if you have access to the broadest pool with different characteristics, skills and perspectives, you can build the best, most creative teams. With the best teams, you can innovate and solve problems faster, thus driving better results. For existing employees, feeling included, accepted and valued, regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender, age, religion, education, and other personal characteristics, will help employees feel happier in their workplace, will increase their engagement and will reduce turnover. For the company, D&I within the workplace boosts reputation and brand.

Walking the D&I Walk

Once leaders understand the benefits of D&I, developing a diversity strategy and instilling a culture of inclusion is a no-brainer. It is easy to talk about, but not so simple to execute.

Many companies are taking special care to ensure hiring procedures are free from biases and HR professionals are hiring people with diverse backgrounds and affiliations. While it takes an evaluation and tweak of a business’ hiring strategy and process, accomplishing diversity within the workforce is doable and measurable with headcount.

The inclusion part is where it gets tricky. As advocate Verna Myers puts it, “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.” As a female in the tech industry, I’ve been to the party, I’ve been invited to dance and wow, does it feel amazing! I’ve also been to the party and have stood in the corner by myself not knowing what to do with myself, who to talk to or what I was doing there in the first place. There are countless articles and training programs on how to instill an inclusive culture. Harvard Business Review has outlined four levers that drive inclusion : inclusive leaders, authenticity, networking and visibility, and clear career paths. Many companies claim they have a diverse and inclusive work environment, but do they walk the walk?

Our partner Microsoft is taking great strides here. For the second year, they will have a Diversity and Tech track at Microsoft Ignite that I’m looking forward to attending in November. They hold their leaders and employees accountable. They have gone as far as to incorporate inclusion into their regular employee performance reviews. They have coined the term “shared core priority” making inclusion part of their daily work. And they participate in Pride celebrations around the world. As a Microsoft employee and a LGBTQI+ ally, my husband will proudly march down Market Street in San Francisco with my daughter on June 30th. It is pretty cool to see all that they do to advance this important movement. Read more here on how Microsoft has made inclusion every employee’s responsibility.

Maintaining an Inclusive Environment with Regular Trainings

In addition to making the workforce as diverse as possible, many corporate D&I campaigns include extensive training to reduce bias in the workplace while facilitating a positive environment. While these trainings alone aren’t enough to instill an inclusive culture and they won’t change someone’s personal bias, an employer can tell an employee what to do and can guide an employee’s behavior with regular, mandatory trainings. And who knows, maybe if one’s behavior shifts towards treating all humans equally, perhaps over time their attitude towards others will change as well.

Video as an Inclusive Training Tool

Regular trainings are great, but in this day and age of dispersed workforces, in-person trainings are disruptive and cost-prohibitive. If you are a global enterprise, how do you provide regular trainings to 300,000 employees all over the world? How can you connect and engage with your workforce? How do you make sure that each employee has participated in the training and has understood the lessons presented? And how do you make it accessible to your global workforce?

We believe that corporate video is a great tool for this.

Thousands of businesses (and many of our customers) use video to engage with their workforces by hosting quarterly updates, CEO All Hands Meetings, on-boarding training, cyber security training and the like. There has been a surge in the number of these businesses who are also using corporate video (both live and on-demand) to train their employees on diversity and inclusion.

While video training isn’t a one-stop-shop solution, it does reach your employees where they are. It also provides face-to-face engagement without requiring travel, it is accessible on any device, it can be translated into any language, it can include polls and quizzes to ensure that the content is being absorbed, and it can engage your team and get them talking about the importance of diversity and inclusion within the workplace. It is a move in the right direction.

Does your company have a Diversity and Inclusion strategy in place? I’d love to hear what tactics are working and what messages resonate best with your people.

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How to Build Huddle Rooms That Increase Employee Engagement

AV in Meeting Spaces

Employee engagement is a crucial success factor for staff retention and company profitability. Gallup reports that “companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share.” Meanwhile, “87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged.” What does this mean for you?

The challenge is on to create workplaces like huddle rooms that inspire collaboration and employee engagement.

How do you deliver a digital workplace where on-site and remote coworkers can easily connect and share ideas? Offer plenty of video-enabled huddle spaces for small, impromptu working sessions. Need inspiration? Follow this roadmap to build huddle rooms that increase employee engagement.

Create your huddle room success team

Start by creating a huddle room success team. Include stakeholders who support or will benefit from attracting and retaining top talent through employee engagement. Consider the desired huddle room user experience or UX, before you build or upgrade collaboration spaces.

  • It’s essential that the group represents the departments that hold the project’s purse strings too.
  • Consider huddle room build, design, video conferencing systems, support, and software budgets.
  • The team may consist of C-Suite members, end users, human resources managers, workplace strategists, IT staff, and facilities managers.

