#SocialMedia and Employee Engagement

#SocialMedia and Employee Engagement
Can you really Tweet your way to engaged employees?

How many social media apps do you have on your smart phone? How many do you use?

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Given that both are such hot topics, it was only a matter of time before employee engagement and social media intersected. At the last employee engagement conference I attended, for example, vendors offered to sell my company social media platforms ranging from experts databases to short messaging services to discussion forums. There was a presentation on adapting social media capabilities in common intranet platforms to drive engagement. Which got me thinking: can social media truly drive employee engagement?

Rather than rely solely on sentiment from the popular press or information from companies whose livelihood is tied to social media, I decided to do my own research. To understand how people trendier than me use social media, I threw myself into: blogging (obviously), Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. (If this sounds like a nightmare to you, I recommend trying it. It’s like that required statistics course in college: you hated it, but what you learn turns out to be surprisingly useful). I ran usage statistics and a user opinion survey on the intranet in my company. I gathered best practices through industry groups to which I belong. I re-read the interviews I conducted with experts during my dissertation research.

My findings can be simply summarized: social media is a tool, not something that in and of itself creates employee engagement.

In fact, social media tools are likely to be adopted or not based on whether an employee is already engaged, rather than inspiring her to engage. If you’re already excited to do your work, maybe you’ll follow your colleagues on Sharepoint. If you are just showing up for a paycheck, the following capability isn’t likely to get you on-board. This is particularly true the further removed from the Millennial generation an employee is.

Further, putting an internal social media platform into place without a clear understanding of how you want to use them to drive business results is a waste of resource. Although it’s cool and “Millennials are doing it,” the truth is, like any investment, when undirected, social media is not likely to produce improvements in business performance (with a few industry-specific exceptions, I imagine).  Some quick guidelines:

1. Social media is great for external communications applications like capturing a shallow amount of attention for marketing or PR. 
2. Socially, it’s great for staying connected to people you don’t know very well across long distances (literal or figurative). 
3. Internally, social media can provide mechanisms for collaboration and knowledge sharing, but not the motivation to do so. Just because you build it does not mean they will come. So, any foray into social media within an organization should be accompanied by a robust change management plan. 

Which social media tools has your organization successfully adopted to amplify employee engagement, and how?

So You Want to Hire an Employee Engagement Consultant?

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So You Want to Hire an Employee Engagement Consultant?
What to Know When Thinking Through Vendor Selection

The CEO just left your office. The good news? She is finally showing an interest in employee engagement. The bad news? She is finally showing an interest in employee engagement. If you are like most executive leaders in an HR function, you are already familiar with the concept of employee engagement.

If you are in a large-enough organization, you may even have staff whose job responsibilities include certain employee engagement related activities. However, it is unlikely that you have in-house a top-tier team of employee engagement experts. Perhaps the time has come to hire a consultant.

The purpose of this blog post is not to suggest which employee engagement consultant is right for your business. Instead, my goal is to help you think about what criteria to use when selecting a vendor. There are several dimensions on which employee engagement vendors vary, and on which an individual might select effectively among them. Here are some helpful questions in selecting an employee engagement consultant.

What are you aiming to achieve? For many organizations just getting started in employee engagement services, the list of options and opportunities can be overwhelming. In some cases, undertaking a big new employee engagement project can be more than an organization has the capacity to absorb. I generally recommend that a first foray into employee engagement services emphasize an engagement model and measurement practice that resonates with the organization in its current state. Most large consultancies are happy to discuss how they conceptualize and measure engagement: among those you consider, which feels intuitive and actionable to you?

What gaps do you need filled? Like any vendor relationship, the ideal partnership will deliver across a number of areas, but in the initial selection it’s helpful to think through what resources and expertise you have in house, and what you need to bring in. For example, some engagement vendors specialize in measurement, whereas others shine in follow-on advisory and HR services. Others are best known for robust benchmarking, whereas others have strength in a technology platform. Understanding your gaps ensures you select the vendor who best fills them.

What is your budget? Vendors have a variety of pricing models, and many will work to meet your business needs within a budget if you’re clear about what your needs and budget are. For reference, some vendors price per project, others per employee. The structure depends on the amount of consultant labor required to complete the project, which is almost always in the report-generation phase. Other factors influencing cost are the number of languages the survey and responses are translated to/from, whether a “pulse” follow up is required, whether the vendor is to also manage employee focus groups to collect qualitative data, etc…

Who has the best reputation in your region? Depending upon the size and scope of your business, you may be looking to use this consultancy to help you benchmark your firm against others in the area competing for top talent. If this is a primary consideration, and the above two criteria have already been met, consider which vendor’s stamp of approval is most likely to influence others in your business ecosystem positively.

Of course, the more experienced you become working with employee engagement, the more sophisticated your organization will become internally, so finally consider whether your vendor is truly an employee engagement partner who will learn and grow with your organization.

Did your organization use additional or alternative criteria? Please join the conversation with a comment!

A Little More Action: Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

A Little More Action: Best Practices for Measuring Employee Engagement

What Leaders Need to Know Before Launching an Employee Engagement Survey

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How do you measure employee engagement? If you’re like most of the employee engagement experts I interviewed for my dissertation research, you’re conducting a survey. You’re asking 80-110 questions, sometimes translated into multiple languages, including an open-ended question.  The questions you use to measure employee engagement vary depending on which firm you are working with, and most of your survey questions measure the drivers of employee engagement, like culture, communications, pay and benefits, strategy alignment and more.

So surveys are ubiquitous, and both the responses and participation rates contain valuable engagement information. But there are plenty of other ways to measure engagement. For example, one approach is to track if people actually exhibit engaged behaviors: participation in and satisfaction with employee meetings and events, participation in opinion polls and online discussion threads related to critical business issues, social media participation, and participation in related programs like recognition programs. Other metrics include 360 degree feedback for leaders, focus groups, and intranet story readership.

The key idea for leaders, though, is not that there exist several ways to measure engagement. Instead, it’s to realize that measurement is a tool that can amplify engagement or disengagement, depending on how the company responds to feedback received.  In the words of one interviewee:

“In the area of engagement I think the big issue is, the measurement really only matters if you do something about it. That’ s one of our consults to leadership all the time is that don’ t measure it if you don’ t want to do anything with the feedback, because you are only going to exacerbate any issue discovered because they will think something is going to be addressed with things they bring up, and when they find out nothing happens, then you are almost worse off than asking the question to begin with.” – V.P., Communications, automotive corporation

In other words, measurement practices can make employee engagement better or worse! Unfortunately, too many of us know from personal experience how demotivating it can be to invest our time and energy in a project only to have it go nowhere. When employees complete a survey and nothing happens, that's the effect.

The good news is, there are a few simple things we can do to make measurement amplify engagement:

• Return results to employees promptly

• Communicate plans to respond to the feedback

• Provide regular updates on the progress of these plans over time

How is your firm measuring engagement? What best practices can you share?