Brian Beehler – Social Media Talk

Today was an awesome day! It started off with my VP greeting me at the door and showing his appreciation for my efforts in 2008. Next, it was my Director pointing out the main successes that were achieved and finally I had the opportunity to show my gratitude to my staff. What a great way to connect with your employees and build sincere relationships by recognizing them for their contribution to the overall success of the corporation. Thanks to the organizing committee for pulling off a great “Employee Appreciation” day.

For me the day is much appreciated but why does it only have to be a day. Well, it doesn’t, it could be an ongoing process through the use of Social Media tools within the workplace. Today’s knowledge workers are so much more than the title on their business cards. They are skilled, experienced and well versed in many of the tools available to them in their personal lives. When employees work together they have the talent and abilities to drive innovation within the workplace. The challenge now is to find ways to capture that collective knowledge and turn it into a powerful tool for building value and continuous improvement. As a business community we need to think past simple job functions and give our employees an easy, engaging way to connect, share and innovate.

Over the last 8 months I have been working on such a tool that will connect our employees with each other. The tool will enable the corporation to exploit the collective potential in all our employees to drive our success. It will engage and empower them to grow, develop and contribute. Our scheduled deployment of the new tool will be September 2009 and over the next few months I would like to bring you through my journey of redefining how a corporate intranet should interact with its employees.

Here is a sneak peak at some of the features and benefits…

We are allowing every employee to have individual blogs — We are anticipating this will cause innovation by making it easy to share ideas and opinions among all levels in the organization.

Employees will be able to create work groups — This will provide them with an efficient way to collaborate as well as communicate their group’s mandate with others.

Employees will be able to play by creating Social groups — This will help employees find colleagues with similar interests, lifestyles, etc., and increase employee engagement and retention.

Individuals will be able to tag — Profiles will be built on a true picture of the knowledge, skills and expertise inside the organization.

Personal pages — This will put a human face on the old school “employee directory” model by encouraging people to search out others and talk to each other.

Whiteboard — Employees will share ideas on colleagues’ whiteboards, fostering innovation, collaboration, and social bonds.
Similar to Facebook, news feeds will be virally transmitted —- We are hoping this will reduce the “I didn’t know” factor by showing important news, activities or events.

There are several other features that I haven’t mentioned because we are currently determining if they are technically possible. Please return frequently to learn more of my experiences through this culture changing initiative.

Together we can build a workforce that truly works together…

Filed under: Social Media Tagged: | Employee Engagement', Intranets, Social Media