I just finished a keynote, The 10 Steps of Employee Engagement, in Kiev, Ukraine at their Employer Branding and Engagement Forum. What a fascinating experience. Ukraine is a former communist country, still struggling to embrace capitalism as they continue towards their goal of being a ‘developed’ country. I found the Ukrainians to be warm, inviting, humorous, adventurous, and eager to hear all things “American”. The audience was part Human Resources and PR professionals, and were acutely interested in hearing about employee engagement, staff motivation, employer branding, globalization, and social media. Having spoken last year in Warsaw, Poland, I saw a similar level of hope and eagerness towards their still in development Human Resources function. Ukrainians know their firms must embrace engagement, employer branding, globalization, and technology if they’re going to compete and thrive in this new era. Although Human Resources in the Ukraine is young by American standards, I left quite hopeful that they are pushing their organizations to further evolve their employment laws, work/life balance, and compensation and benefit systems, while pushing to get their employers to understand the benefits of talent management investment.
On a personal level, I was struck how similar Ukrainian Generation Y’ers are to their western generation Y counterparts. My trip proved yet again that Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat), was prophetic in predicting that technology is making the world a very small indeed. I was amazed how many Ukrainians had seen my You Tube videos, had already read my book Louder Than Words, and post trip, how many new Ukrainian Twitter followers I gained. Paul McCartney wrote a song, Chaos and Creation, which reinforces the need to seek out opportunities during times of change. The Ukrainians are doing just that!!
-Bob Kelleher, Founder, The Employee Engagement Group
