Ramp up Employee Engagement in 2015 with a Community

Happy New Year!

2014 was the year of inclusive customer experience and customer journey. However, in 2015 take some time and shift your focus to your most important asset – EMPLOYEES. They are the ones who make your company stand, grow and thrive.

Studies have shown that companies with engaged employees rake in 2.5X more revenue (gasp!) vs. companies with non-engaged employees. [tweet this]

With disgruntled & disengaged employees, a vicious circle starts.

For happy customers, it is essential that you have happy (and satisfied) employees.

Moreover, as per a survey in US by Dale Carnegie,

To engage employees, initiatives like engagement strategies, innovative working spaces, great perks and more have been started. However, there is one thing that many organizations tend to keep on a back-burner. The portal or the company intranet.

The Older Days of the Portal Malaise

In the older days, when Cloud Computing was not there and servers, complicated devices ruled the world; portals were an excellent way to get everybody on the same track.

However, with Cloud Computing, BYOD, IOT and endless (and lightning) fast changes in the way we work, travel and communicate; it doesn’t make sense to stick to legacy portals.

Even when the employees and intranet administrators put n sincere efforts into running it, this is what they kept experiencing:

Portals have not been very successful in engaging employees and across platforms, organizations; suffer from these problems:

• Difficult navigation
• Hard search
• Cluttered and chaotic UI
• Lack of social media integration
• Non-mobile friendly
• Non-localized
• High maintenance
• Non-aligned with the millennial (and upcoming) generation’s lifestyle and expectations

Answer to the Portal Malaise

Setting up Branded Communities for your employees is the answer.

If you have an employee community:

There are many platforms where you can build your community. However, the one that makes most sense is a platform that your company uses to store ALL your data – customer, marketing, support and partner.

Across enterprises, Salesforce has proven too be a popular choice and setting up your Employee Community will ensure:

1. Hosting is easy: SaaS – removes maintenance, security ease, frequent backups
2. Branding is simple: Easy with customizable templates, Force.com pages, Community Designer (Community Cloud),
3. Speed-to-market increases: Basic environment in minutes, extensive branding done easily
4. Data is inside Salesforce only. No longer should we think about separate communities. A Salesforce community is a wrapper with different users given different flavours/assigned permissions to create new stuff. [tweet this]
5. No combinations will be required as everything is integrated inside Salesforce; so your employees will have easy access to whatever they want to collaborate on projects without leaving the environment.
6. Common set of resources/skills will be deployed to manage business apps and employees
7. Leveraging AppExchange will be possible
8. Manage the site without coding
9. Scaling will be easy
10. No manual upgrades will be required

Additionally, Communities will offer these advantages:

• Chatter
• Greater control over user permissions
• Dashboards
• SSO
• Mobile access
• Enhanced branding capabilities
• Better employee user experience

Ready to setup your Employee Community? Save this Checklist for a good community

Employee community can prove to be a great asset to increase engagement and reduce churn. In the New Year, think of it as easy-to-use, update, low maintenance, revenue generating card up-your-sleeve.
Your Employee Community should include:

• HR policy information
• Company News
• Recruiting Information
• Employees Personnel Information
• Secure File Sharing Platform
• Quick case resolution times (IT problems)
• Employee Chatter Groups for real-time peer support and collaboration
• Announcement sections for employee news, product launches, new trainings, achievements, critical information
• Miscellaneous section for planning parties, hang-outs
• Ability to conduct polls
• Functionality to share documents across departments, geographies without getting lost in drives and mails
• HR Section where HR can interact with employees and vice-versa
• IT case set-up section
• Deep knowledgebase to raise expertise levels
• Integration to empower employees to convert leads, opportunities right from the community
• Marketing collaterals, MQLs and more to build trust between departments
• Mobile –friendly (so that they can get their caffeine fix while they are working)
• Ability to revoke/grant access to distribute content selectively

Takeaways

Go ahead, make your employees a happy bunch with a hang-out/collaboration/knowledge session/case logging in portal; with one solution itself.

About Grazitti^TM Community Services

References:

1. Salesforce Portals vs. Salesforce Communities