Have you ever thought about the impact of social media on your workforce? Ron Thomas from the Human Capital League took to his blog to share his thoughts on the benefit of aligning your corporate culture with social media. In the post, Ron says that that “Culture defines an organization, and to maintain that level of connectiveness requires communication and constant reinforcement. Social media offers the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with and among employees, former employees, customers (both new and former) and other key connecting points to the organization.” Building on his post, here are 5 ways you can harness the power of social tools on your intranet:

  • Allow it to shape and manage your company culture: Use your intranet to reinforce the values, goals and ideas that you have for your organization. The home page can share a message from your CEO, highlight your organizations mission statement, and announce exciting initiatives that your team takes on.
  • Allow it to help you strengthen change management initiatives: Be transparent with your employees and let them see what the organization is working towards. Build a sub-site to highlight and share valuable information about future organizational, strategic and technological changes that are being considered. Encourage employees to comment and rate those projected change management ideas.
  • Allow it to help you improve execution of corporate strategy: Get your CEO connected with employees in an open forum on the intranet. Schedule an employee/executive chat where everyone can communicate freely or create a suggestion box where executives and employees can have two-way conversations via the intranet.
  • Allow it to let you better facilitate corporate communication: With a social intranet you can reach out to your coworkers to share business tools, ask questions and learn from one another. Social tools like message walls foster communication between employees and your executives by allowing them to publicly share knowledge and gather feedback from the organization.
  • Allow it to let you better manage and increase employee engagement: Empower your employees on the intranet and give them the ability to personalize their own intranet work space. Encourage employees to write unique tidbits about themselves and to use status updates, tags, bookmarks and widgets so coworkers can learn more about each other.