SMiLE and be happy!

It’s been a busy week or so at People Lab, we’ve been very social getting out and about as we visited the SMiLE London 2015 and hosted a table talk about Social Media and HR (more on that to come!).

Hosted by Simply Communicate, the conference was all about social media in the large enterprise. It gave everyone a great opportunity to meet new people and learn from them and their experiences, and share our own, on how social media can work internally for all of us at work.

Speakers from IBM, Vodafone, and Coca Cola, to name a few, spoke about their experiences of using social media and intranets with their employees, how they launched their platforms, how it is positively affecting the work they do as a company, and how their employees are interacting and benefitting from it as individuals.

Stanley Awuku, Internal Digital Experience Manager at Vodafone Group discussed the social media platform used by Vodafone employees called Circle, which is designed to ‘bring social inside’. With over 2,000 communities (groups of employees), employees share knowledge and collaborate on projects, creating links with other departments and employees all over the world. The site also has a Town Hall function, an open question and answer space that archives content.

At Coca Cola, Jonathan Phillips explained that their iConnect intranet site is a main resource for HR purposes, moving away from an intranet, into a digital workplace. iConnect is the only way employees can check their payslips and request holiday time, which makes it a no-brainer for getting employees utilising it. However, they can also access internal communications as to what is happening with Coca Cola campaigns and how they can get more involved. This approach has seen 2/3 of the workforce using iConnect.

The Financial Ombudsman discussed how more social and interactive changes to their staff newsletter “On The Go”, powered by Newsweaver, produced more engagement with their intranet site; by utilising a ‘Twitter’ format, condensing content into attention grabbing headlines and an abstract, as well as adding video content including Vine videos to engage staff with important information in a fun way. With an 80% open-rate this just goes to show how embracing new ways of working is, working!

The overall idea from speakers emphasised the importance of all employees getting involved with their intranet/internal social media, including staff at the very top, and the need for Champions/Ambassadors of the social media platform to help those use it, and generally get employees excited about using it!

As Jonathan Phillips at Coca Cola explained, their CEO and European presidents meet four times a year, two hours each time, as part of the iConnect council, which helps build very strong relationships across different teams and encourages the message that all staff and their views are important.

Toby Jones, Internal Communications Manger at RFU said that using ‘Champions’ for their new intranet site proved imperative to building the ‘team’ message of the site, and now see 500 engaged users a month (from a bank of 650 staff!), all with the aim of getting staff as geared up for the Rugby World Cup 2015 as rugby fans themselves.

As well as keeping employees engaged with brand mission, working on projects together, and generally being social, what else can social media in the large enterprise offer?

As Coca-Cola’s iConnect has picked up on, it’s not just a case of getting employees talking to one other and engaged in tasks, it can be used as an HR tool for basic, but essential personalised employee content. It could also be used across the employee  life-cycle, at the usual touch-points, such as employee induction, documentation and policies, and training, the possibilities could be endless. Also, as technology moves on, we can start to tap into even more information on how our employees interact and what that really means to the business.

Detailed metrics are helping to discover optimal behaviours, which are key to improving outcome and optimising business network, expanding much further from the standard ‘x opens and x shares’ analytics.

Marie Wallace, Analytics Strategist at IBM spoke about how they are taking things a step further with their Social Graph, which maps connections and interactions between employees on their networks, and can give insight as to which departments are isolated, and give leads as to which employees (called Information Brokers) can help you get more information you need, as well as giving personalised engagement KPIs on each user’s dashboard. As Marie said, engaged employees are more likely to generate measurable innovation and demonstrate more customer advocacy.

What’s clear from SMiLE London is that social media is hear to stay, companies are investing in social platforms in a variety of ways, understanding technology to utilise access and interaction, and it seems we have barely touched the surface on using social media with our work-forces.