Improve Employee Engagement Within Your Company With Creative Social Intranet

Knowledge is power. We all agree to this. And we all are acquainted with the truth of it in our everyday personal and professional lives. Yet, recently it has become clear that worldwide, we’re still lacking behind in terms of technological and ‘high-end’ skills that many businesses and big organisations require for success.
Naturally, it takes a certain amount of investment if you want to gain highly qualified employees. However, one of the most important considerations for modern enterprises is recognising and promoting those that have knowledge in the very first place. The knowledge economy comes with a growing demand for education that encourages new knowledge and capabilities which includes positive response to change, thinking in novel ways that cross traditional boundaries like culture, accepting technological understandings, budding critical awareness or subject disciplines and imagining many futures.
Organisations today worldwide need to be innovative to attract and retain employees that can move them forward.
Thus you can say that these days, knowledge is not just power, it’s also something that can be used by an organisation to foster innovation.

Why is Knowledge Management important?

Listed below are some of the many reasons why knowledge management is important.

• Ensuring all relevant and important information, data and resources are accessible by employees when they require it
• Vital knowledge and information is kept within the organisation even after employees quit the organisation.
• Keeping away from duplication of efforts
• Ensuring your organisation is effectively taking advantage of existing expertise in the company
• Standardising processes and procedures for better knowledge management

Finally, to conclude, this all leads to faster and more valuable decision making and easier collaboration. Most importantly it also encourages innovation and growth.

The New Digital Workplace

Smoothing the progress of knowledge sharing indicates ensuring that knowledge is retained within the workplace.

The difference in the way we work today and the demands put on by modern organisations is the most common problem that organisations worldwide today face and this has changed beyond our imagination.

Today’s workforce is no longer confined to a single office environment.

As the new diversified digital workplaces have emerged, the need for team-based, collaborative and digitally connected work environments becomes important for knowledge sharing, retention and admittance to the digital workplace.

In this digital workplace, the owners must give their workers the support that they require to make easy sharing which can take the form of:

a) Training by means of intranet/ e-learning platforms
b) Online workspace that will ensure easy collaboration
c) A joint voice within the organisation

All this is possible by adding social and learning aspects to the Company’s intranet social tools which often forms the basis of an effective digital workplace.

Retaining Employees

Today we’re witnessing the younger generation lot that is leaving jobs that don’t live up to their expectations. This is something that organisations must recognise and attempt to stop as soon as possible.

The Intranet is a great facilitator of knowledge as it provides a central hub for easily sharing and accessing resources for better communication of information and collaboration between employees in various departments and areas.

To further understand the organisational requirements, it takes a little knowledge gathering and prior-planning in your Social Intranet to do the job effectively:

1. Frequent Audit of the existing digital workplace to spot areas for improvement
2. Find out areas can be expanded upon to increase value to clients and the employees
3. Keep Enriching the knowledge base with further information
4. Enable organisation-wide sharing of valuable knowledge
5. Assess future knowledge sharing to the next level

The Social Intranet

Much of this can be eased by adding social to the digital workplace mix.

This indicates that everyone, from the senior-most to the junior-most employees, can pour what they know about their work into the organisation’s knowledge pool and this can then be easily accessible by fellow colleagues.

This can be done with the use of

• Employee Profiles
• Wikipedia’s
• Blogs
• A collaboration of team workspaces

It’s necessary to consider the following three key areas for planning:

1. People/culture
Certainly, the employee’s ability to add info to wikis and blogs will state that the knowledge base of the organisation is continuously growing and that it belongs to the organisation on the whole, rather than an individual.

2. Organisation
Organisations of various shapes and sizes can add aspects easily into the intranet platform to form an efficient digital workplace that will ensure that the working culture turns and remains more innovative and collaborative. This is important for providing excellent customer service and retaining workers which then become an asset.

3. Technology
Technologies every now and then come and go and most organisations are fairly resistant to change. This is essentially what creates the problem in the first place, so it’s highly necessary to place people in a prime position.

So now What’s Next?

We strongly recommended you watch our Creative Social Intranet’s Introduction video.

