Viewpoint

Enterprise social media at work: web-based

solutions for employee engagement
Anshu Sharma and Jyotsna Bhatnagar

Anshu Sharma is a Introduction of enterprise social media at work

Doctoral Student and
Jyotsna Bhatnagar is a Social media is no longer a fad but a strategic asset! Organizations who have realized
Professor, both at the this fact are increasingly using social networking sites for recruitment and employer
Department of Human branding purposes. However, it is time to move ahead. Today, social media can be
Resource Management, used to engage not only customers but also internal stakeholders, the employees.
Management Debates on pros and cons of social media use as an internal workplace tool are slowly
Development Institute,
fading away and social media is smoothly making its place at workplaces. With the rise
Gurgaon, India.
of Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006), many companies have upgraded their intranets to
“social intranets” by incorporating features of Web 2.0. Applications such as Facebook
at work, Microsoft Yammer, IBM Connections are helping organizations create their own
social networks. These private social networking tools, also called enterprise social
media (Leonardi et al., 2013), usually offer similar networking features as that of a public
social networking site. However, the membership and access on these enterprise
networks is limited to organizational members within the enterprise boundaries.

Engaging employees through enterprise social media

As organizations become globally dispersed, increasing the physical proximity
between employees, enterprise social media can be used as a workplace tool to deal
with challenges of employee coordination, communication and collaboration.
Employees are able to connect with their colleagues not only within their teams but also
organization-wide spread across the globe, thus expanding their social networks. By
offering features such as blogs, discussion forums, instant messaging, tagging and
so on, it creates a dynamic social networking environment for employees’ interaction
within organization with potential benefits for engagement and collaboration. This
allows them to share ideas and solution to solve work and non-work-related issues on
a common platform. Also, it is an easy and effective way for newcomer socialization
because new employees can easily connect to their colleagues, give-and-receive
feedback and support. By the virtue of being connected to diverse members across
different teams, departments and countries, employees are able to expand and create
heterogeneity in their social networks. Discussion forums, blogs and webinars allows
them to share new ideas and provide valuable feedback on organizational policies.
Employees can also join various online communities of practice (CoP) (Hanson-Smith,
2013), depending upon their interest, where they can interact and discuss subject
matter experts. These CoP may vary across a range of activities from formal
communities such as those of software developers, or economists, etc. to informal
communities such as health, sports and travel for greater employee engagement. Also,

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being enterprise-wide, these platforms can be used by top management to connect
with employees at all levels in the form of CEO talks or video chats, thus overcoming
hierarchical boundaries and power dynamics in internal communications. This can be
a great source of motivation as employees feel involved and valued. Thus, enterprise
social media is a strategic tool for employee engagement as it empowers employees to:
 connect to diverse people across the organization expanding their social network;
 share and disseminate new ideas and solutions for existing problems;
 quickly resolves problems because everyone on the network knows “who knows what”;
 involves a large diverse group for participative decision making; and
 helps in newcomer socialization process.

How organizations are actually walking the talk

IT services and solutions company, Tech Mahindra launched “MyBeatPlus”, an
enterprise social media initiative to achieve its vision of promoting a “One Tech
Mahindra” culture among more than 80,000 employees (Kar, 2016). This internal virtual
platform allowed employees to connect with each other, as well as their clients. It
created a collaborative work culture where employees could share ideas, suggestions
and interact with their top management. It helped people to join interest groups, where
they could learn from peers and also engage with subject matter experts. All this
resulted in increased employee engagement levels with improved communication and
collaboration among employees. On similar lines, Lenovo, a China-based computer
company, improved engagement levels with an internal in-house social media platform
called “Lenovo Social Champions”, where employees and C-suite executives shared
and discussed about company products, branding, feedback (Pathak, 2015). Such
social media technology made employees feel empowered over other traditional
workplace communication media such as e-mails. Louwers (2016) shared how
Yammer, an enterprise social networking tool became a revolutionary tool for internal
communications and drastically increased engagement levels for over 9,000
employees at Inflight Services at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines when crew members could
share real-time feedback with back-office staff for real-time problem-solving. Other
examples include Royal Bank of Scotland which deployed private social media network
named “RBS One Heart” to initiate internal communication for employee retention
purposes (Landers and Goldberg, 2013).

