The announcement of Jive’s IPO is an extremely exciting event for everyone in the social business space. It further validates the use of social networking in business and brings us closer to realizing our vision – improving our ability to innovate, collaborate and accelerate business outcomes through social media.

For those of us who believe that social business will soon play an important role in any size company, the announcement is confirmatory rather than surprising. In other words, this is recognition that more and more companies understand the transformative impact social media can have on the way we work and engage. And those that don’t come to this understanding risk putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Our customers who are embracing social business are finding that it’s dramatically changing the way they interact with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Through our social software, they’re creating significantly more transparency, increasing the speed of their business, and generating and sharing more ideas and knowledge across their entire value chain.

The Jive IPO will likely heighten the awareness of social business but what companies need to consider is how we then take this vision to the next level. The single most disruptive change brought about by social media is that people have replaced information as the centerpiece of the workplace. What this means is that we need to put people first, as it’s not just about the software but the right management tools and processes that unlocks the true benefits of social business. That’s why we are committed to initiatives such as The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a bold new social business initiative intended to generate fresh and practical answers to today’s management challenges. As I noted previously, this initiative will open the door to new thought leaders who can collectively help to shape management practices for the 21st century and organize people and processes more effectively.

This is critical as social business is all about people – not just within the enterprise, but the entire People Network, which includes customers, suppliers and partners. In short, we’re talking about more effectively organizing people and processes at every level in the value chain – in whatever language, for whatever purpose necessary – by removing every barrier to connection. And, by starting with people the Saba People Cloud creating a more fluid model that truly optimizes social business technology to increase the rate of innovation and enable more intimate interaction and sharing of ideas and initiatives.

We believe you need to reengineer people processes and integrate social business technology into every single facet of the business and those who do this will be the companies that will win.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, People Productivity, Social Business by Shawn Farshchi
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Valued Customer,

As you probably have heard, SAP announced its intent to buy SuccessFactors on December 3rd. While this news is clear validation of our view that cloud computing is challenging the traditional enterprise applications, it is unclear how this transaction will be beneficial for SAP or SuccessFactors customers.

Our Observations about the Acquisition

Clearly SAP is looking at this transaction as a way to enter the cloud market and become the single provider of all business applications. There has already been extensive coverage by the press and industry analysts, but here are a few of our thoughts on the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors:

• SuccessFactors’ current platform is not a single platform, but a collection of applications from the myriad of acquisitions – Plateau, YouCalc, Jambok, Cubetree, Inform, and others. SuccessFactors will need to integrate with SAP’s existing ERP and talent management systems, which are quite complex and lack the depth of functionality. But the integration efforts will likely be slow-going given that the purpose of the acquisition is not necessarily to create the next-generation, unified talent management solutions, but rather to help SAP gain a presence in the cloud market.
• A key decision criteria for any customer is a vendor’s product roadmap, which includes functional depth, user experience, and product innovation. With SAP’s investment in its own LMS, talent management, HCM, and HRIS, it’ll take quite some time to integrate and rationalize SuccessFactors’ products with SAP’s. Most likely, SuccessFactors will get mired with endless integration decisions, making it impossible for it to keep pace with the innovation market demands.
• Customers have long embraced the benefits of deploying neutral and open talent management platforms that are interoperable with HRIS, financial, and ERP systems. With a unified platform and an open platform strategy with other back-office systems, Saba People Cloud provides the smart alternative to high integration costs and cumbersome and expensive upgrade of the back-end systems.

Saba’s Commitment to Your Success

At Saba, we believe that one company cannot provide every innovative, industry leading solution. Instead, our mission is to be the single, best solution for helping our customers transform the way work is done in their organizations and to bring the most innovative solutions to market through an open ecosystem on the Saba People Cloud platform.

For the last two years, Saba has been working diligently to reinvent the talent management industry and create this type of innovation, open platform and broad partner ecosystem. This is why we have begun signing strategic partnerships with market leading companies whose services and offerings are complementary to Saba’s. In early 2012, we will launch an entirely new type of solution called the Saba People Cloud, a unified, people-centric and social platform designed to transform the way people work.

More than 1,600 customers, 23 million users, and 51% of the Fortune 100 today trust the Saba People Cloud platform, with its proven scalability and performance to meet the requirements of organizations of all sizes. We remained committed to continuous product and technology innovation to ensure that Saba People Cloud platform will deliver to the promise of transforming the way you work.

