Engaging Remote Workforce – 2020 Year in Review #13

Engaging Remote Workforce

In the previous post of this Year in Review series, we examined the trend of Citizen Developers. One of the key side effects of citizen development is the motivation and positivity that it unleashes. This is true, not just of the citizen developers but also of the other business users in the workforce. Motivating people and employee engagement remained a global challenge this year. Apart from Citizen Development, here is another example of what we did for engaging remote workforce during 2020.

The Platform

We deployed several mechanisms of engaging remote workforce this year. However, in this post, I will stick to my experience of creatively using the low code application development platform. I have already explained this concept in my earlier post on Citizen Developers. These are business users (outside IT department) who create applications for their colleagues. Specifically, let us see how we used Zoho Creator, a Gartner magic quadrant ranked platform, for employee engagement.

The Idea

Zoho Creator (or similar platforms) allow us to define our business process, along with associated workflows and databases. This involves some programming by the business users. In our case, the HR (Human Resources) team learnt basic programming earlier during the year, even though they had no prior coding experience. Since we already knew how to create a business application from scratch, we thought of having some fun with it.

An idea took shape. Why not create an application to conduct a virtual event? At the core, we only needed to manage some processes, workflows and flow of information. To achieve this we only had to replace the typical use case of designing business processes with the objective of creating fun and engaging events.

The Execution

The idea was formed in our minds, but we needed to flesh out the details. We already had the concept of a Virtual Talent Contest. Instead of live performances by employees in a physical event venue, we could do this virtually. If we just did this over a Zoom call, it would be fun, but not engaging enough. So, we thought about a few dimensions that could make this a memorable and engaging event.

Competitive Element

Firstly, we needed a competitive element. Games are engaging because of the competition involved and the unpredictability of the outcome. Of course, we did not need more doses of uncertainty in 2020, but the competitive element sounded exciting. We thus decided to hold a Virtual Talent Hunt.

This required either live performances or pre-recorded submission of performances. This was not a challenge for us. Our platform already had inbuilt capabilities to record live performances and also to upload pre-recorded videos. We only needed to drag and drop the required multi-media fields into our virtual contest form. And, voila, Game On!

Social

The second element that makes an activity engaging is the social element. The one thing that we missed most during the pandemic was our social interactions. This also applied at work, where we missed seeing each other! So, how do we get the social element into the game?

Executing this seamlessly required some development skills. Our trained business users aka Citizen Developers were game for it. We created a dashboard that displayed each of the contestant’s performances. This was followed by a voting form, so that people could vote for their Top 5 performances. We believed that this would be more exciting, rather than merely voting for one favorite contestant.

The combination of the above functionalities was equivalent to a rudimentary event or contest management platform. And, we achieved this with zero technical resources and no additional software costs!

The Twist

That is not all – there is a twist in the tale as well. The voting form required all voters to select five contestants in order of preference. We initially wanted to insert a system check to prevent voting for the same contestant across all choices. However, we stumbled upon an interesting social experiment.

And I am disclosing the details of this experiment to anyone outside the core team for the first time!

We allowed people to vote freely without restrictions. Sure enough, many people cast votes where all five preferences were for the same contestant! Probably, these votes were cast by the contestant’s family and friends, outside of work.

I then created a Truth Index to calculate the bonafide nature of votes received by the contestants.

Truth Index = No. of ‘unique votes’ received / Total no. of votes received

Unique votes were defined as those votes where the same contestant was not chosen across all voting preferences. In other words, if a contestant received a lot of votes wherein his/her name was chosen in all five preferences, the Truth Index would be low. A higher truth index implied that the ‘accomplices’ of the contestant did not vote exclusively for him/her.

Key Take-away

The Truth Is Out

The Truth Index helped normalize the scores and also provided very interesting insights into the voting patterns. If we had put in all checks and balances, we would not have uncovered these insights. There were people who wanted their friends and families only to vote for themselves. And then there were the gracious ones, who asked their battalions to vote for the deserving candidates. Of course, this applied to the other four votes as they wanted the first preference vote for themselves!

A few of our top contestants had a Truth Index of 100% and this attitude will take them to greater heights. On the other hand, we can ignore those contestants with a low Truth Index. After all, everything is fair in love and war!

Get Creative

We had a lot of fun building the platform and designing the virtual event. Configuring it on our own gave us the freedom to be as creative as we wanted. The contest was designed with the specific objective of eliciting engagement of the team, their friends and families.

I see a lot of people constraining their thought process based on what is available. If we believe we can build what we can design, creativity will flow automatically!

It’s not rocket science

Doing all this, with just the HR team, and without techies, seemed like rocket science not too long ago. However, the pandemic and our pitstop approach in response, has relieved us of the burden of self-limiting beliefs. It is clear that action is the only prescription to overcoming confusion. As I like to say, whether you believe in yourself or you don’t; either way you are right!

Engaging Remote Workforce in 2021 and Beyond

I am glad to see several examples of how we have created virtual employee engagement across remote teams. However, this is indeed challenging, because the mode of online engagement is very different from the real physical world.

We don’t know how long the remote working will continue into 2021 and beyond. However, a hybrid workforce is likely to be a permanent feature in many organizations. We need to re-imagine how to keep engaging remote workforce under such working conditions. The good news is that we all have the creativity inside us. We just need to sign off the monotone and be mindful to tune into a different channel to enjoy the music!

Year in Review 2020

Check out the master article for the Year in Review 2020 that contains links to all posts in the series. Also, bookmark the master article on the browser to read all the 20 thoughts from 2020 and lessons for 2021.

About The Author

Rajiv Maheshwari is a business and start-up advisor, and the co-founder of From The Experts Mouth. He is a management professional with over 25 years of experience, and worked as CEO for a decade, and in leadership roles with NYSE listed companies such as Accenture and WNS.

He is a Chartered Accountant and MBA (Director’s Merit List from IIM Bangalore) and an autodidact, who is on the path of self-directed life long learning and sharing. He is a thought leader, author and keynote speaker and has developed several frameworks to bridge the gap between academia and industry.