The workplace revolution: Are you a revolutionary, or just revolting?

Net Promoter Scores ®: a tool designed to understand a customer’s level of trust in your brand, as the primary indicator of the ‘loyalty effect’, a path to untold wealth and riches. Will they recommend you to their friends? The frenzy for customer experience happened around the same time as the explosion of social media.

In combination, they unleashed a torrent of Consumer to Consumer communication, exploring the concept of brand management and upending the power pyramid. Big business has never been so vulnerable.

A brilliant market strategy: Siri, Alexa, Cortana. Instantly recognizable personifications of major brands. Designed to take engagement to the next step, anticipating what we want, listening to you, responding to your requests with a minimum of hassle and fuss.

The cost of entry: - a few hundred dollars and access to your data. Value for Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft? A massive customer engagement boost, locking out competitors and weaving their brand into to fabric of your family’s life.

Glassdoor, GPTW. Potential employees can now take a look inside their potential places of work. They can see a level of detail that spans photographs of the food in the cafeteria all the way to ratings of the CEO and reports on the working practices of individual business units.

They can search for jobs based on individual workplace preferences, eliminating any company that gets a sub-four star rating, which is, apparently, the magic cutoff level.

So, do you have a workplace strategy? What is going to be the brilliant innovation that will drive employee engagement, differentiate you in the marketplace, allow you to drive data-based decisions around the future of work at your enterprise? When we ask our clients this question, the response we get can be quite surprising.

Often based on very expensive ‘employee engagement surveys’, it’s built around a one or two-year time horizon. Focused on historic metrics like attrition and length of service, what passes for a workplace strategy is often more of a ‘coping strategy’. It’s behind the curve, it’s not analyzing live data to generate predictive indicators in order to drive powerful engagement.

Consumer technology now leads the enterprise. How long did it take before social media started being used at work? A year? Two years? You haven’t got long before your workforce starts looking for an engagement experience like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are delivering.

The 2015 Gallup survey tells us that 32% of employees are engaged in their jobs, a shift of 3% over four years. This is a massive chasm that needs to be bridged, and you know what? It probably isn’t going to be bridged with a lackluster plan that avoids rocking the boat, seeks to maintain the status quo and is rooted in historic data you can’t impact.

WAKE UP! It’s time to grab the tiger by the tail and take some risks! Start articulating a vision for the workplace that’s built around your culture. Find a way to discover what your workforce really cares about. What do they read? What matters to them? What do they value? Get some systems that will allow you to capture this information quickly, cheaply, easily and OFTEN!

Use analytics properly, think PIPELINE! What works now isn’t going to work in a few years, find out what drives your future workforce, ask candidates what they want and what matters to them.

To make this work, start communicating. Employee communications have to be leading the charge, if this is one person sending out a ‘feel good’ newsletter full of information everyone already knows, you are cruising for a bruising. This is all about communicating and then LISTENING.

Engagement isn’t something that happens to you, YOU make it happen. Start designing the future the way you want it to be, and if that isn’t something that’s supported by your leadership, get a jump on the inevitable and exercise your right to leave. Don’t put more lipstick on the pig, if your organization isn’t paying attention to the workplace revolution, be part of one that is.

Check out Poppulo's guide on employee engagement written by Communication Consultant Andy Blacknell.