You are a valued Saba customer and we appreciate our continued partnership. Please feel free to reach out to your Saba Client Executive with any questions you might have. We look forward to our continued partnership in making your talent management initiatives a great success!

Sincerely,

Bobby Yazdani

Founder and CEO, Saba

Filed under: People Productivity by Bobby Yazdani
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As you’re probably aware, over the weekend, SAP announced its intent to buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in cash, which represents a 10.5x multiple of consensus 2011 revenue and an 8.4x 2012 revenue.  The acquisition is particularly interesting given that it happened on the heels of Oracle’s $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow Technologies.

Both of these transactions are driven by the demand for cloud-based services, which is growing rapidly as enterprise customer adoption accelerates.  As a result many technology vendors are seeking to add cloud-computing services and required talent to support their businesses, in some cases through acquisitions with price premium.

Not coincidentally, the business strategy Saba has been pursuing in the last two years also reflect these trends.  We’re focused on innovation and on the path to delivering to the market the best product roadmap, the best global operational capabilities, with the best customer roster in the industry.  While our customers’ adoption to the cloud has been the fastest in the industry, we have been taking steps to prepare the entire company – financially, technologically, operationally, and organizationally – to transition to the next-generation cloud business model and support critical-mass cloud deployment on a global basis.  And we are positioned to succeed with an organically-grown, unified, open platform that is highly scalable and interoperable with HRIS, financial, and ERP systems.

We have been executing against the Saba People Cloud roadmap and are gearing up to launch the next release of the most innovative product in the market – Saba People Cloud, a unified, people-centric and social platform designed to transform the way people work.

With that as a backdrop, I look forward to the exciting opportunities for Saba’s growth that lie ahead.

Filed under: talent management by Bobby Yazdani
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Last week, Saba was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, California, contributing to the discussions and activities behind building social businesses. Throughout the course of the show we saw all kinds of exciting and innovative tools and heard some quite visionary theories for what a true social business looks like, but if there has been one underlying theme to the conference, it’s that a fundamental change needs to happen within organizations to become a social business. In other words, an organization won’t suddenly become a social business by implementing the latest, hot technology alone, but by taking a look in the mirror and enacting change throughout the entire business. And how is this achieved? By reinventing the very concept of management.

If you were involved with E2.0 last week or have been following our blog, you’ll know that Saba, along with the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) recognized early on that the reinvention of management is the key to adapting to the “new world of work” in our midst, and the shift towards the social business that coincides with it. This led to the launch of the “Management 2.0 Hackathon” on the second day of the conference, a partnership between Saba, Enterprise 2.0 and the MIX which aims to generate innovative ideas that illustrate how the principles and tools of the Web can be used to make organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and accountable.

To aid to the collaborative nature of the project, community and social guides have been added to engage participants and make the hackathon experience as smooth as possible. The community guides will interact with participants on a daily basis, providing updates, introducing new activities, and ensuring an engaging hacking experience, while the social guides will help participants with questions about the Saba Social collaboration platform.

Community and social guides are:

• Chis Grams, MIX and New Kind

• Jonathan Opp, MIX and New Kind
• Michele Zanini, MIX
• Ben Willis, Saba
• Milind Pansare, Saba

The MIX and Saba team have also added a group of coaches to the hackathon who will provide thought-provoking perspectives and practical advice to participants.

These coaches are:

• Gary Hamel, The MIX
• Polly LaBarre, The MIX
• Andrew McAfee, MIT
• Dion Hinchcliffe, DachisGroup
• Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable
• Mark McDonald, Research Director, Gartner Executive Programs

The brains behind the MIX, industry expert Gary Hamel, commented earlier this week, “Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering.”

Saba’s own Bobby Yazdani sees the new way of work, which heavily emphasizes and depends on social and mobile technologies and relies on people networks and the right processes, with technology serving as the vital means to an end. And the voices emanating out of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference agree, with CMSWire claiming that employees crave the need to feel relevant and to be truly empowered within an organization – and this is precisely what “Management 2.0” is designed to do. The BrainYard’s David Carr highlighted how the reinvention of management served as the overarching theme of the conference’s keynotes, and referring to the Management 2.0 Hackathon and its goal of collaboration leading to the new management model, commented, “By joining with the members of the MIX community, Enterprise 2.0 conference goers will have a chance to turn that next step into a giant leap.”

