Engaging Employees to Drive the Business: How IBM Uses Workforce Science, Analytics and Collaboration Tools to Build its Smarter Workforce

The business landscape is ever-changing: New markets, new processes, new delivery channels, new technologies. But when everything else is changing, there is one factor that remains a constant to business success—people.

Talent may be a constant necessity, but the nature of the workforce is changing, too. Mobility, work-life balance, challenge and opportunity … these are among the factors that lead to an engaged workforce.

IBM Corp. developed what it calls The Smarter Workforce by drawing on its extensive experience in workforce science, analytics, social collaboration tools and digital technologies to put people at the centre of the business. Engaged employees help clients drive change, fuel innovation, create business value and forge sustainable competitive advantage.

In the research paper Engaging Employees to Drive the Business: How IBM Uses Workforce Science, Analytics and Collaboration Tools to Build its Smarter Workforce, you’ll learn how IBM made its people the centre of the transformation of business by focusing on three dimensions of the workforce dynamic:

• Talent. It starts with people. IBM’s talent suite uses workforce science to understand what is unique about employees, how they complement each other, and how to build the recruiting, development and retention mechanisms to ensure success. What’s worse than spending on employee development only to have them leave for a competitor? Not spending on employee development and having them stay.
   
• Work. There’s more to it than just the work environment. It’s important to not only provide an engaging job, but also to provide the tools to perform it. A company must provide the technologies of our ever-changing business landscape—mobile, social, collaborative—to create an empowered workforce.
   
• Culture. Tools and people together directly connect employee actions to business strategies. That means increased productivity, efficiency and agility. That is where the rubber meets the road; these three dimensions can’t be viewed independently, but have to be seen as interdependent elements that allow an enterprise to attract, engage and develop a workforce that delivers customer value, and can adapt to rapidly changing business conditions.

Download the research paper Engaging Employees to Drive the Business: How IBM Uses Workforce Science, Analytics and Collaboration Tools to Build its Smarter Workforce, and learn how to enable your workforce to meet the business needs of your customers and your enterprise in today’s fluid business environment.