Many companies boast that their employees are their greatest assets, but when the going gets tough, they shed those precious assets in an effort to cut costs and boost efficiency and productivity. But what if you could reduce your costs and cultivate your employees at the same time? The Internet, which has revolutionized value-chain management with business-to-business (B2B) efforts — and retail with business-to-customer (B2C) efforts — makes it possible to do just that.
Business-to-employee (B2E) management lets companies satisfy employees’ needs while streamlining formerly time- and labor-intensive processes. By reducing organizational barriers, B2E enables people to interact more along lines of work than along lines of command. Companies as diverse as Charles Schwab & Co., Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola Co. and Delta Air Lines are setting up B2E systems that emulate B2C models and treat employees like customers. Although the verdict is still out on the long-term benefits of the approach, our research effort over the past year (including 30 interviews at companies doing something innovative in B2E and — for a better understanding of existing B2E technologies — 25 interviews with employees at software and service vendors) shows that early reactions are positive. In one Fortune 100 company we studied, executives calculated that for an initial two-year investment of $8 million, they can achieve annual cost savings of $75 million and an estimated productivity... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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