Tag: employee engagement

Warehouse worker
Digital Supply Chain

The Power of Listening to Your Frontline Workers: A Recap of My Podcast with Dan Johnston

I’m excited to share a new episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast, featuring Dan Johnston, CEO of WorkStep, a platform that helps companies improve their supply chain workforce engagement.

In this episode, Dan and I delve into the challenges of supply chain workforce engagement, and the impact it has on a company’s bottom line. With turnover rates on the rise, companies are facing increasing difficulties in retaining and engaging their frontline workers. This not only affects productivity and safety, but also profitability.

However, Dan believes that there is a double bottom line opportunity in this challenge, as companies that invest in improving their supply chain workforce engagement can not only save millions of dollars, but also positively impact the lives of thousands of frontline workers.

We discussed the results of a case study with Animal Supply Company, a smaller logistics firm that saw a decrease in annualized turnover rates of 50% after implementing the WorkStep software. Dan also shared his insights on the current trends in the space, and how companies can use technology to improve their supply chain workforce engagement.

One of the key takeaways from the episode is that companies have the power to positively impact the lives of their frontline workers, and that doing so is not just good for the bottom line, but also for the human bottom line. Dan believes that companies that listen to the voice of their associates, engage with them, and take the actions that could be most impactful for them, will ultimately be the most successful in the long run.

As WorkStep is a series B company with over a hundred large customers, and millions of frontline workers, Dan shares his vision for the future of the platform and how it will help companies not only decrease turnover, but also make their supply chain a better place to work.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did, and I encourage you to listen to it in full to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of supply chain workforce engagement. You can visit workstep.com or email Dan directly at dan@workstep.com for more information.

Don’t forget to follow the Digital Supply Chain podcast for more insights and discussions on the latest trends and developments in the world of supply chain. Thank you for your support!

Technology / Software

CloudApps releases their employee engagement app Sumo

CloudApps SuMo
CloudApps recently released SuMo, their sustainability employee engagement app. The name SuMo comes from the words Sustainability Momentum we’re told, and this is because SuMo was designed to maintain the momentum of an organisation’s sustainability initiative. GreenMonk was given a demo account on SuMo so we could take it for a test drive, and it is a cool little app.

CloudApps sell a suite of sustainability software products for organisations. Their applications sit on top of Salesforce’s Force.com cloud platform, which allows CloudApps to focus on writing the software, and not have to be concerned with maintaining the server infrastructure which runs their programs.

CloudApps solutions already have quite comprehensive capabilities, so it was interesting to see them come out with this employee engagement module.

Pledging a challenge in CloudApps SuMo

The SuMo application works well on mobile devices and it is designed to foster interest and ongoing enthusiasm for sustainability initiatives amongst an organisation’s workforce. It does this by allowing employees to pledge to participate in a number of challenges supplied by the organisation. These challenges are categorised, ranked for difficulty and assigned points.

As employees carry out these challenges (anything from switching from short haul flights, to teleconferencing for their next meeting, to volunteering at a local charity event), they are assigned points and badges, which determines their position on the Leader Board.

Because SuMo sits on Force.com, it can take in data from an organisation’s ERP applications, as well as reporting them back. So initiatives undertaken by employees in SuMo can be reported directly into its back-end systems and the savings accounted for.

CloudApps SuMo adding an idea screen

Also, a nice touch in SuMo is the ability for employees to add new ideas to the site. These ideas can be voted on by colleagues, commented on and favourited. It’s nice to see a bit of social working its way into these kinds of enterprise apps. This will certainly help the app be more engaging and sticky for users. This is something whose importance shouldn’t be underestimated for industries with issues around recruitment and retention.

The user interface has a few little quirks (it is not always as intuitive as it could be), and the app needs to become more social (include Share on Twitter, Share on Facebook, etc. buttons) buttons, but presumably that will all come with time. For a version 1.0 app though this is a creditable effort.

Image credits Tom Raftery

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Trends & Concepts

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 02/19/2010

Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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