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Don't Let the Turkey Put You in a Snooze When it Comes to Employee Engagement

Staff, Appian
November 25, 2014

Turkey time!

In just two short days we get a well-deserved break filled with family, football, and plenty of good food.

No doubt many of you are busy grocery shopping to feed an army or just a few of your closest family and friends. Stuffing, the green bean casserole, and plenty of tasty pies are some of my favorites.

And of course, the turkey.

I'll never understand why the turkey gets a bad rap. It's too dry. It has no flavor. I'd rather just eat all the sides.But perhaps the one that bugs me the most is that turkey puts people to sleep.

I go to bat in the name of the turkey. I scarf it down multiple times a week and I never seem to crash or doze off.

But if there truly is to be some chemical in turkey that gives us the snoozes, it may have found its way into your company's level of employees engagement.

Appian recently conducted a survey of business processionals across all industries on their goals and values when it comes to process excellence. As expected, more and more organizations are turning to process innovation to grow business and reach consumers.

Organizations view technology as a means to drive business growth. When asked what the primary reason for embracing new technologies for business applications was, the top survey answers related to improved efficiency, improved customer experience, and increased business agility.

However, a major piece of the enterprise technology blueprint is missing.

Alarmingly, not a single surveyed person expressed improved employee experience as a factor in achieving their business goals. Business agility and customer experience are crucial to organizational success, but it's tough to achieve these - or any other substantial goals - without an engaged employee workforce.

Studies consistently show engagement drives greater productivity, lower turnover, and a better quality of work. To quote one Gallup report: "Organizations in the top percentile of engagement outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share, and have 90 percent better growth trend than their competition."

Often times, IT organization focus solely on the end-user or customer experience of an application. While meeting customer expectations is essential, it's very hard to accomplish if your employees are disconnected or disinterested in the product or service delivered to market.

Think of an application platform as the solution, or on Thanksgiving, a strong cup of coffee along with your favorite holiday pie to fight whatever that so-called turkey chemical is.

An application platform enables your employees to keep up with a 24/7 consumer culture with continuous improvement, rapid product introduction, and improved customer engagement. Such a development approachtouches all levels of business, keeping employees engaged, regardless of their department or title. An all-encompassing workplace technology strategy (mobile, data, social, cloud) better engages developers by enabling them to build applications without writing code. A shared, visual model of the business empowers collaboration, measurement, and agile response leading to improved engagement company-wide.

This approach empowers employees to experiment, take risk, and test new products and service lines, adding to their overall feeling of self-worth, while ultimately making them excited to come to work and tackle the next big challenge.

All hail the turkey! Ignite your employees with the platform needed to wake them up and power your business!

-Mike Ingrisano, Media Relations Manager