how to get more involvement from employees?

Question

Once a week we have an half hour session where we talk about a few features in our application or explain a customer question to our employees(sales, support, technical services and development). This session is to teach our employees the application we sell and to help them improve the service to our customers. Once every two weeks this session is mandatory. Unfortonalty some of our employees do not take this too seriously.

How can we, as developers, gain more involvement from the rest of the company? and make them to understand the application we're building, selling and supporting more?

Answer 1

Ask them to present the topic in front of you after some days from the session day.

Another good way is to make them suggest new features and modifications in the project.

Answer 2

If you have any hidden "tricks" or "easter eggs" in your application then start showing them one every week.

Make it interesting and tell them how a trick can help a customer.

Answer 3

Couple of points:

• Make them feel important. Give them direct input using proper questions, even if you need to resort to analogies.
• Speak with them, not at them. When people are being lectured there's a natural instinct to not take any notice.
• Use analogies for things they do not understand, and again, give them direct input.

The main goal is giving the person a stake in the project. If they do not have anything valuable in the project (even an opinion that led to a feature classes in here), they will not care.

Answer 4

You can't get any more involvement from your employees because subconsciously they know they will not get any more benefits through exercise of extra involvement.

Reasons?

• They may not agree with your development strategy or with your customer relationship model. So they feel as they don't really belong here.

• Their work will not profit from any extra insight, so for them it's a waste of time

• They don't get paid enough so they are at a minimum accepted performance

• They have other personal problems in mind and don't want to take extra mental burden during their working hours

• They long since learned the company does not care about their opinion and improvement ideas, so they shut down their involvement service

• They're that kind of people that are not interested in being involved (hire strategy issue)

Recognized anything? Then you know what to fix.

The important thing to understand that you should not just cure the disease but the reasons of its emergence. You may threaten people with some punishment actions if they don't get involved. You may play to emulate the need for their involvement. It will work for a brief time then fade out. Until you get to the origin of the problem, nothing will help.