If it seems as if a leading tech conference, tech vendor and tech-based collaboration platform are focusing too heavily on people rather than the technology itself, it should be noted that E2.0, Saba and the MIX are placing their bets behind the collaboration that organizations will need to foster between people through technology – and those companies that do this best will be the most successful in the new world of work. In this equation, it’s a case of organizations understanding how to have their people leverage the latest technology to make their businesses reach their true potential. And all it takes is a new approach.

Interested in the Management 2.0 Hackathon? Join the excitement at mix.sabapeoplecloud.com.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, Customer News, People Productivity, Social Business by Emily He
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A guest post by Gary Hamel

Over the last decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on busi­ness.  It has spawned a slew of new business models and has helped make operating models vastly more efficient.  By contrast, the Web’s impact on management models has been relatively modest.

While blogs, Wikis, and online communities have made manage­ment more efficient (by reducing the costs of communication and coordina­tion), the Web hasn’t yet dramatically changed the way in which organizations are managed and led.  (See Table 1.)  Nevertheless, over the next few years the emerging “social technologies” of Web 2.0 are likely to transform the work of management root and branch.

Why? Because organizations face a set of challenges that lie outside the performance envelope of management-as-usual.  These include a rapidly accelerating pace of change, a growing swarm of uncon­ventional rivals, crumbling entry barriers, a rapid transi­tion from the “knowledge economy” to the “creative economy,” intensifying compe­tition for talent and a profusion of new stakeholder demands.

To tackle these challenges, organizations will need to become far more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and accountable than they are right now.  This will require a fundamental re-tooling of traditional manage­ment practices—around Web-derived principles.

Unlike most businesses, the Internet is already adaptable, innova­tive and inspiring.  It is also a powerful tool for holding organizations accountable for their social impact. While the typical corporation is based on a center-to-end architecture, in which decision-making authority is heavily concentrated at the top, the Web is built on an end-to-end architecture, where power is highly distributed.

The management model that predominates in most organizations has its roots in the early 20^th century.  At that time, management innova­tors were focused on the challenge of achieving efficiency at scale.  Their solution was the bureaucratic organization, with its emphasis on standardiza­tion, specialization, hierarchy, conformance and control.  These principles comprise the philosophical foundations of Management 1.0, and are deeply baked into management mindsets and processes.  In virtually every organization, one finds that power cascades down, that strate­gies get set at the top, that tasks are assigned and not chosen, that supervi­sors review subordinates rather than the other way around, that control is imposed, and that senior executives allocate resources.

Before the Web, it was hard to imagine alternatives to manage­ment orthodoxy.  But the Internet has spawned a Cambrian explosion of new organizational life forms–where coordination occurs without centraliza­tion, where power is the product of contribution rather than posi­tion, where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few, where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched, where commu­nities form spontane­ously around shared interests, where opportuni­ties to “opt-in” blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added, where perfor­mance is judged by your peers, and where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.

Of course, the Web has its limits.  Online collaboration, in its current state, is not a very good substitute for the sort of unscripted, face-to-face interac­tions that are critical to producing genuine break­throughs.   And complex coordi­nation tasks, like those involved in the design of a new aircraft, still require a dense matrix of “strong ties” among critical contributors, rather than the “weak ties” that are typical of web-based communities.

Nevertheless, for the first time in a century, we have a viable alterna­tive to the status quo.   Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organiza­tions that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering.  Without doubt, we have cause to be hopeful. If we can find ways of trans­planting the Internet’s DNA into our organizations—the interwo­ven values of transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, open­ness, commu­nity and self-determination—we may have the chance, at last, to over­come the design limits of Management 1.0

To that end we are launching the Management 2.0 Hackthon in partner­ship with Saba and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We are seeking to generate innovative ideas that illustrate how the principles and tools of the Web can be used to make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and account­able.

Now it’s up to you.  By joining the hackathon, you can help to reinvent management for a new age.  The ultimate prize?  Organizations that are as fully human as the people who work within them.

For more on the Management 2.0 Hackathon, see Bobby Yazdani’s blog post.

Filed under: Online Collaboration, People Productivity by Gary Hamel
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Organizations need to evolve their management practices faster than their competition if they want to successfully transition to a “networked economy.” But most do not have a disciplined approach to embark on this evolution because they don’t have access to knowledge and insight from those who understand what it takes to build an organization for the new world of work.

