How EMC Maintained Morale While Cutting Costs
What keeps high-performing employees devoted to their jobs, even in a dismal work environment? The answer isn’t a steady salary. According to research for my upcoming book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down , the two key levers in strengthening employee engagement are stimulating assignments and great colleagues.
It’s impossible to understate the importance of having a sense of community at work, especially in these turbulent times. After enduring wave after wave of job cuts, plant closings, and corporate bankruptcies, employees uniformly say that what enables them to keep going is being able to talk to others who listen to and understand their concerns.
Company-supported networks or affinity groups — grassroots internal organizations that address the needs of a particular employee population, such as women, engineers, African Americans or millennials — have proved a huge winner for employees and employers alike in this recession. These groups provide a much-needed sense of connection for employees who might otherwise feel adrift as their companies focus on survival.
At the same time, organizations also benefit from encouraging and endorsing employee communities. In addition to a sympathetic ear, the groups also help build internal professional networks and develop career skills. Many offer nuanced learning opportunities; for example, women’s networks may teach negotiating skills, while millennial groups could pair young members with senior members. All of these actions make talented employees feel more attached to both their colleagues and to their company.
A wide spectrum of options exists to create a sense of collaboration and camaraderie, from in-person meetings to videoconferencing, webcasts and even Twitter. Virtual forums are especially important to cement connectivity between workers scattered around the world.
EMC, the technology giant, offers one example of how to use social media to improve collaboration and innovation during uncertain times. The company launched an experiment in October 2007 with EMC ONE, an online forum based on off-the-shelf social-networking software that allows basic collaboration and discussion.
Even as the recession bore down, EMC ONE flourished. One spin-off community that has been particularly successful is called “The Water Cooler.” True to its name, any topic is open for discussion, from company cost cuts to the economy’s effect on families. In addition to advice and healthy venting, Water Cooler conversations have also provided productive solutions to the special challenges of the recession. In December 2008, an EMC employee invited colleagues to post “Constructive Ideas to Save Money.” More than 320 ideas were suggested, including unpaid time-off and lowering the temperature at EMC headquarters by two degrees. “There were hundreds of very tangible cost-saving ideas that went above and beyond any ideas the company might have come up with,” says Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy development.
Today, EMC ONE hosts more than 160 virtual communities, where any employee can brainstorm new ideas, ask questions, share what’s on their minds, solve problems and disagree — in any language. Almost one-third of EMC’s 40,000 workers worldwide are registered users who actively contribute and another 11,000 are “lurkers,” totaling an impressive 50 percent adoption rate among the workforce.
For companies, these online forums provide unparalleled insights into workforce issues that might otherwise go unaddressed and fester. For employees, knowing that their company cares what they have to say, encourages them to say it and trusts them enough to let them say it without prior approval or censorship is a gift of inestimable value. Without much effort and at a negligible cost, both are part of a community — and can reap and promulgate its many benefits.
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