“Employee led business change” is about enabling the voice of an employee for the benefit of business. We’ve taken a look at the Balfour Beatty scheme called “My Contribution”.
My Contribution is about people and engagement, with individuals stepping forward with their ideas and energy to help build a better business – a stronger, more resilient organisation. These ideas drive change, making the business more efficient, safer and ultimately a better place to work.
My Contribution uses Microsoft Yammer, Teams and the Sideways 6 idea platform (others are available) as the means of engagement, enabling employees to submit their idea using #idea and other relevant hashtags to identify specific subject areas. Across the company more than 400 volunteer employees have stepped forward to form ‘Team MyC’ – undertaking special roles to assess and where appropriate progress ideas through to delivery.
The concept reminds us a little of the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government and Communities Committee Engagement site which is built on the “Your Priorities” platform as developed by the Icelandic Citizens Foundation.
Within Team MyC are MyC Leads, who collaborate with employees on idea development, MyC Ambassadors promoting My Contribution as a whole, MyC Comms Leads providing communication support and MyC Subject Experts and MyC Decision Makers who help evaluate and measure the impact ideas will potentially have.
More than 10,000 ideas have been submitted in the first three years – those implemented so far achieving over £52 million in cost savings and more than 343,000 hours of saved time and have received over 140,000 likes and comments.
It’s conceivable that with a little innovation and a large commitment to employee engagement, companies can achieve great things. However, the engagement piece needs to be meaningful just as the conversation between public services and citizens needs to be honest and involve active listening.
We think that within the well established community of public sector practitioners there’s a whole wealth of transferrable skills, methods and techniques to explore and adopt in the private sector. We’d love to get more examples of innovative practices in employee engagement, send them in!