#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?