Hints & Tips from Greg Ward, Nampak Plastics
Often enough high levels of employee engagement are linked to increased profitability, employee retention and increase in business performance. However, maintaining employee engagement is critical to meeting business objectives in these difficult times, so what better way to do it than using social media.
Here are a few things to consider:
- People are moving from face to face to online communication and therefore organisations should have an intuitive and engaging intranet to allow employees to share information
- Social media can provide a voice for employees to be advocates of your business, therefore empowering your employees can make them true brand advocates
- A social intranet gives every employee a face and a voice
Four ways social media can improve employee engagement
1. Sharing information and ideas
Allow people to discuss topics and issues of the organisation via a platform (i.e. intranet), this can often be a useful tool to generate ideas. Discussion forums tend to be an effective way for employees to solve problems together.
2. Create a community
Create a virtual community to allow employees to talk to one another, this can especially effective for a multi-site business. Employees can share skills, ideas, previous experience that may be useful for others.
3. 2-way communication
Provide the opportunity for two-way dialogue allowing employees to speak directly with senior executives. Through the use of blogs, webcasts and discussion forums you have the opportunity to really engage in conversation with your employees. Get your leaders to start blogging, it’s a great tool to bring the management team closer to your people
4. Bring the organisation journey to life
Video and podcasts are a great way to engage with your employees, let them comment or even post their own video clips.
