Ideas for Driving Innovation Via Employee Engagement

Allan Platt, CEO of Clareo, a consulting firm focused on innovation, offers insight about how Human Resources can use employee engagement in remote and hybrid workplaces to help companies, big and small, with innovation. Here are some of his best practices for Human Resources leaders, according to a recent interview with HR Exchange Network:

In-Person Meetings

When you’re coming up with a lot of different ideas, and then you're trying to agree on who's going to do what, being in person is much more effective. We invested a lot of energy into developing tools using Miro and other boards, but it's still not the same as in person [meetings]. Building trusted relationships does not happen much online.

REPORT: How Employee Engagement Enables Innovation in a Hybrid Workplace

I recently went on a tour, and I went to visit one-on-one with every single person in the company. I told them, ‘I'm not coming here with an agenda, we don't have a work plan, I'm here to just to be human with you, so that we can do the work later, so that we understand what each other is looking for.’ And I came away from that with a much richer impression of the kinds of things that people in our company were motivated by and excited about. Of course, that helps me be a more effective leader.

Translating In Person to Remote Work

We conducted or own internal innovation, which was around developing virtual methods for things that were typically conducted face-to-face. Those tools have now taken on a life of their own, because they allow us to deliver elements of our work remotely with clients who are based in Australia, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere in the world.

What we've found is that getting together is incredibly important when you're trying to come up with any kind of creative new strategy, whether it be connected to sales, delivery, or thought leadership. As a result, we’re having much more frequent in-person meetings, but they're focused on a key theme or a key topic area that we want the group to then learn from together and then go away and be able to work remotely as a team after that.

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Size Matters

My first observation on how employee engagement relates to innovation is that scale really matters. For a company like ours, which has 20 to 50 employees, the answer will be very different than for a company like Exelon, which has 50,000 people. As a small company, we've learned to take advantage of every opportunity that there is to collaborate in person.

If you have two or more people, who are in the same city at the same time, then go out of your way to make it happen for them to get together to work on a project because the amount of richness that you'll get out of that will pay dividends. We try to be really scrappy and opportunistic about that. Of course, we have intentional things where we get everyone together as a team, or where we have teams getting together to work on client projects.

Communicate regularly and frequently, but realize that there are diminishing returns. What I mean is that Zoom fatigue is a thing. And I try not to have too much mandatory fun, like ‘Hey, we're all going to get together on Zoom and pretend like it's a cocktail party. It's not. It's not that much fun, right?’ People enjoy being together, though.

Come back to opportunities to get together. After the pandemic, even the people who were most cautious about COVID, had their whole energy light up once they were back together. Even introverts are saying, ‘Oh, my God, I needed this because I just needed to see another person.’ So, try to make that happen.

With larger scale organizations, it is a much more complex task, because there you have a lot of people who don't know each other, who don't have trusted relationships, who are being asked to work together on innovation projects. Aligning that with your strategy is fundamental.

I can speak a little bit about Exelon. Their whole mission was to create a culture of innovation. How do you go about doing that? You need to create some broad engagement with employees. That includes everyone from management, all the way down to frontline utility workers.

Use the Right Tools

We worked to develop some tools that allowed them to do that. We have some web-based surveys that allow someone, even if they're on a poll working, to fill out an innovation survey with their phone. We had to make it really fun because these are people who do not have a stake in innovation. So, you need to give them a stake in it. You need to make it inviting, you need to make it fun, and then give them a reason to be there. The technology also helped because it created a whole platform called Reinvent.

That is where they communicate out to the broadest possible audience what's going on at Exelon. There they can talk about what they're doing with energy transition with electric vehicles, electrification of the grid, or updates to the grid. It helps give employees a sense of purpose and meaning. When they're climbing those poles, they understand that there's a bigger context that's happening, and they feel like they've had some input.

The other challenge that big companies face is organizational. A traditional large company is going to be hierarchical. The challenge is that you need an engineer, but it's not in the job description when you're working on an innovation project. It’s a lot like consulting because we put together teams based on skills and the current need. HR has invested a lot of structure into job descriptions, job levels, etc., and into reporting hierarchies. When those two cultures try to come together, it doesn't always work.

It's a really difficult process. Big companies can learn from the world of consulting when it comes to performance evaluation. As a consultant, you don't necessarily have a boss, you may have 10 bosses because it's a skills-based team. How do you evaluate that person? How do you evaluate his or her performance? Who does that? It’s much more complex. It's key for unlocking innovation. If you must figure out how you're going to deliver hydrogen power to an industrial facility, you need to get engineers, even if that's not in their current job description. Trying to get that flexibility into the organization is hard work.

An excellent innovation culture is a good start. That's one element of the program. I think the technology itself is key. The tools that a big company needs are very different. They can't just use Google Drive to collaborate. There is a whole set of software tools that are designed specifically for big companies. Those tools must be able to engage innovation participants in a more structured way, so that they know what they need to get done as a group, and they're empowered to do it. In addition, management can track to see how things are progressing. So, they can help them move along, and then they can also make decisions around what things need more investment and attention.

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