Creatorbase

Making Sense of the Intersection

In May 2015, I wrote about a complex intersection between human motivation, digital, and sustainability that Elcom and Creatorbase are exploring. And with much anticipation, we announced on June 2^nd the #WorkforceSuccess15 initiative at the Sustainable Brands 2015 conference (recaps & videos) -- an event that would help shape our initiative and me as a digital and sustainable business community leader.

At the time, we knew it would be necessary to wade through a lot of content and research from many sources including: Elcom; Jacob Morgan and his Future of Work community; McKinsey & Company, Gartner, Inc., Forrester Research, Altimeter Group and PwC; and what felt like a massive fire hose of incredible ideas and insights from #SB15sd sessions and side conversations in San Diego!

It’s now time to focus.

July 22nd Webinar: Workforce Engagement and Success

This is not an easy intersection to assess and navigate! It requires that you connect many relevant perspectives and focus where necessary for a particular digital and sustainability challenge and/or opportunity.

One Sustainable Brands 2015 speaker that provided some guidance was Cynthia Figge of CSRHub. She described four different measures that correlate with perceived sustainability performance and ‘Digital Communications’ stood out as a leading indicator.

Digging Deeper into the CSRHub Chart

Cynthia and I will discuss the data above and other interesting trends during a live webinar on July 22^nd. But let’s touch on this data now with some questions. Is a company that has a strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) reputation more likely to be a better user of digital media? Are its websites and other digital communications more useful and have better content?  We might expect a connection between sustainability performance and the communication of a company’s CSR program. But is there also a broader connection that demonstrates that a company that has a sophisticated digital communications strategy and strong CSR/sustainability programs will have necessarily incorporated communication of their CSR program into their communications strategy?

I asked Cynthia to elaborate and she said, “we compared CSRHub data on perceived CSR performance for 14,441 companies and data on 937 companies from Investis, an international digital corporate communications and investor relations company. We determined we could explain 39% of the variation in digital communications quality for 845 overlapping companies – and found that good policies on employee compensation, employee training/health/safety, energy and climate change, and on environment policy were correlated with better digital communications performance.“

Webinar Discussion Topics

With digital communications as a workforce engagement and success pillar, we’re going to boil down some questions, and discuss issues and recommendations we think HR, communications, sustainability, and technology leaders care about, including: 

Questions:

• What are the top workforce-related challenges that modern organizations face and why?
  
  
• What should companies do to attract, empower, and retain skilled, high-performing employees and contractors in increasingly distributed work environments?
  
  
• How can employees, regardless of where they work, improve their individual and team performance – and be happy in the process?
  
  
• What will the future of work look like with more automation and digital systems across business processes; how should companies and employees prepare, now?
  
  
• Who should drive digital and sustainable business practices in the organization and why?

Issues to Consider:

• Most organizations rely on a diverse mix of employees, consultants, temporary help, and partners that are highly distributed and have very different labor management, productivity and personal needs. We’ll touch on challenges and recommendations, as well as discuss how sustainable brands define workforce success including high-levels of engagement and ongoing participation. 
  
  
• Many organizations have antiquated communication and human resource policies and systems – coupled with cultures that create friction rather than remove it.  With increasingly distributed and freelance workforces, changes and/or creative tweaks are required to keep pace with workforce engagement and success trends. 
  
  
• The Industrial Revolution has long passed but many organizations still operate with counterproductive artifacts from that era. Contemporary success comes from hiring and retaining the best talent within budget regardless of their location and unique needs.
  
  
• Process automation and artificial intelligence are increasing in the workplace but this doesn’t necessarily mean increased unemployment, or underutilization of talent. With more efficient operations, organizations can focus on innovation and delivering higher-quality products, services, and customer experiences that create competitive advantage and drive sustainable revenue growth.
  
  
• Digital and sustainability work hand-in-hand and cut across the organization regardless of size, industry or geography. We’ll discuss a collaborative approach with leadership in key areas and phases.
  
  

Ask Questions Now. Participate in the Live Webinar.

We’re putting a lot of thought into the complex intersection of human motivation, digital, and sustainability. Our #1 goal for this webinar -- and associated eBook to be published shortly after -- is to synthesize a lot of information and remove the complexity to help you understand digital communications challenges and opportunities; to take meaningful action for your organization!

Register for the webinar, share with colleagues, and tweet us questions before the webinar with #WorkforceSuccess15. We’ll take your input into consideration and look forward to a conversation with you.