Engaged Employees Are Your Best Brand Ambassadors
I read an article this week written by Francois Pienaar, a SharePoint evangelist and director of enterprise content management at Mint Management Technologies in Gauteng, South Africa.
Pienaar points out that, in general, employees don’t leverage social media platforms to talk about the company they work for. Rather, they spend hours browsing on Facebook, retweeting Twitter posts or chatting away with coworkers on intranet platforms while work piles up.
While it may seem as though social media apps have no place in modern day workplaces, this could not be further from the truth. Social collaboration at work enhances relationships between employees and ups their level of engagement. Pienaar says, “A common misconception about social collaboration is that it will decrease productivity, when in fact, it can greatly enhance productivity.”
How? Social collaboration tools like SharePoint encourage and enable creativity, knowledge sharing and problem solving within an organization. They also support marketing, with employees endorsing your brand and sharing company content everywhere. Engaged employees willingly do this both internally and externally.
But it all starts with engagement. Engaged employees seek out opportunities to grow and improve, share leads with other divisions, solve problems together or make suggestions to improve processes. Disengaged employees seek out opportunities to sink your ship.
What are you doing to ensure your company has an open and honest two-way communication culture that supports collaboration between all employees, including senior leaders? If the word “nothing” comes to mind, you are not alone and you are not done yet. Let’s partner to create a collaborative work environment that breeds both engaged employees and bottom line results.