Employee reactions to enterprise social media initiatives

Adding an enterprise social software to the company’s list of workplace technologies is
only the first step and would add no value unless employees use them actively in their
day-to-day work lives. Employees should feel free to connect to their colleagues at work
for work and non-work related matters, without the fear of being monitored by a big
brother, thus creating a sense of belongingness. Organization can benefit from their
wisdom of crowd only when employees feel psychologically safe to share their true
opinions, feel free to provide not only positive but also negative feedback. Because it
is this negative feedback that allows areas of improvement. This happens when
organizations create an open and transparent culture where employees realize that
their voices are not only heard but also valued and acted upon. Hence, engaging
employees on such platforms largely depends upon the level of organizational support
and encouragement. Organizations can increase employee participation on their social
networks by:
 convincing employees that you genuinely want them to share;
 allowing informal employee conversations to make friends at work;

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  making opportunities for constructive feedback and challenging views; and
 defining what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.

Implications for human resource managers

Keeping in mind the two types of social media – public and private – organizations need to
differentiate between their external and internal social media strategies. This can be done
by:
 creating a social media team to design and implement a social media strategy and
allocating budget requirements for enterprise social media software package;
 clearly stating the dos and don’ts for employees comprehensively for both internal and
external social media policy;
 devising an internal social media policy which is much more open than the external
social media policy to get candid and genuine employee feedback;
 linking social media strategy with human resource management policies and
procedures such as reward and recognition, learning and development, grievances
and termination to name a few;
 encouraging employees to voice new ideas, opinions and suggestions by reward and
recognition schemes;
 engaging employees by organizing events for online discussions, innovative idea
sharing; and
 involving top management on internal social media platforms to encourage employee
participation.

Conclusion
Organizations can go a long way by using enterprise social media technologies for
employee engagement and collaboration objectives. They need to realize that enterprise
social media is not only a social networking platform for their employees but also a great
way to connect and involve employees in organizational purposes such as idea generation,
Keywords: problem-solving and participative decision-making and, hence, can be a strategic
Employee engagement, employee engagement initiative. However, it takes a lot more than mere investing in social
Social media strategy, media work tools – organizations need to build a “culture of openness and transparency”,
Enterprise social media, where employees not only “feel free” to share ideas and opinions but also “feel happy and
Internal social media, involved” with high-touch points in their entire employment experience. Only then can we
Social intranet reap returns on our investment.

References
Hanson-Smith, E. (2013), “Online communities of practice”, The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics.

Kar, R. (2016), “Connecting, co-creating and celebrating through social media platforms at Tech
Mahindra”, Awarded as the best case study by SHRM India HR Awards 2015-16 in Excellence in Social
Media – People Practices, Tech Mahindra Limited, available at: www.shrmiac.org/awards#parent
VerticalTab9

Landers, R.N. and Goldberg, A.S. (2013), “Online social media in the workplace: a conversation with
employees”, The Psychology of Workplace Technology, pp. 284-304.

Leonardi, P.M., Huysman, M. and Steinfield, C. (2013), “Enterprise social media: definition, history, and
prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations”, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 1-19.

Louwers, S. (2016), “Employee engagement at KLM reaches new heights as crew share expertise on
enterprise social platform”, available at: https://blogs.office.com/2016/01/13/employee-engagement-
at-klm-reaches-new-heights-as-crew-share-expertise-on-enterprise-social-platform/

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McAfee, A.P. (2006), “Enterprise 2.0: the dawn of emergent collaboration”, MIT Sloan Management
Review, Vol. 47 No. 3, p. 21.

Pathak, S. (2015), “Lenovo created an internal social network to improve employee engagement”,
available at: http://digiday.com/brands/lenovo-created-internal-social-network-improve-employee-
engagement/

Corresponding author
Anshu Sharma can be contacted at: anshu.sharma@hotmail.co.in

VOL. 24 NO. 7 2016 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGEST PAGE 19

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