Story:
Tagging and Partnering "A way to increase employee participation in Organisational Communities"

Introduction

In today's globalizing world, every organization wants to be sustainable and make significant contribution to the community they are part off. In order to support and promote organizational sustainability initiatives, most organizations rely on creating communities within the organizations. The back bone of these communities is employee involvement and at the same it’s the most challenging aspect of these communities. With employees already existing work load, family and personal commitments, it’s challenging for them to contribute to the community.

Hence most communities just become a name or a means for employees to show that they care, for the sake of it. Moreover it looks good on your resume that you were actively involved where you worked at, free lunches and dinners are a bonus! Organizations spend a significant amount of time, money and energy on promoting these communities to reach to as many employees as they can, to get them involved. It definitely looks good on the organizational portfolio and brand name. Communities also help to increase employee involvement, promote leadership and team work.

Now the challenge is how to make these communities effective and efficient without pushing employees into them and making sure everyone is actively involved. With more employees actively involved, there is a better chance of the community to be successful and serve it purpose of spreading awareness about the organizational sustainability goal. Tagging and Partnering Strategy just helps in that!

How does it work?

Let’s take an example of the Diversity Committee, almost every organization has a Diversity committee in which an employee’s volunteers to be part of the Diversity initiatives within the organization. Since Diversity is a key initiative that almost everybody feels they have a moral and ethical responsibility towards, everybody can’t be part of the committee. Most often than ever a representative is chosen and given the task of representing the team’s interests in Diversity. His job involves attending diversity committee meetings, sharing his interests and communicating back to his team the Diversity Committees progress. But not often does the knowledge transfer take place, the employee would attend the Quarterly, Semi Annually or Annual meeting depending upon the schedule and return back to work next day. Nobody knows what happened in the meeting, if the employee is really keen to share. Employee might forward an email that every representative was asked to share with his team mates “Agenda”. Unfortunately in today’s corporate world where we receive more than a dozen emails every day, while prioritizing and re-prioritizing the “Agenda” gets archived.

This is where Tagging and Partnering comes into play, in order make sure that knowledge transfer, awareness, employees initiative is happening in the committee, the representative of the Diversity committee Tags a member of his team to the Diversity Committee every month. Then the representative Partners with the Tagged member and facilitates his learning about the committees objectives, its progress and what goals the committee’s is set to achieve. This really bring a fresh perspective to the committee, creates a platform for knowledge transfer and moreover relives the current employee representing the team of his duties. To make sure that there is no “Free Rider” in the committee the new member would have to set himself a goal for the next one month. His partner is there for him to seek advice and help if needed.  Once the one month period is over for the Tagged employee his job would be to tag and partner with another fellow employee and follow the process the branch representative followed with him.  The chain continues till the time for next Quarterly, Semi Annual or Annual Meeting for the Committee takes place. The person who actually started the chain, goes with all the collective feedback to the committee meeting and now actually represents the teams because everybody was involved.

 How it helps

The tagging and partnering would help committee’s increase employee involvement, spread awareness among various employees instead of just the representative. It facilitates learning, transfer of knowledge and brings in diverse perspective from each individual employee who joins the committee. It also creates synergy among employees, supports team work and takes work load of an individual employee

This strategy helped me increase number of participation in communities by 70%!