Define employee engagement benchmarks and goals

Next, define what successful engagement looks like by identifying benchmarks and setting goals. Example benchmarks include average employee tenure and current conference room utilization and the number of video meetings booked each month. 

Third-party focus groups and one-on-one interviews can also help you define current engagement levels and collaborative workspace preferences. Now set goals based on how much you want to improve these metrics each quarter, or annually after you’ve installed your huddle rooms. 

Develop a huddle room video adoption plan

Beautiful huddle rooms outfitted with the latest digital workplace solutions won’t necessarily increase employee engagement if your small collaboration spaces sit empty. Before the team starts construction, write a video adoption plan to encourage huddle room utilization.

  • The adoption plan should include employee training and a way to measure room and technology use.
  • Staff must know how to reserve huddle rooms and use new video conferencing and collaboration tools.
  • It’s also helpful to identify an influencer at every level from executives to end-users to champion video adoption and encourage employee engagement.

Design a user-friendly huddle room

Ever have to wait 10 minutes for a video conference to start? To encourage video adoption and engagement, ensure that huddle room equipment is easy to use. Include equipment and software staff members prefer, and that IT can easily support. Refer to your research to review which collaboration tools staff members like to use.

You can track current conference room usage via existing support software, or your scheduling system such as an Outlook calendar. Look at which rooms employees reserve most often. Study what type of video conference equipment is in your small meeting rooms.

Also, track how many employees were in the room and the number of remote employees that logged in to each meeting. Use this information to determine how many huddle rooms you need, and the room sizes that work best for your teams. Consider how to support bring your own device (BYOD) preferences when designing your digital workplace .

Use Room Standards to Create a Replicable, Positive User Experience

Based on your research and goals, develop huddle room equipment and software standards. Your standards are a finite set of hardware and software options. Most importantly, stick to these guidelines when building new collaboration spaces.

With standardization, employees will be familiar with meeting room controls. End users can walk into any huddle room and start the meeting quickly and easily. Remember that meeting that took too long to start? Standards help eliminate wasted meeting time. Limiting available options can streamline the IT support process also.

Positive user and IT staff experiences can lead to increased video conferencing adoption and employee engagement. Ask for staff suggestions on how to make meeting room control more user-friendly too. Allow users to provide feedback anytime through apps or email.

Consider Huddle Room-Specific Devices and Software

The popularity of huddle rooms has sparked suppliers to create hardware and software specifically for use in huddle rooms. When outlining your room standards, consider these collaboration solutions designed specifically for small meeting spaces. Huddle room gear can be more affordable than hardware designed for larger areas. Streamlined collaboration solutions can also be installed faster than more complex systems.

Cisco Webex® Room Kit Mini

Cisco’s Webex Room Kit Mini huddle room solution is easy to install and use. It’s a single device includes the codec, speakers, microphone, and camera.  This Cisco hardware is ideal for teams of two to five people. It allows users to connect to laptop-based video conferencing solutions via a USB connection.

Barco Clickshare CS-100 Huddle

Barco’s Clickshare CS-100 Huddle wireless presentation system helps small teams collaborate with fast and easy screen sharing. Users can share content from any laptop, tablet or smartphone using the Clickshare app or button.

Monitor huddle room devices and track room utilization

Tracking the goals your team set at the start of your project is essential to measuring room utilization and employee engagement. AVI-SPL’s Symphony user experience application makes it easy to monitor global room and device usage on a single screen, from anywhere.

Symphony proactively monitors conference room equipment. Your staff can address issues before they negatively impact huddle room user experiences and employee engagement. If your IT resources are already strained, consider a managed services solution as well.

Keep in contact with end users and IT support

While you deserve to celebrate your huddle room success, don’t disband your team once your small conference rooms are in use. Review end-user feedback to find ways to improve the meeting room experience and increase room utilization rates.

With your huddle room utilization rates in hand, measure them against changes in staff turnover. Look for correlations between employee engagement via collaboration in huddle rooms, and longer employee tenure. Update your room standards as needed.

Get more huddle room planning ideas

Ready to get started? Check out the How to Create Inspiring, Collaborative Huddle Rooms guide for further details on how to build small collaboration spaces that increase employee engagement. Read ideas on how to determine the number of huddle rooms you’ll need and how to estimate costs. Download the huddle room guide now.

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Adapting To An Age Of High Frequency Change

CMMA Blog

There is a rolling argument between futurists and historians about the very nature of change.  

The futurists say that we are living in an age of accelerated change. The reason our heads are spinning – a sensation reported to me by most people I speak to – is that everything happens faster now. Super-charged by our global economy, hyper-connected by technology we are witnessing an age of disruption and transformation never before seen.  

