Using social media to engage employees?
I stumbled across this article from the Management Issues website which discusses a report from the consultancy Watson Wyatt, which argues that employers are missing a trick by trying to clamp down on the use of social media in the workplace. Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt who writes the report, suggests
“..employers that avoid social media altogether are missing an important opportunity and running the risk of alienating Generation X-ers and Millennials. Embracing the technology with proper planning, guidelines and change management for its use are effective approaches to ensuring success”
Instead of restricting Generation X employees from using tools they are familiar with, engaged in and enjoy using, it discusses how social media can be used to fulfil the important internal communication objective of engaging employees.
The article touches upon ways that employers can use social media to communicate information & memos to employees, and also encouraging them to participate in company-wide discussion through the use of blogs, blog feedback, wikis, podcasts and so on.
Great idea.
But to take this one step further, how can these social media tools be even more *useful* to employers and employees?
Can it help in employee development & knowledge building? Ensuring that their industry knowledge is always up to the minute? That their own company knowledge is up to the minute?
Can it actually help them *do* their job? Offering them tools they can use day to day?
I think so.
It got my brain bubbling about how social media could be deployed in a useful way for companies and employees.
One idea I had pictures a kind of employee start page – much like iGoogle, Netvibes or even the new BBC homepage. A small piece of online real estate that is the employees’ own resource for information, tools for their job, networking tools and news feeds. The employee can subscribe to RSS feeds of the industry news publications and add them as a widget on their page, subscribe to the RSS feed of their own companys website even.
They could have some of the tools they use in their day to day work as instantly accessible widgets on this page – for example, I used to work at a Telecomms company whose account & product managers had countless calculator tools they would use to form quotes for customers, all held in different places in the network.
If these were all easily accessible in one place surely it would make the process quicker and importantly more hassle free? Perhaps they would calculate a quote, instant message a colleague with a question, look up the latest promotions and add to a internal wiki the latest cost or issues arising with that bunch of phone kit to let all their colleagues know (or at least those who have the relevant departmental widgets installed on their startpage) all within one window?
It can also give the employee some automony in creating their own internal comms experience. As well as mandatory information they or their department may need to have displaying on their startpage, Gina from Marketing might have an interest in the latest information coming out of the companies Corporate Social Responsibility team, or the field sales team might simply want a traffic widget or a Google maps widget to help them plan their journeys to see customers.
What do you think? Can you think of other ways a company might be able to use social media as part of their internal comms strategy? Could you see your company finding the use of social media as an internal comms tool useful? What other internal comms issues could social media help?
Anna wrote this on 19.03.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Employee engagement, Social media, Strategy box
On March 19th, 2008 at 5:03 pm, Dan Thornton responded:
Great starting point for an important discussion. It’s always amazing that I can currently connect with people outside of my company, or outside of the company intranet, far more easily than I can within!
It’s definitely something we’re looking at!