EyeSee

Several weeks ago I was invited to create a 3 minute video about the use of social media to engage employees. I did create the video however it’s guaranteed to give someone a seizure, my video editing skills need much improvement. It’s on my to do list to edit and improve so I don’t have a video for you to see, however I do have a detailed presentation in regards to this.

When I started to work on this project I knew that there was a number of people that did not like their jobs however I was very surprised to find out the actual numbers.

Only 29% of employees are engaged, 54% are not engaged and 17% are actively disengaged!!! I can’t remember where I found these numbers but they seem to be somewhat consistent across the board wherever you look.

The reasons are many but the one point that I focused on what shortening the gap between the leaders of the organization and the employees. It’s a known fact that business owners, CEOs etc. are very passionate about their company and if you are part of a small organization it’s very easy to feel that energy, know what the vision is and share in that vision. When you are a large organization it becomes hard to have that connection with the owners so to speak as there are many layers between you and the leaders of the organization. There are many ways to shorten the gap and one is by regular meetings/updates with these leaders. However these are few and far in between but what about on a more regular basis? Social media, if used effectively, can enable this gap to be shortened thus driving employee engagement up.

The presentation goes through the various tools available today, how to use them and the benefits to the organization. So take a look and ponder. I have not presented any case studies here however you are only limited by your imagination. So to all the leaders out there, try something new.

I read a recent article about Women in the Open Source world which lead to this post. Being a geek I love to attend various geek related events. They usually tend to have a high ratio of men to women so it was very refreshing to find out that there are some really cool geek women out there that are making amazing contributions to open source.  Here are a few, check them out.

Here is a list of some of these women. If you do know of any more do let me know.

Chani is a Canadian programmer and student… for SoC 2008 she did widgets-on-the-screensaver, and for SoC 2006 she did oscar filetransfers for kopete. She had a separate blog for that.
She discovered the internet and programming because of a game called Creatures. She faded out of that community several years ago, but once in a while she makes some attempt to revive her big project.. then gets distracted and abandon it again.

Lydia Pintscher is a software enthusiast and dedicates a lot of her free time to Amarok, KDE and Kubuntu as Community Manager of Amarok and by doing advocacy and promotion for Amarok, KDE and Kubuntu.

Stormy Peters I currently work as the executive

director of the GNOME Foundation. I also am an advisor for HFOSS, OpenSource World, IntraHealth Open and OpenLogic, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries.

Brenda writes and uses opensource code for telcos. She works with SMS, WAP, and embedded applications for cellphones and PDAS, realtime billing, remote data access and phone number portability. She wishes she had more Erlang projects. She sometimes talks in the 3rd person. Brenda knows life is too short to use java.

Mackenzie is a student in Washington DC. I’ve been doing Java and C for a couple of years now. I’ve worked with Python, PHP, and Javascript a little too. I’m using various GNOME apps as a way to practice C and learn GTK+ programming.

Valerie Aurora works part-time for Red Hat as a Linux file systems developer. I spend the other part of my time writing (about science, not fiction). I have a consulting company as well, VAH Consulting.

Miriam Ruiz is a Spanish engineer and a Developer in Debian, a Linux distribution. The best one, in her opinion. She is quite involved in the Games packaging, as well as in the Debian Women project. She is also quite involved in the feminist netsphere, belonging to groups like LinuxChix, Ubuntu-Women, WikiChix, ChicasLinux, Indymedia Women or Systers. She doesn’t really do that much stuff in them, mostly because she doesn’t have time to be so active everywhere, but  she fully supports them.

She is also an editor in Barrapunto, one of the most important weblogs in Spanish, and currently one of the bests sources of information about technology and geek culture in Spanish in the network.