The historians counter this by pointing to periods from the past. What about the shift from horse-power to the combustion engine? The changes that brought about, in agriculture, commerce, city design and our social lives? Or the advent of domestic automation, releasing us into paid work and largely creating the modern leisure industry? These were the real ages of accelerated change.  

I would argue both parties are equally right, and equally wrong. They treat change as if it is some-thing that can be measured in a single dimension. As if we can benchmark change on a single, simple scale. 

In short, change isn’t measurable in a single dimension. It has both amplitude and frequency, like a wave. If the last century was about long waves of great amplitude, this century is about change at high frequency. 

What does it mean for business? Time is of the essence, like never before. We need to be sharp, adaptive, agile. We need to access and process information faster, take decisions more swiftly and confidently, be prepared to alter our course to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape. These are the challenges for business in the 21st century. Not to be overly focused on optimizing our current mode for efficiency and profit, but to be prepared to jump to the next one, whether following the customer or leading them. 

High frequency change in the enterprise is facilitated by: 

  1. People: Customers demand personalized instantaneous interactions. Leaders need access to information on demand, so knowledgeable decisions can be made quickly.
  2. Processes: Every organization needs to consider its structure, processes and distribution of power to meet these challenges. And technology will inevitably play a critical role in meeting them.
  3. Systems: Security requires constant vigilance of systems to rapidly evolving threats.

This demand for speed translates throughout the enterprise. Ensuring the rapid flow of information and updates across the business is critical to the sustained success of the modern, agile, enterprise.

Tom Cheesewright

Tom Cheesewright

Applied Futurist

I’m Tom Cheesewright, Applied Futurist. I help global brands and industries to see what’s next. I tell compelling stories of tomorrow. And I help to build strategies for sustainable success, whatever the future holds.

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5 Tips on Welcoming New Employees

CMMA Blog

Congrats! You’ve hired the perfect talent for an open role and a start date is set. Now how do you retain that talent ? According to a survey by Nintex , about 31% of new hires quit within the first six months of their new role and 20% leave within the first 45 days. Welcoming new employees is the solution.

Managers are realizing that the onboarding process starts well before the new hires first day of work. These first interactions between you, the new hire, and other internal staff are essential for the future success of your team. Still, the question remains: As a manager, what should you do after a start date is established?

5 Tips on Welcoming New Employees:

  1. Start engagement before the first day.

The more a new hire knows about your company and culture, the less nervous and more excited they will be. Whether over the phone or by email, reach out to the employee with detailed information regarding these 5 essentials:

  • Start date and time
  • Regular business hours
  • Any special instructions for entering the office or building
  • Company dress code
  • Additional resources, such as company welcome videos or links to important pages on your company’s website.
  1. Invest in the employee’s transition.

First impressions are everything. On their first day, your new hire wants to feel welcomed, excited and set up for success. As a manager and leader, you are responsible for staging a smooth transition. Preparing a designated workspace for the employee will show that you are prepared for their arrival. Some companies provide “swag bags,” or branded items, to symbolize inclusion in the team. You should also alert the office to the new employee’s first day. Whether it’s a simplistic email or a more creative announcement, the message remains the same. By welcoming the new hire to the office, they receive a first glimpse into the company culture and enthusiasm surrounding their arrival.

  1. Set a preliminary schedule.

A new employee’s first week is jam packed with heaps of information, new faces and briefings on projects to come. Schedule out your new hire’s initial training sessions and meetings to ease some of the pressure. Avoid information overload and gradually introduce them to your company’s workflow.

  1. Highlight the team and company culture.

When it comes to company culture, you are responsible for bringing your new employee up to speed. Ideally, the new employee should have the opportunity to meet with a person from each department they will interact with over the course of their role. This will help them gain an understanding of the company culture and the type of people they will work with.

Highlight the importance of engagement, collaboration and excitement surrounding employee and leadership roles. This will humanize your workplace and show the new employee that they will be working with caring, passionate and relatable people. When it comes to employee retention, this goes a long way.

You can go the extra mile and assign the new employee a buddy who can take them out to lunch and answer lingering questions. The buddy is typically a well-informed individual who can provide guidance on working for your company.

  1. Check in and be present.

You can maintain professional relationships with communication and interaction. Though managerial style may range from person to person, it is essential to show a level of interest in your new hire’s current state. You can do so by being present in their daily activities. A good way to gauge how they are settling in is by setting up a check in with the new employee one week after they start. You should express genuine interest in their transition into your team. As a result, your new employee will build trust in you and gain the ability to disclose work-related troubles with you in the future.

 

At TeamPeople , we pride ourselves in our ability to create seamless transitions for our employees working around the country.  From finding the right talent for your open position, to welcoming and retaining your top talent, TeamPeople is ready to support your team every step of the way. Interested in taking your team to the next level? Send us an email!

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