Before speaking of the title, guess these words: they start from ‘P,’ always go hand in hand, and one can never be spotted without another. If you guessed Pizza and Pepperoni, I would say you are right, but in this case, it is People and Phone. This pair can be found in work premises also. Too much social media disengages employees from work and makes them internet-sick until you find the right strategy to use it to increase engagement in employees. This will be the main highlight of this article.
Now you might have remembered catching your employee peeping into their phone screen when no one’s around or kneeling at one corner after using the washroom, or probably sitting near the tea stall waiting for tea and scrolling endlessly.
How Social Media Benefits Organizations And Enhances Employee Communication.?
As shown in the figure, collectively, over 4.57 billion people use social media, and thus it brings people around the globe together on a common platform. As a result of which it can be efficiently used as a tool that enhances employee commitment, which is also supported by the fact that organizations have reportedly increased the productivity of their workforce by 20-25 %.
Listed below are some of the benefits social media offers
- Increased business reach
It is an instance that many businesses had to change their products or even shut down; there were some employers who made their business survive during the COVID-19 period. And the reason behind this being social media marketing. Informative content, interactive graphics, and videos uploaded in social media help to get high customer reach even in the lockdown period as we saw people and phones are inseparable.
Social Networking Sites or simply SNS like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc., helps build an organization’s online presence. Online marketing helps develop the product reach you want and, even while working from home, bring considerable customer gain.
- Showcasing the benefits
Understanding deeply, employee engagement can be regarded as the basic communication and interaction, whether verbal or non-verbal, between the employer and staff. And thus, the first thing to ensure is to understand your workforce’s requirements. Satisfying your employees about their issues or basic needs can act as the powerful weapon that builds communication to strengthen the organizational structure.
Your question might be how will all this help in increasing engagement in work staff. Look like this. Highlighting the benefits you give to employees, sharing employee reviews about the same, and encouraging the culture you provide can be the base of your online marketplace that boosts your employees’ motivation and also attracts some good candidates and customers.
- Encouraging workforce
Is your employee recognition ceremony just limited to your organization?
Are your employees less satisfied with their recognition?
Well, then here’s a chance to end this and share it with the world out there. While building your online presence, showcasing your best achievers makes them more satisfied and encouraged than anything else. Such employees can also gain online endorsements and appraisals helpful in building a professional career.
The customers and other probable viewers on any platform receive a fine impression of how you celebrate the success of your manpower and motivate them at every stage. This also attracts talented candidates, helps retain the current employees and reduce turnover.
- Developing connection with staff
From administering the onboarding to processing employee’s payroll, it is evident that the responsibilities of HR are immense and cumbersome. However, with factoHR’s partnership, the burdens and the pains of error and time-consuming HR tasks are drastically reduced, making the connectivity with employees effective. Similarly, social media tools like Badgeville measure user behaviour using gamification, which can be called engagement/interaction.
Gamification, a trending technology, uses game constituents to attract people and gain more participation. Such elements are used in a non-gaming application, Badgeville, as we said, to increase user engagement and loyalty.
Establishing engagement with the staff requires employers to connect with the employees, remotely or lively. Social media tools provide this feature, thus easing the work.
What Are The Steps To Use Social Media As A Key To Foster Workplace Engagement?
In many ways, social networking helps improve engagement that one might not have even thought of. But the first step is to know how and when to use it, and even the impossible organizational goal can be achieved. So here are some of the steps which boost employee interaction with the organization.
- Know the right platform
The modern world has come up with hundreds of networking platforms having different graphics, different criteria, and used for different user activities. Such platforms every day fought in the race of being number one. The case of Whatsapp Messenger’s privacy policy update and it being nearly replaced by Signal Private Messenger isn’t old yet. In such circumstances, if the employer is choosing such a tool, he should be aware of their need and benefit provided by the networking site.
In fact, knowing which is the highly used application among the employees would be more helpful to narrow down the list. You can target it to win your employees.
You can also gather the benefit of various platforms. For instance, LinkedIn can help you share the company insights professionally with longer article space to publish. Whereas on the contrary, being professional, Twitter lets you share crisp and to-the-point information.
- Connect with your employees
The second step in the process is to establish a connection with the employees. One way could be creating organizational groups and stages where an employee can represent their ideas and requirements. Employers can allow and encourage employees to share their thoughtful suggestions that can make their organization work better.
Creating an open space where employees can share everything with the knowledge that they are being heard gives them the spark to be interactive and fruitful for the organization.
The platform can even be used for highlighting the employees’ achievements and kind deeds towards society. This encourages and empowers the employees to work more harder for their businesses and build customer attraction.
- Organize surveys
The last thing, probably the continuous one, is to survey things out if they are properly working regularly. Because it’s of no use if what you have thought of before establishing is not exactly working.
Try asking employees what can make their online presence more reachable by the customers. Their feedback can be useful and will also motivate them as their suggestions are heard. This also helps in reducing the gap between employees and employers and establishing social and organizational collaboration.
The Bottom Line
As many as positive sides of networking platforms are there, irresistible negative sides cannot be neglected. Proper control of the usage is thus demanding. An appropriate strategy for all these negative impacts can help you reach the goal you desire. Such a strategy would include everyone’s participation in the program, speaking of their ideas and needs, and encouraging their peers to get involved. Standing together and working towards the same aim can help achieve the goal faster.
And you shouldn’t think social media can only drive employee encouragement, but can even be used to maintain a professional brand, attracting excellent candidates for the job and retaining the existing ones. Networking sites like LinkedIn are famous in the same field right now. And not to be mentioned, the increased viewer reach and likes shows the number of customers you can target.
Thus every technology has two sides as well, but the experience and knowledge of how to use it is something an employer needs to know to build his castle (his organization) and rule the kingdom (the market).