It will present you with actionable insights into the important elements of a digital workplace. It further assists you on how it can assist you in effective capturing, storing and providing access to valuable knowledge and information in form of databases, documents, policies, programs, FAQs, online workspaces and much more.

Databases, documents, policies: all of these are USP assets that an organisation possesses. The same should be said about an organisation’s employees also and see them as business assets, it’s time to ensure you do so.

Thus all organisations must provide employees with the essential tools to ensure that they can share the knowledge they possess.

The boundaries of work and workplace are changing every now and then worldwide. Flexible working hours, remote working areas and dispersed workers operating in a digital workplace, have opened up a new era where collaboration and communication within a company have to familiarize to fit with this transformation.
At the heart of this is the Creative Social Intranet, a software where significant connections and real-time communication is possible which is integral to modern business.

Really! But how can stay ‘social’ mean more productivity?

How is social = productive

For countless organizations, a social intranet is the missing jigsaw piece to the modern digital workplace today. What a social intranet does is select one and achieves what other digital tools and services have failed to do.
Creative Social Intranet takes the best of social media platforms, sites, and portals to create a platform where there is ease of connection, collaboration and communication. The features that Creative Social Intranet can boost include flexible management systems, engaging collaborations and also powerful search capabilities. The positive end result is productivity which is maximized, knowledge, views and ideas that are shared, and the building of communities across your organization. Our rich social features include tagging, blogging, liking, sharing, and commenting – to ease the way people connect on a social site. Also social intranet software makes possible getting in touch with a co-worker in another office space in another country, even in another language.

So how is a socialized intranet helping modern businesses today?

We at Creative Social Intranet have tailored the intranet software of some of our clients to become the social intranets that their organizations require for everyday use and to form well-built connections and collaborations. New Innovative ideas can be found to maximize the value of your social intranet.

Hence what makes a prize-winning victorious Social Intranet?

1. Boosting employee engagement by creating employee recognition programs

Along with cultivating a positive culture at work, recognizing your workers is one of the most important things you can do to boost employee morale and employee satisfaction. A social intranet platform is one of the best media where anyone can say a simple thank you to his/her peer in front of the entire company audience.

2. Giving a platform for every employee to speak up

It is very easy to become invisible if working in a large, global company. A company will experience low retention levels and high absentees if it fails to notice, recognize or celebrate their employee’s success. By providing employees with a voice, a social intranet platform helps to remove hurdles like location, language or seniority barriers that often hamper significant connections.

3. Establishing a platform for innovative ideas and knowledge sharing

Geographically dispersed manpower of a business that is largely spread generally faces communication and knowledge sharing barriers. Empowering fellow workers to connect with each other, share ideas and collaborate is one of the key features of a social intranet.

4. Promoting positive company culture

While an intranet is a perfect platform for celebrating your employee achievements it can also exhibit new initiatives, upcoming events and showcase various successes within the company. This will motivate the workforce and encourage their confidence which, in turn, enriches the entire workplace culture.

5. Making Intranet relatively important to everyone in the organization

Undoubtedly, to make people visit your intranet regularly, you need to make it relevant to them. It’s important to remember who your audience is in order to ensure that the content loaded and the news broadcasted is read. When people receive messages and news that isn’t applicable to their role, their interests and engagement drop. Thus leading people to stop tuning in and an intranet without populace is just a piece of software. Thus it’s very important to make your intranet relevant to everyone using it.

What can be learnt from social intranets?

• not be scared of increased social activity.
• With a relevant social intranet, employees can receive regular updates on new researches, share ideas and views and also figure out their roles and responsibilities in a project.
• Tasks happen a lot faster when social engagement is installed in the workplace.
• The most beneficial features of the social intranet are social tools that companies use, real-time interactions, ability to collaborate within the organisation and cross-platform availability.
• Social intranets initiate business digitization. Earlier, digitization focused on customer-facing processes. Social intranets spotlights on internal processes, and how work processes can be improvised by digitization.

So what’s next for your social intranet software?

a) Social intranets will continue to adapt and evolve to fresh trends in communication and collaboration, especially those employed in social media.
b) Its focus should be on gen-next features and their integration and implementation into the intranet software.
c) As with every new generation that joins the workplace, expectations for high digital tools, ahead of the curve office tech, and particularly developments in work intranets is important.

