As mentioned in our white paper on mobile enterprise apps and employee engagement, successful companies need to involve employees in their success. They need to provide the tools and knowledge for them to be successful and start sharing information openly within their organization. This need for open communications is caused by digital developments such as social media. Customers expect brands to share everything and build a sense of community. Employees struggle with the same expectations with regards to their companies. However, social innovation is often not given enough attention within organizations, restricting employees’ sense of engagement and trust (source: Smile).
Employees feel more connected to their colleagues when they are able to share company news – whether it is good or bad news. This is because when employees are properly engaged in company processes such as decision-making and goal setting, they feel they are an important part of the organization (source: Smile). They want to know what is going on and feel connected with their company. In other words, they need social innovation. There are two crucial factors to achieve social innovation in enterprises:
1) Transparency
First, employees want transparency. What are managers doing? What do they think about a situation? Organizations using social software report that their company’s activity stream is popular among employees. Some people even compare this intranet activity stream with Facebook’s news feed. With employees constantly able to see what their colleagues are doing, they feel more connected, and as a result, get more engaged (Source: Holtz).
2) Long-term proces
Secondly, dialogues need to be encouraged for a longer period. After all, employee engagement is not a short-term initiative. Organizations cannot start to engage employees and then drop the initiative, because efforts will backfire and create employee estrangement (Source: DronaMobile). This means companies should be actively involved, making the engagement of employees a priority.
While it is difficult to know everything that is going on within a company, mobile devices can help your organization achieve these two crucial engagement factors. With a mobile platform, employees can be invited for events, join discussions, give feedback, and more.
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