We want to help change that. Today, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we unveiled details of The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a bold new social business initiative intended to generate fresh and practical answers to today’s management challenges. This exciting, collaborative project, powered by the Saba People Cloud, with Enterprise 2.0 Conference and Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) was announced during the keynote panel, “Inventing Management 2.0: Lessons from the Fringe,” featuring Polly LaBarre, co-founder and editorial director of the MIX. The Management 2.0 Hackathon is an online, large-scale problem-solving event that will harness the collective intelligence of progressive minds in management from around the world.

The new world of work, which heavily emphasizes and depends on social and mobile technologies as well as the Cloud, demands a new, fresh approach to empowerment and management. Social business technologies are changing the way organizations do business by helping them accelerate change. But people processes are ultimately what will create a new transformative workplace because people—not information—are now at the center of the workplace. This is without a doubt the single most disruptive change brought about by social global business. We understand this change, and our technology is designed specifically to support knowledge sharing and highly connected communities, which is why we are helping to spearhead this important initiative.

As we all know, businesses move much faster in a networked economy; what used to take years in the past, now takes hours or minutes. In order to seize new market opportunities, organizations need to quickly find the right people, assemble them into teams to seize new opportunities as quickly as they need to.

Social business allows organizations to unleash the collective wisdom of “People Networks,” which we define as everyone in the entire enterprise value chain—customers, partners, suppliers and employees. By removing every barrier to connection, people and processes are organized more effectively—in whatever language and for whatever purpose necessary. This enables everyone in the extended enterprise to take advantage of real-time insights and collaboration that effectively drives innovation, increases productivity to better compete and bring new products to market with speed and agility.

The Management 2.0 Hackathon will open the door to new thought leaders who can collectively help to shape management practices for the 21st century and organize people and processes more effectively. Anyone who wants to reinvent management and learn the skills to become an inspired management innovator that enables transformative organizations, will want to be part of this Hackathon. And as David Carr of InformationWeek’s The Brainyard pointed out when talking about the theories of management, “by joining with the members of the MIX community, Enterprise 2.0 conference goers will have a chance to turn the next step into a giant leap.”

We can’t revolutionize management alone, we want to bring together the brightest minds in the industry to innovate, create and share passions so together we can design a new roadmap to social business success.

For more on the Management 2.0 Hackathon, see Gary Hamel’s blog post.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, Social Business by Bobby Yazdani
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In my earlier blog post, I talked about the significant role employee engagement plays in business performance and how research from Gallup shows that “companies with world class employee engagement have 4x higher earnings per share growth than their peers”. The same Gallup study also showed that “the US workforce loses $300B in productivity from disengaged employees”. As such, employee engagement is a key enabler for driving business results.

Following my post, Saba held a very interactive webinar called “Increase Company Earnings with Better Employee Engagement “. A big “thank you” goes out to everyone who attended this webinar and shared their thoughts!

Here’s the summary of the audience polls we held during the webinar.

Poll question #1: What % of your employees would you say fully understands and can effectively communicate your company’s strategy?

This is fairly consistent with the findings in the study that we shared in the webinar. The study showed that 55% to 95% of employees can not clearly state the company’s strategy and their role in supporting the strategy. This leads to related issues such as organizations feeling like 50% of their workforce capacity is wasted and 84% of companies feeling like they are not using their workforce to its full potential.  This fosters disengagement and confusion among the employees and ultimately leads to a culture of underperformance.

Poll Question #2: How would you characterize your organization in having the right processes and structure in place for proper goals and objectives management?

About a third of the organizations participating in the poll seem to have  the right processes and structures in place  .

Poll question #3: How would you characterize your organization in having the right processes and structure in place for proper goal alignment?

This is another area for improvement. A vast majority of the organizations participating in the poll, recognized the need to put  better processes and structures in place for effective goal alignment. In one of my previous posts, I shared a story about fighter pilots in the Allied Air force and how through proper goal alignment, they won a key air battle during World War II. In today’s fast paced business environment of intense global competition and turbulent markets, it is common for an organization to see business priorities change frequently. With proper goal alignment, each person within an organization can clearly see the direction of the business and understand how the activities they are engaged in contributes to meeting the overall organization goals.