Thus to conclude, Creative Social intranet is intuitive, adaptable to most integrations, and is unique to every user. And most importantly uplifting your digital workplace.

Are Disengaged Employees really bothered? Then why do Employers need to bother about them?

Are disengaged employees a stain on your business?

There are a lot of statistics and reports available criticizing the disengaged employee as a stain on the organizations, something to be loathed and something to be got relieved of as soon as possible. Some articles have even openly addressed to the disengaged employee as ‘bad employee’. But is this by anyway fair to the disengaged employees? Is it fair to say that disengaged employees are not committed to either their own or their organization’s growth and success? In spite of everything, though engagement and commitment are correlated, they are still distinct concepts. It may also be time to define disengagement and underperformance as two separate theories.

So, do disengaged employees really care?

While some do and some don’t.

However, in order to take full advantage of the opportunity offered by disengaged employees, we should presume that most employees do actually really care about some facet of their work.

1. Some will care about the quality of the work they do
2. Some will care about their own image in the organization.
3. Some employees will care about their own personal career,
4. Some will care about their co-workers or certain members of the team they work with.
5. Some employees simply just care about being respected and valued for the work they do.

What do you learn from your disengaged employees?

The key issue for organizations nevertheless is to understand the element of care among disengaged employees and learn some key lessons.

a) Disengaged employees are emotionally charged as they care about what they feel they aren’t getting in return for their valuable time, efforts, skills, expertise and intellect at work.

b) Salary will only help in turning up of employees at work, but won’t be enough to keep people engaged.

c) Every individual employee has his own definite requirements from his work besides the salary and benefits package the job offers.

d) There is a personal blend of individual requirements like development, growth, career enhancement, respect, authority, autonomy, work interest, contribution, and value and so on.

e) Organizations can learn an array of important lessons ranging from caring for, communicating with and examining disengaged employees.

f) Creative Social Intranet enables clients to learn what is motivating engagement and disengagement to understand the prevailing culture in each team.

g) This puts further light on what it takes for individual success, targeting leadership and team development and training.

h) Creative Social Intranet gives you the chance to run surveys of your design for engagement survey responses.

i) You can learn the exit story of your employees and get concurrent feedback on the real experiences of your disengaged employees.

But maybe the feedback from disengaged employees be all negative and cynical!

Yes, maybe it is.
Yet it can also sometimes be very real and sometimes emotional too. Even if it is distrustful, it offers a valuable sneak peek into how people feel and can give a rich source of insights to the data created by the employee engagement survey.

So, even if we learn from disengaged employees, why should we care for them?

• The main thing here is that many of your disengaged employees will be looking for new employment to fulfil the desires they aren’t attaining in their current job.

• Also if u think they aren’t going to be re-engaged then it is best for both the employee and the organization to part ways.

• However, it is important for you to care about them and provide them with the required training and support so they can search for an alternative job with a clear mind.

• Time and again disengaged employees are left alone to seek out an escape.

• The problem here is that they are many times caught up in negative thinking loop and thus search for a job with all the wrong reasons.

• They are trying to escape their own personal prison instead of positively searching for their next opportunity.

• The result of this ‘trying to escape’ is that it often shows off into interviews. It is worsened by the possible feeling of underachievement by the disengaged employee.

• She/he believes that the current job did not endow with the experience and career-boosting opportunities it should have and, hence, his/her self-efficacy is depressing.

• As an outcome, she/he does not suppose to be successful in any job interview and is expected to perform poorly.

• The disengaged employee feels trapped in a job they don’t like and don’t want to stay in either.

• At the end, the organization is left with an increasingly disengaged employee ratio and all the negatives that it brings with it.

What steps will you take to care for your disengaged employees and to learn from them?

1) Support and train and also develop your disengaged employees.

2) Bring them back into the workforce as an active valuable and contributing member.

3) Some will re-engage and stay on with you as a valuable employee.

4) Others will feel better about quitting and will perform better in their efforts to leave coz after all they are seeking is an opportunity and not an escape.

