How to engage employees to co-create business value

TemboSocial's popular #CultureWorks series welcomed Julian Mills, Head of Corporate Intranet and Internal Social Media for BMO Financial Group this week.

Julian leads a team of digital professionals who manage an interactive platform for securing strong engagement from BMO’s 45,000 employees.

Three separate groups have won international communication awards for digital campaigns based on the team’s solutions.

Julian shared with our standing-room only crowd that with a range of powerful technology available, organizations have never been better able to engage with employees and co-create strategy.

Success really depends on a results-focused approach guided by business purpose, and a user-centric mindset.                                                       

Julian shared:

• A strategic framework for an integrated, interactive intranet
• How to significantly lower the cost and increase the frequency of collaborations between co-workers to solve business problems
• The key metrics for ensuring program success and driving business performance

Some of my key take-away’s:

Even entertaining the conversation about whether to build or buy is expensive. In Julian's experience, "winning proposals" account for total cost of ownership - over several years - and time to value. Be mindful of this as you consider the tools you need to drive performance for your projects.

Employees expect not only consumer-grade experiences from their tools at work but also integrated ones. Competing for attention with an already busy employee by sending them here for the collaboration part of their day and there for the learning part of the day is a battle that cannot be won. BMO has done an exceptional job of ensuring all employees literally begin their day on the same page (of the intranet). The integrations are invisible to staff but provide an engaging experience and one that reinforces the BMO way of doing things at every click.

What you said:

Maureen Hart shared the following: “Just attended this fabulous session on the evolving digital road to stronger employee engagement. The content was very insightful but Julian’s style was also very open and honest with great advice on how to be successful in this space."

Rayna O’Neil of Bonzai Intranet offered "I really enjoyed this mornings #CultureWorks meetup with Julian Mills Head of Intranet for #BMO Financial Group. Key take always: partner with vendors who have deep expertise in areas you don't, it will give your internal team more bandwidth to customize to drive amazing time to value for your internal stakeholders."

Final Thoughts

BMO is a great (and award-winning!) example of an organization that looks to the intranet not as a document store but as a platform for authentic, meaningful conversations, a venue for building awareness and advocacy and a vehicle for driving business performance.

You can learn more about how they do it here.

We spoke to 1,000 organizations about the tools they are using to engage their staff.

You can access it here.

#CultureWorks returns in Toronto in January. Stay tuned.