If you missed the webinar and want to learn more about how to increase company earnings with better employee engagement, please click on the link below to listen to the webinar recording.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, People Productivity, talent management by Bhaskar Deka
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As the Community Manager for the Saba Online Community, I get to participate in numerous exciting projects being led by Saba customers, partners, and employees. It’s always fun to help find ways to use Saba Social (our social solution that powers our community) to drive various collaboration goals. My most recent project is relevant for all three audiences, linking up our customers, partners, and employees around learning content in a whole new way. I’m proud that this program is hosted within the Saba Online Community.

Recently, I caught up with Jess Tan, VP of the Global Learning Ecosystem, to find out more details on the Content Connect program.

1.    In the length of a twitter update (140 characters) tell us about the Content Connect program.

Jess Tan (JT): The Content Connect program is an ecosystem of Saba content and training partners that aids learning professionals’ discovery and collaboration.

2.    What led to the creation of this program?

(JT): Customers and prospects frequently ask us who our content partners are and how we work with them. Based on customers’ feedback, we decided that the best way to address their many questions was to build a whole content ecosystem. The goal is simply to connect the customers directly to the content vendors based on any business and industry needs, and to connect customers with their peers to collaborate and share best practices.

3.    Who would benefit from this?

(JT): Content Connect is useful for any customers (especially Training Directors and CLOs), who work with learning content daily. Some are putting together training curriculum with custom and packaged content, others are looking for help in delivering training that addresses certain competencies, and still others are content developers looking for authoring tools.  Of course the content vendors will also benefit from the connections they make.  Regardless of the size of the vendors, their broad or specialized niche offerings, the program facilitates their connections to Saba customers they otherwise may not be exposed to.

4.    How does the Content Connect program add value for the community?

(JT): This will be a go-to site for all things content related.  Not only can members find out about partners and their offerings, but they will also learn from their peers through vendor reviews and shared best practices.  Customers will be able to sort our master list of content vendors by the industry or focus area that is relevant to them. They can also find vendors who have self-tested interoperability with Saba LMS and standard SCORM and ACC compliance.

5.    What are you particularly excited about?

(JT): The innovative potential of this program has got the whole team looking forward to the future.  As this ecosystem expands and becomes more vibrant, it has the capacity to become a unique asset for learning professionals.  Think about LinkedIn’s influence on the modern hiring process.  Before LinkedIn, the hiring company’s only options were a series of online listings not very different from a newspaper’s classified ads.  It was extremely difficult to track down and reach out to people with very specific skill sets and there was no database of recommendations for potential employees.  LinkedIn changed all of that.  Today there are over 120 million professional sharing their exact skills, recommendations, educational and professional experiences. At the same time, hiring managers can easily find a shortlist of the exact candidates that they want.

In the same way, Content Connect offers Saba Customers a new way to find and choose content vendors.  The content industry is so fragmented that a simple Google search will not bring you the best results.  And, sometimes the exact right content fit is not from the best-known content vendors.  With Content Connect, users can find out who specializes in courses on Ethical Leadership (Impact Solutions) or which vendor offers more than 50 courses in Cantonese (Skillsoft).

6.    How will this environment affect learning professionals in the future?

(JT): Just like the hiring manager takes advantage of LinkedIn’s candidate details, so too will learning professionals streamline their search based on vendor information and offerings on Content Connect.  You can find someone who promises to address your exact need, review the opinions and ratings from other community members, and click to connect with them directly.

Are you interested in the program? Please take a look at these informational links:

• The Saba Blog Post: http://bit.ly/ContentCnt
• The Content Connect Press Release: http://bit.ly/ContentConnect
• Saba Customers are welcome to join the community and access the Content Connect Program
• Content Vendors can learn about becoming a content partner with the Content Connect Program

Filed under: learning applications, Online Collaboration, People Productivity by Deirdre Yee
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No one wants to fail.  

It’s embarrassing and attention grabbing.  People pay attention when it happens.  Look no further than http://failblog.org/.

And that is exactly the problem.

what would your life be like if you never took that leap of faith to ride your first bike, raise your hand in class with what you thought was the right answer, or interview for that dream job that you weren’t necessarily qualified for?  There are many important benefits to approaching problems with a willingness to fail, these include:

• Failing to succeed (you stopped trying to soon)
• Killing creativity (you were afraid to try)
• Under-performing  (you didn’t think you had it in you)
• Not moving fast enough (planning to avoid every possible failure has you in analysis paralysis)
• Huge missed opportunities (you couldn’t see the opportunity thru the risk)

Time for a Change

So, to be successful – individually and as organizations – we need deliberate thinking in place to properly reward failure.

