The Impact of Employee Engagement on Projects

Research from McKinsey shows that projects are much more likely to be successful when employees are engaged and involved

Very often, technology change such as Cloud deployment, is not seen as being business or cultural change. Often this is the main reason why employee engagement is not adequately boosted beyond the common BAU function during projects and programmes.

In addition to having employee engagement practices for BAU, projects need further, unique opportunities for employees to engage with a project and make contributions. Designing a communications strategy to engage employees with the business change must facilitate two way communication, convey what the changes will do for users and consider the overall impact of the business change for a variety of stakeholders.

In spite of the clear case for greater employee engagement with the business change, the figures from the McKinsey research are still surprising – in the case of unsuccessful projects, 35% of respondents did not contribute at all. In extremely successful projects, the employees who did not make any contribution to the project falls to 1%.