Employee Engagement is a key factor in any digital transformation. However, it is one which is sadly overlooked and under appreciated.
If you want your employees to give their best and commit to your business goals and values, you have to provide the ideal environment for them.
From a digital perspective this means giving employees access to what they need, when they need it, with the minimum of effort.
Poor Employee Engagement Encourages Shadow IT
Almost every organisation has information, knowledge and data stored across various silos, sites, file shares, LOB systems. This is the result of of growth and change.
However, when a user wants to find information across these various data stores they have to individually access the separate systems. Consequently, this is painful, time consuming and inefficient.
Similarly, when a user eventually finds what they want, they keep a local copy on their desktop, file share or other device. Purely so they don’t have to go through the painful process again!
Above all, the dangers of this are huge and subsequently, we are unwittingly encouraging Shadow IT
A Better Approach to Employee Engagement
A better approach would be to provide our end users with a unified view of our various information stores. In other words, surface what they need on a single page.
From a business perspective you can imagine the efficiency gained from not having to trawl through the various information stores.
From an employee engagement perspective you are giving your end users what they want with the minimum amount of effort.
We discussed the value of unified views in a previous insight on intranets
Unified View
Let’s imagine that our end-user wants to search on the term ’employee’. They may want to know about information pertaining to an employee in their organisation.
This information could be employee news, employee processes, employee representatives etc.
Under normal conditions, they would have to search a myriad of sources to find the information.
This is where SharePoint search comes to our rescue!
By indexing our content sources we have a central store in which to interrogate and ultimately display our users’ query.
So now when our user searches for ’employee’ we can bring back news
We can also bring back employee documents, discussions and people
Surfacing all of this rich information into a single interface really does provide our end user with a unified view across our information stores!
The user is now able to see news, documents, discussions and even contact people who can help!
Although the above is a relatively simple example, the business value gained through efficiency and employee satisfaction is huge.
How your employees discover knowledge across your legacy data is a key part of your Digital Transformation strategy.
So if you would like any help in realising the benefits of Sharepoint, Search and gaining efficiencies with your users please reach out to us