Food for Thought

• If you Fail, you are in great company.
• If you don’t fail, you are not taking enough risk – you are under-achieving.
• Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility.
• Kids learn and are wonderfully creative because they are not afraid to fail. Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Build Failure into the Process

Gap stores around the world have dedicated sections of the store that are dedicated to off-loading merchandise at discounted prices, sometimes at a loss.  They have anticipated, in advance, that a certain percentage of their designs will fail, will not be at all popular or will sell far short of expectations, and they have built that into their business model.

Plan accordingly.  The more complex the problem, the more you should expect failure

As Rebecca Costa notes in her book, “The Watchman’s Rattle,” the more complex a problem, the less likely it is that you will nail it on the first (or second, or third, or…) try.  That being the case, you need to anticipate that the rate of failure will increase with the level of complexity of the problem you are trying to solve.

Reward Failure, especially in more Innovative Processes

Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Creating the world’s first light bulb was not an obvious or easy process; it took lots of trial and error (Imagine if Thomas Edison had given up after a few failures).  Think to yourself, are your organizational behaviors encouraging or discouraging trial and error?

Put People in the Right Jobs & Trust Them

Each of us has different sets of skills and competencies. As well, we all have different strengths and faults.  Organizations need to recognize this and adjust their jobs and promotion schedules accordingly.  Some people, for example, are more naturally geared for thought-leadership while others are geared for people-leadership so our job structures should not mandate that, to “move up” in an organization, individuals take on (larger) teams of people in a management capacity.   Models like this tend to ask managers to be creative, visionary and strategic while at the same time asking creative people to excel at people management roles, potentially diluting the potential of both (and introducing unnecessary opportunities for failure).

So “Fail Fast” — and move on!

There are two ways to get across town – create the perfect plan that optimizes for every red and green light, or get going and turn when you reach a red light so you keep going.  In Agile Development, this idea is captured in a mantra that says, “release early and release often.”  This is to say, you are going to hit issues, so find them and fix them fast early in the process so you can move on towards success!

How can Saba Help?

Saba’s collaborative applications, including Saba Social, helps organizations innovate faster. Through bottom-up idea generation, social feedback, and knowledge sharing, Saba Social allows for organizations to focus on both the individual and the organization as a whole. This creates a culture of motivated, aligned, and engaged employees. Check out “The Ask” video on the Saba Social page to learn more about what Saba can do for you.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, Social Business by Ben Willis
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One of my favorite stories is from the era of Apollo 11. In 1969, during one of the press briefings in the NASA command center in Houston, Texas, the reporters were waiting for the NASA officials when they noticed a janitor with a broom. A reporter asked the janitor what his job at NASA was. The janitor replied – “I help put a man on the moon”. Could it get any better than that, to have all levels of an organization with a unified understanding and commitment to a mission?

In fact, it was President Kennedy, who set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of 1960s,  in his address to the joint sessions of congress in May 25th, 1961. “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon – if we make this judgement affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there,”  Kennedy said.

Contrast this with recent studies that reveal that, on an average, 55 percent of the employees cannot clearly state their company’s strategy as well as their role in supporting that strategy. In fact, in some cases the number is as high as 95 percent. This fosters disengagement and confusion among the employees and ultimately leads to an under performing culture.

Employee engagement has direct impact on a company’s performance. According to the Gallup organization’s Q12 model, companies with world class employee engagement have a 3.9 times higher EPS growth rate than their peers. The same study also shows  that the U.S. workforce loses $300 billion dollars in productivity from disengaged employees.

Human resources organizations can and should play a strategic role in establishing an environment that leads to better employee engagement. By establishing a system that enables the clear creation and alignment of goals throughout the organization, that are cascaded down from the executive team to divisions, business units, departments, teams and individuals, companies can ensure that any changes to business strategy is effectively communicated throughout the year. With the right technology in place, organizations can ensure that employees not only clearly understands the organization’s mission and strategy but also feel like organization cares about their development. This results in increased employee engagement and subsequently better business performance.

Please join me on October 27th at 1pm ET for a webinar which will chronicle how to drive company earnings with better employee engagement.

Filed under: People Productivity by Bhaskar Deka
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