6 Ways Social Collaboration Can Boost Employee Engagement

6 Ways Social Collaboration Can Boost Employee Engagement

6 Ways Social Collaboration Can Boost Employee Engagement In today s demanding corporate environment, businesses are struggling to boost employee engagement. It is a strategic imperative but no small task given the severity of the problem. According to Gallup Inc. s 2013 State of the Global Workplace report, only 13 percent of employees say they are engaged at work. Astoundingly, actively disengaged workers continue to outnumber engaged employees at a rate of nearly two to one. Employee engagement is typically deemed the primary responsibility of human resources organizations and many have put programs and surveys in place but are not seeing improvements rapidly enough, if at all. These organizations are left trying to determine why employees aren t more engaged and the right measures to put in place to increase employee engagement. If you look around and identify any business where employees are genuinely happy and productive, you ll see that one key to employee engagement is people. People are engaged by people productive and satisfied employees like their work, who they work with, and who they work for. Collaboration, the act of working with other people to achieve business benefit, is vital to employee engagement. Connecting people to other people and to the information and processes they need to get their work done is a key to unlocking employee potential. Now, HR and senior executives can take advantage of solutions that bring productive, engaging social collaboration to the enterprise. SAP Jam delivers enterprise social collaboration where employees work, connecting customers, partners, and employees with information, applications, and processes to solve business-critical problems and to drive results all in your social network, business applications, or while mobile. SAP Jam natively integrates with other SAP and SuccessFactors solutions, cloud or on premise, and brings together people, information, and content, all within the business process. Using a solution like SAP Jam, HR departments will have concrete solutions for the following questions: What are you doing to increase the engagement of the workforce? How can we get new hires engaged and productive faster? How can we reduce the cost of training while provide more and better training? What are we doing to improve performance management? How can we get more employees collaborating and contributing? How do we ensure employees can be productive wherever they are in remote offices, while traveling, or while mobile? 2

HR and senior executives need to ensure they have the right solutions in place to help employees connect and collaborate. The answers to these questions are critical to the success of any employee engagement initiative and therefore to any company. HR and senior executives need to ensure they have the right solutions in place to help employees connect and collaborate. The following are the most important ways that enterprise social collaboration can drive employee engagement. Using an enterprise social collaboration solution, you can lay a foundation for successful and productive collaboration that drives employee engagement. 1. Engage employees directly and continuously. Many organizations are looking for ways to engage more directly and communicate more effectively with their workforce in a world of an increasing number of remote workers and the need for authentic, transparent connection. Enterprise social collaboration breaks down organizational silos by providing a secure, social foundation across the entire business. This foundation can be used to cascade messages, take pulse checks, manage teams and projects, work with internal and external parties, find experts, and innovate more effectively. It also ensures that employees have transparency and an ability to ask questions and express their opinions. For example, TELUS Communications, a $10.9 billion global telecommunications company, has had impressive success using a variety of communication and collaboration techniques within SAP Jam and other tools to advance their corporate strategy. They use conversations, blogs, videos, status updates, and document sharing to achieve a company-wide conversation that is both productive and engaging and have seen direct impact on their employee engagement. 2. Minimize time to contribution New employees often face daunting learning curves when they join an organization, lengthening the time it takes to reach full productivity. Enterprise social collaboration can connect new hires with the people and content they need, thereby reducing the time to contribution and ultimately increasing retention. Automatic assignment to new hire groups will seamlessly connect new hires with key people, training, and information. Through integration with back-end HR systems, the system can use profile information to easily locate the right person to help the task at hand. Additionally, the extended social network can recommend people and content that is relevant. These best practices enable new hires to jump right into interaction with key people and content that can answer questions and direct their learning, making them productive from their first day. 3. Facilitate agile learning The pressure to lower learning and training costs is intense, while employees are asking for more comprehensive and flexible learning alternatives. Enterprise social collaboration can help increase the knowledge retention and productivity of your employees by tapping into their natural, social learning styles. It can do this by extending learning into the realm of the social, helping connect people to productively share information in ways that further learning. 3

From mentoring to communities to collaboration, enterprise social collaboration enables use of discovery, collaboration, peer resources, and expert finding to find new and inventive ways to get answers and further on the job learning. Additionally, communities of learners can work together prior to classes or based on specific topics of interest, creating communities to ask questions, engage and share information, hold informal events, use polls, and discuss topics of interest. These collaborative, engaging techniques facilitate agile learning while keeping costs down. When you allow your workforce to leverage the wisdom of the crowd, preserve knowledge, share successes, and get fast answers, your employees will find it easier and faster to make good business decisions. 4. Enable employee connection and collaboration With workers across the globe, in multiple sites, and highly mobile, companies need a way to easily keep employees connected wherever they are. Enterprise collaboration solutions provide a flexible, easy-to-use solution for connecting employees to other employees as well as to the applications and information they need to get their job done. Whether working on an impromptu team, a task force or special project, or regular ongoing departmental interactions, these solutions support employee collaboration in the context of business that deepens and enriches collaboration. These solutions provide decision-making support, monitor and update back-end data, enable notification, and facilitate discussions, in the context of the back-end applications and process employees interact with every day. When you allow your workforce to leverage the wisdom of the crowd, preserve knowledge, share successes, and get fast answers, your employees will find it easier and faster to make good business decisions. 5. Transform performance management Performance management can be a burdensome and frustrating process, yet it is critical to developing employees and managers across the organization. Enterprise social collaboration solutions enable you to cascade messages and guidance easily and help your workforce create and share goals. They put people at the center of the process with social capabilities to ensure the process is inclusive, collaborative, and results-driven. One way to increase compliance with the talent management process is to ensure everyone understands the intent and details of the process. Enterprise social collaboration solutions streamline and enhance communication with videos, messages, and annotated documents that can be easily created and distributed to actively guide all employees or specific groups through the performance management process. They also connect various levels of your organization to ensure managers are up to date with the latest information and can share best practices. The individual level is where things really get interesting. Enterprise social collaboration enables the setting and managing of goals in a collaborative, open manner. Private performance rooms can help team members track and stay on top of their goals as well as provide a forum for managers to work with individual employees on specific issues. All of this results in faster and better goal alignment and completion, which increases the level of control and engagement of every employee. 4

6. Keep employees connected and productive 63% of US companies allow employees to work from a flexible location, either from home or by telecommuting, according to a 2012 study by National Study of Employers. Key to ensuring employee productivity and more importantly, employee engagement is providing the foundation that enables employees to work productively, regardless of location. The most effective and efficient way to enable remote productivity is to ensure that the business applications employees use every day, such as CRM or Financials, enable employees to connect and collaborate directly from where they work every day. If your enterprise social collaboration solution is disconnected from business applications, it becomes just another task on a long list of to-dos. Because of this, employees are less likely to take advantage of the collaboration capabilities and what will result is a siloed application with minimal usage. Remote work is one side of the equation; the critical other half is to ensure workers can take advantage of intelligent collaboration features while mobile. The use of phones and tablets in the enterprise has seen tremendous growth and enabling enterprise social collaboration on these devices ensures that your employees can access the information and people they need while mobile and never miss a beat. By deploying SAP Jam, a cloud-based solution, HR and senior executives enable their workforce to engage and collaborate like never before, thereby increasing employee engagement. Enable connection and collaboration with other employees, customers, and partners, as well as the information, applications, and processes needed to solve business critical problems and drive results. Contact us to see how SAP Jam can help HR and senior leadership enable unparalleled enterprise social collaboration today. 5

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