Social communications improves business agility and delivers numerous benefits that directly impact how employees work. It supports real time collaboration and sharing of information among business teams, which result in fewer business communication delays. Social communications also lessens the time it takes to complete tasks and helps employees make faster and more informed decisions. However, with many changes occurring in the workplace, even positive changes may find employees who resist modifications in their work habits. Many companies add social tools one by one and it is not unusual for employees to start resisting using new applications due to the need to remember separate passwords and managing several different user interfaces on their desktop. To increase adoption rates for social communications, companies need to take several steps to ensure high adoption for social communications in order to achieve its expected benefits. Steps to improve adoption for social media by employees include:
Support social applications across multiple mobile devices. A key feature for using social communications is that it is accessible for users. With more employees using a mix of smartphones and tablets it is important to provide employees social communications access on the devices of their choice.
Deliver a simplified user experience. Simplicity and ease of use are two critical factors in making social communications popular for employees. Many employees are often too busy to take the time to adequately learn how to use social applications. To improve adoption rates deploy applications with an intuitive user interface across all devices
Provide easy access to shared content. Social communications supports online document sharing applications that allows members of a business team to review, read and annotate their documents and those from others. It gives employees immediate access to files that support their job functions and reduces time spent searching for this same information from other sources. The search capabilities on document sharing applications need to be accurate and fast to encourage user participation.
Implement online communities. These may be communities of interest or discussion forums, directories of employee profiles and interests or microblogging sites that enable employees to reach out to a broader population of colleagues and quickly find answers to questions or relevant information from co-workers in other departments. Information that may have taken days to discover can now be found quickly saving employees many hours of searching for content.
Promote social adoption internally. Create an internal awareness of how social communications is used by other employees and encourage employee participation. This may be as simple as encouraging employees to post personal information or specific skills they have on a community site to encourage cross functional conversations.
Engage top management. When senior executives start using social communications as a major channel for sending information to employees or receiving comments from workers, the adoption for social communications will increase rapidly, as more employees will use these applications to communicate with others.
To find more about how to gain and justify the many advantages for social communications and learn more about how other companies using social communications in their business please check out Constellation Research’s new report, “How to gain competitive edge for social adoption”, October 23, 2012 by Elizabeth Herrell.
