Engagement World Focuses on Emerging New Field

The engagement industry’s premier education and expo event will return to Chicago April 17-19, 2018 

 

More than 200 business professionals came together last week in Chicago at the Fairmont Millennium Park hotel for the 2017 Enterprise Engagement Alliance Conference and Rewards & Recognition Expo, part of Engagement World. The three-day event, sponsored by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, is the 7th annual gathering of experts, educators, program planners, top-level managers and vendors focused on the emerging field of engagement, which increasingly has captured the attention of investors, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and Corporate America.

 

The event is designed to provide a roadmap for the implementation of strategic, integrated engagement processes and to introduce the many tools and tactics involved with enterprise-wide engagement.

 

Education programs covering a day and a half dealt with key issues such as the coming development of ISO standards on Engagement, constructing and integrating an Enterprise Engagement framework and business plan, Engagement Certification offered by the not-for-profit Enterprise Engagement Alliance (EEA), the eye-popping numbers behind the EEA’s Engaged Company Stock Index (go to TheEEA.org), and numerous other C-Suite-level topics. Attendees almost universally agreed that although engagement will ultimately have a huge impact on the way people and companies do business, the field is still in its early stages. 

 

An In-Depth Look

In his session entitled “Coming ISO Engagement Standards: What This Means to You” Lee Webster, Administrator of the ISO 260 U.S. Technical Advisory Group and Director of Employee Relations at the University of Texas Medical Branch, offered attendees an in-depth look at how proposed standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will impact the way organizations design, execute and focus their engagement efforts aimed at employees and customers, and what to expect in terms of specific guidelines.

 

Steve Goldstein, author of the business best-seller, Why Are There Snow Blowers in Miami?, discussed the many ways that companies weave engagement throughout the enterprise in his session, “View From the C-Suite: Why Engagement Is Now.” Goldstein offered specific examples of how some of the world’s biggest brands still have a long way to go before they achieve the goal of full engagement, including the story of a recent shopping trip in New York City.

 

“The education sessions and networking opportunities were fantastic,” noted hosted buyer Chris Galloway, Senior VP of Performance Solutions at St. Louis, MO-based Fusion Marketing. Other attendees echoed Galloway’s comments, with many adding that the more strategic focus of this year’s education sessions was more to their liking.

 

The Rewards & Recognition Expo and University, co-located with the EEA Conference under the banner of Engagement World, focused on the extensive research conducted over the last decade indicating that organizations can derive greater benefits from their incentive, recognition, and loyalty programs by focusing on scientific program design and the creative selection, presentation, and delivery of reward experiences that address both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and which help promote key values across the audience. 

 

Slides of education sessions are available here.