Richard Doherty, Jobpartners

What benefits can social networking offer in the workplace and how can you implement a corporate network to engage your workforce and enhance your employer brand?






Social revolution

An engaged workforce delivers significantly more shareholder return and employee productivity rises. The importance of social networking is increasing as its ability to create value for the organisation is recognised.

Social networking sites have revolutionised communication and the art of personal marketing. A huge number of people now have profiles on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. They spend a significant amount of time communicating with friends and colleagues via these sites, as well as using these tools as a means to create their own personal brand to stand out in the crowd. Facebook alone has roughly 150 million users.

Many businesses are now recognising that the communication benefits social networking technologies provide in the consumer world can also be applied to the corporate world, and as a result are looking at ways of harnessing Web 2.0 technologies.

Getting social with your talent

For HR in particular, social networking represents a fantastic opportunity to create a sense of community among employees. It also allows them to promote communication, and the sharing of knowledge and ideas, and as a result boost employee engagement and ultimately enhance the internal employment brand.

As we’ve heard time and time again, the war for talent is getting fiercer so you need to do all you can to attract and retain the most talented individuals. Not only do you need to familiarise yourself with social networking sites but you also need to seriously consider implementing a corporate networking solution to keep the key talent that you have.

Engaging with Generation Y

Generation Y is beginning to hit the talent pool. As it’s important for a company to change its marketing strategies to reach new consumer tastes, so is the need for you to adapt your talent strategies and build on your internal brand. 

A social networking tool is effective at engaging Generation Y, for whom Facebook is part of everyday life. Social networking encourages collaboration, helps to foster knowledge and idea sharing right across the company. 

For example, staff can communicate on items as diverse as what to do for the Christmas do, to coming up with new ways for boosting customer loyalty. Globally aware companies recognise and understand that corporate networks also bring down geographical barriers enabling employees to talk to and share information with colleagues in other offices, in the UK and worldwide.

New recruits can also benefit through learning about the company and its culture, and connecting with others sharing experiences, helping to speed up their induction.

Creating a personal brand

Vital to the X and Y generation is the ability to create a personal identity and brand to improve visibility and career mobility. By providing details on career goals, experiences and skills, HR and managers can get to know their employees better which can greatly help internal mobility programs that can reduce external recruitment costs.

Employees are empowered to interact directly with senior level managers, which may not have been possible before. This encourages employees to take a more active role in the development of their own career, and as a result, creates a stronger sense of company loyalty. By presenting a holistic view of the employee from both a personal and professional perspective, employees can remove false stereotypes to better understand and engage one another.

Flexible delivery

Before introducing any new technology, organisations need to develop a blueprint for implementation. Increasingly, we are seeing a move away from “one-size-fits-all solutions", as massive ERP systems simply cannot be tailored to the unique needs of a business without significant cost or delay.

Organisations are looking for flexible solutions that will adapt to their business processes instead of having to adapt their business to a solution. Organisational readiness and agility will be the name of the game as organisations look for software as a solution applications, which require no hardware or direct implementation from IT. 

This added flexibility gives organisations access to external skills they may not otherwise have been privy to and also provides them with an additional layer of governance to ensure internal social networking policies can be adhered to.

Establishing guidelines

Within the business case, benchmarks must be established in order to assess the success of the network, such as what is the target number of users for the new networking tool and how will the tool be measured?

By creating your own network you can use your existing resources to get the staff you need through referrals, alumni and interest groups. This can be much more effective than searching public social networks which can pose a security and staff retention threat.

Finally, a corporate social network is not MySpace or Facebook but a professional environment that requires some basic ground rules on what is appropriate or inappropriate content.

Guidelines for establishing forums and groups need to be thoroughly explored to prevent creating unintentional situations of exclusion that could be deemed discriminatory.

Communicating the benefits

Sponsorship and active involvement at the highest rank is crucial to creating a new culture of active engagement to motivate a company. A misguided word from an executive can very quickly cause a project to fail, before it has even started.

Once the network has been implemented, employees should not be left to discover it on their own. Communication is absolutely vital to ensure take-up. HR & managers must market the new tool to employees and provide some basic training for how social networking will be used within the company. For example, assign super users to initiate conversations, and to create groups and forums so that people are actively encouraged to use the network. 

You also need to either monitor the network itself or appoint a team to do this in order to ensure that people are making the most of it. This may include dealing with any negative uses of social networking such as too much gossiping, or unsuitable comments.

Assessing success

The great advantage of an internal network is that there is no risk of embarrassment externally if an inappropriate comment is made as there is with sites such as Facebook.

However, an internal network still needs to be monitored to avoid potential disclosure of confidential information or an impact on morale if someone says something negative.

Lastly, to assess its success, feedback should be sought from employees on the corporate social network. Find out what they enjoy about it, how much they use it; and how it benefits them in their everyday jobs.

The benchmarks which were established in the business plan should also provide a way of measuring success, for example how much of an impact the corporate network has had on internal mobility.

An engaged community

Ultimately, the benefits of a corporate network are too strong to be ignored and HR should be embracing it now. Internal social networks can stimulate employee involvement and knowledge sharing, which ensures that every person within the business counts helping to create a strong feeling of community.

This in turn can help boost employee engagement and productivity as well as reinforce the employment brand. During these hard times anything which can improve engagement has to be taken seriously.