What new technology can you use to utilise memory design for employee engagement?

A week or two ago I attended a Future in HR event by Sympa hosted by Annette Andrews where one of the ideas presented focused around the importance of belonging to attract top candidates to organisations and its importance in workplace communities.

This made me think, why does a good community even matter? It turns our a good sense of community is more likely to create engaged and productive employees who take ownership of their work (pretty important for the bottom line!). I also wondered what creates a good community in the first place?

My goal last week was to try and explain that, but it turns out community is complicated (not everything can be like IKEA furniture), so instead I turned to one of the few things about which I know more than anyone else - me (photo below). I reflected on my own experience in youth sport communities to navigate some of the complex emotions that your employees could be experiencing that lead to engagement or disengagement, and ideas for ways I think this could be mitigated by leadership. If you’re looking for a succinct list of what makes a good community, don’t read my last blog post. I explained it to some degree, but I know I have a lot to learn. If you want new ideas and an honest story about the emotions behind belonging and engagement, however, it will be worth your time.

How I felt writing about ME writing about ME writing about MY story

Around the same time as the Sympa event, Denise Hampson, who came up with the idea of memory design, posted a series of blog posts explaining how we can use memory factors to create better experiences for customers like emotional engagement, sensory immersion, novelty, ‘Peak-end’ coding, mementos and repetition. I’ll be exploring these elements in my next six blog posts, starting with emotional engagement.

Looking into communities made me realise how much nuance there is in our new hybrid workplaces. There are so many opportunities to bring people together and develop individuals, but there are almost as many ways for people to fall apart. One of the main concerns I have with hybrid working comes from the degree of freedom given to people; It must be frustrating for people in HR right now. Freedom to work from anywhere attracts people, but long-term, if there’s a division between in-office and at-home culture, or even division by days of the week, this could create a divided organisation over time.

Shared purpose and strong values are the hallmark for creating a strong community. Right now, all workplace communities have had COVID and * recovering from the pandemic to bond over, but what happ