Healthy company: technological innovation and people management
Thinking like a technologist includes never losing empathy for what technology can and cannot do for people. Therefore, when Maria James asked me to write a few paragraphs as Mainfor's R&D director about how we can innovate in people management, it took me little time to list different circumstances where my department is contributing to improving the health of our company:
- Project management: When working under this format, stress and the search for objectives can lead to individual and group problems that in my area we monitor and help mitigate. What good is an R&D department if it does not use technology so that its colleagues can produce better with less effort/time/energy? Each project we start has 2.0 equipment or, if not, we improve our 2.0 know-how to be up to par.
- Improvement of processes and workflows: Well-understood innovation is that which seeks concrete and specific solutions. While it is true that projects are important, transversal and common workflows are even more important, since it is in this backbone where innovation can help and quickly pay for the investment. As I mentioned in my last podcast, it is the workflows and their optimization and improvement that can give you that extra productivity.
- Automations and monitoring: Creativity emerges naturally when stress is reduced, and it diminishes if you "have time to think." That's why we've turned to algorithmic machines as our powerful allies, allowing our people time to invent "cool things," like the IEP YouTube channel "Café en prácticas" (which isn't, despite what some may say, an excuse to come to the office in jeans and a sweatshirt).
As if that weren't enough, at Mainfor, we've been experiencing a true transmedia revolution for about 18 months, allowing us to stop outsourcing audiovisual production and become a small 2.0 content producer with a catalog that ranges from live broadcasts and podcasts to the creation of a solid visual training framework. And we can assure you that the effort has been worth it, not least because of the internal introspection it has required for us. It's been like sitting on the couch, searching for our strengths and weaknesses, and watching it on YouTube. This healthy, almost Freudian process of self-knowledge has clearly improved our psychological health:
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- Self-recognition and security in ourselves: Hey, I do my thing well and I can also show it on video to the family or to a date on Saturday night.
- Improvement individually and collectively, since being so exposed drives us to progress.
- Empathy to understand visual language, how new generations consume it and adapt our products and services to them.
As you can see, our "mens sana in corpore sano" as a company touches on all functional aspects and, above all, makes use of the best of innovations: social innovation, that is, innovation that thinks first of people and then of zeros and ones.
Workshop, healthy company
Now announcements: You can reserve your free place for the events in Granada (January 16), Seville (23) and Madrid (30) in this link. You will learn first-hand what they are like and how to be a healthy company and why the Postgraduate Program in HR management is your bridge to employment in the sector or that curricular update that you are looking for to boost your career in people management.
