This year, we were excited to welcome the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – an impartial, independent and neutral organization ensuring humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and violence – to the Jive and Aurea family. The organization brought in Jive to empower colleagues to work across regions on important thematic areas such as urban violence and creating better conditions for people living in detention centers. I’ve been inspired over the past year as I’ve had the honor to support the ICRC in their efforts to help manage major change processes and improve social collaboration.

On November 12 and 13, we’ll hear from Ernesto Izquierdo, ICRC’s social collaboration project manager, at Aurea Experience 18. He’ll share how the organization is using Jive to enable conversations that cut across hierarchies and locations as part of our opening keynote presentations and our employee engagement track in Munich.

Breakout Session: Tuesday, 13 November, 2pm

Title: Advanced and innovative engagement techniques

Got the basics down for engaging your employees using your Jive platform? Getting to the next level can be a challenge. Ernesto Izquierdo from ICRC and the UBM team have some creative ideas for using Jive as the basis for unique and specific types of engagement, including techniques for more productive meetings and linking peer-to-peer recognition with charitable giving.

In preparation for Aurea Experience, I recently checked in with Ernesto to find out more about how the ICRC is using Jive to support over 50 internal communities and facilitate their work on several humanitarian projects.

Michelle: Which best practices surrounding ICRC communities are you most proud of?

Ernesto: Our colleagues work in over 80 countries, and Jive is enabling us to work together across regions in ways we were not able before. We use Jive to drive conversations about our new institutional strategy and engage our 18,000 staff on a single hub. It helps us get feedback from people who are directly involved with the implementation of our strategy across all the many places we work.

Some of the subjects we work in are highly confidential, and unlisted groups in Jive help those teams discuss topics and securely capture decisions instead of asking questions over email and getting lost in all the exchanges. For example, one of our teams used to send over 100 emails to discuss and validate one biomedical item. Now all this discussion takes place in one single thread via Jive. This improves the effectiveness of our work and ultimately increases our capacity to help people caught up in armed conflict and violence.

Michelle: How do workplace technology and people’s mindsets need to evolve to address employees’ changing needs?

Ernesto: Regarding the mindsets, we are building specific trainings for our managers, called

“Managing in the digital age at the ICRC.” Our aim is to explore together how we can do things differently and more effectively with new digital tools. Of course, we need to take a step-by-step approach, listen to what people value about their current ways of working, and show them how new practices such as “working out loud” could help drive our teams to learn from what and how others are doing things, as well as ease communication across hierarchies and silos.

At the same time, we have to understand and respect that not everyone will want to use social technologies. We are the oldest existing humanitarian organization, so we know how to adapt to changing environments. However, the speed with which digitalization is changing work processes and transforming every single aspect of life is still a challenge, but one that we are embracing. In order to facilitate this evolution for digital workplace technologies, we need to invest more and more in user experience, and in providing an easy journey for our ICRC staff. By keeping simple processes to under two or three steps, we can ensure that people maintain their ability to respond quickly to humanitarian needs worldwide.

Michelle: What are you looking forward to next month during the Aurea Experience 18 conference?

Ernesto: I’m looking forward to meeting great community specialists, such as Jon Ingham and Dan Thomas, and seeing how other organizations are using Jive to achieve their objectives. I’d like to have honest discussions, not only about positive achievements, but also about real challenges and how people are tackling them. I’m also really interested to learn more about Jive and Aurea’s on-premises roadmap.