5) ‘Remember your organization will develop a reputation as a caring employer’.

6)At the End “Everyone is a winner”.

Why are many organizations still hesitating to adopt digital workplace?

Is your business ready for this technical advancement?

As per a new survey by research firm Gartner, today not more than 20 per cent of employers in all of the highly-skilled economies are prepared to accept digital workplace technologies like the virtual collaboration or mobile tools.

Strange but true…..

The survey, carried out among more than 3000 respondents in advanced countries like Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S., found that a very small proportion of organizations (between 7% and 18 %) possess the “digital agility” to influence and control media, information and technology in exclusively, unique and highly innovative ways.
The objective of digital dexterity is to put up a flexible, responsive workplace by executing tools such as content management systems (CMS), cloud, employee portals, social networks and multiple mobile apps.
Today’s consumers are digital that means customers and employees think alike.
Digitization has turned out to be crucial for innovation and for keeping employees engaged in their organizational goals and personal careers too.

a) As per Gartner statistics, workers between the ages of 18-24 are by majority the most approachable of all other age groups to adapt to digital workplace products and services.

b) To our surprise, the oldest legion of workers analysed, that’s between the ages of 55-74, are the second most likely adopters of digital workplace tools and services.

c) Workers ageing between 35-44 expressed the highest lack of interest towards the adaption of new technology and ways of working. They take their jobs as routine, have the weakest view of how technology can help their work and growth and also are the least interested people in mobile usage.

HR’s responsibility and role in Digital workplace

Some researches indicate that around 56 % of Human Resource leaders are being hard-pressed to take on a very important role in driving their organizations to digital transformation.
This bestows a distinctive opportunity for HR to escort the charge of turning their organization into a digital organization of the future to improve engagement and productivity, while still getting a stronghold at the leadership table.

1) Impact of the digital revolution

Obviously, there is a strong impact of the digital revolution on the way people work.
Employees have got to be able to work anywhere, even in a ‘non-office’ environment, act as team players, have consumer-like software skills for using a mobile phone, cloud, social media, apps, and other tools and lastly be on toes to say OK to non-routine ways of working.

2) Hiring the right candidate

As responsible HR professionals, you must be equipped to hire candidates who can survive and bloom in the digital environment or else train the existing employees to become digital workers.

3) Improve engagement

Digital technology can improvise engagement and also job satisfaction by reflecting employees home-life handiness. It can improve productivity and efficiency too by offering flexibility, mobility and other options for administrative and HR-related duties.

4) Value-additive work and personal development

When employees can modernize their advantages easily, whenever and wherever they want, they have more time to spotlight on value-additive work and personal development.
A digital workplace allows things like remote work, easy onboarding, connecting people even when they may not be physically present in the office and allowing them to perform tasks and activities as per their own agendas.

HR can play an advocate for the value of people as a priority in technology functioning.

This means the user experience is required by the new system to improve the skills of the workforce, and how will this impact your employee satisfaction and engagement.
HR may not have to lead transformation on its own. It can assemble inter penalizing teams that include HR, sales, finance, customer service, IT and others that are capable of influencing the expertise to redefine the overall employee experience.

Overcoming the resistance to revolution

The success and victory of digital transformation usually depend more on the right change management rather than on the technology itself. This makes it crucial to involve management holders from across the organizations that are willing to handle the transformation initiatives. Any alterations in an organization have a direct impact on the people within that organization, and thus HR leaders should work to ensure that employees are comfortable, well informed, properly trained and accept the change wholeheartedly. To overcome this resistance, the best tactic is first to sculpt the behaviour required by the new digitally dexterous organization.
This means accepting the digital workplace, innovatively using technology, thinking strategically, representing team spirit, and including both; the stakeholders and innovative thinkers together in the process.

Other important steps can be:
• Growing with feedback from digital workers through proper mentoring, frequent surveys and perfect observation.
• Arranging centre groups for older executives to train them about upcoming technology challenges.
• Modelling workers needs on how to use technology inside and even outside the office.
• Highlighting eccentrics to expose insights of productivity and unshared technology.