How internal social platforms promote employee engagement
Companies are quickly learning that the benefits of social collaboration go beyond the personal sphere. Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have proven that they can positively contribute to firms’ marketing efforts. Furthermore, social platforms are turning out to be valuable customer service tools. Businesses can respond to consumers who register complaints on social sites without switching media channels, and live chat is rapidly becoming an alternative to the call center.
One of the more fast-growing uses of social technology in business is its application as an internal communication tool. HR departments can deploy social collaboration suites to promote more streamlined interactions between co-workers and help managers improve their efforts in communicating to staff. The hope is to create a more dynamic, contemporary work environment – and, especially at companies that employ a great number of millennials, the effective use of this technology can result in increased employee engagement.
Opt for connectedness
In a corporate landscape where bring-your-own-device programs and cloud computing predominate, companies have become more connected internally. Social tools capitalize on this trend, promoting engagement and employee productivity by reducing barriers.
In a column for Diginomica, cloud technology expert Phil Wainewright discussed his takeaways from attending EuroCloud UK’s conference on employee engagement in the connected enterprise. David Keene, Google Enterprise’s head of marketing in the U.K. and Ireland, spoke at the event and highlighted the ways in which social tools help provide context and meaning to employees as they carry out their work.
“Working’s about achieving stuff. To me this is about the computing moving from a demand model to an assist model where it can push things to you in context,” Keene said, according to Wainewright. The Google executive went on to suggest that there were four pillars of employee engagement in the contemporary workplace: flexibility of work made possible by mobile technology, collaboration in the cloud, real-time video and chat communication and “bridging silos within and between organizations.”
Create more staff involvement
Of course, the same technology that enables employees to interact with one another can be used by managers to communicate more actively with staff. In a post for Independent Retailer, Shifthub Marketing and Community Manager Katherine Wellman insisted that involving more employees in decision-making can be a highly effective technique.
“Your staff is on the front lines of your business every day, and they quickly learn what is working and what is not,” Wellman noted.
Implementing social communications can help managers achieve this goal in an organic way, capitalizing on technologies that many employees, especially the younger set, will already be used to.
Capitalise on social intelligence
According to Wainewright, Salesforce executive Simon Day spoke at the EuroCloud meeting about social intelligence – that is, analytics based on data acquired through social technology. However, obtaining those insights depends on having the right solutions in place.
“The trick of course is to get all that data into a single pot where it can be analyzed – and as an attendee later commented to me, in sufficient quantities to be statistically meaningful,” Wainewright wrote.
Paired with talent management software, social tools can make a wealth of actionable data available to HR.
Download the 3 steps to selecting an employee engagement vendor
This post was written by David Bator from http://www.tembostatus.com/
