Empowered Employees Increase Productivity

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]A smart and well-designed social intranet enables empowered employees to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which in turn can make them more productive and enhance an organization’s ability to achieve its goals and objectives. This post discusses four factors that help create the right environment and facilitate engagement: implementing the right media blend, making the system easy to use, enabling content to find people, and trusting employees.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][divider_line][vc_column_text]How many times have you overheard a conversation in your office and taken positive action as a result? Imagine accessing all the conversations in your organisation and filtering the ones that were relevant to you and your job. Consider the time saved and the reduction in duplicated effort that would bring.

This is already happening in companies adopting intelligent social intranets, which McKinsey estimates increase efficiency by 25 percent. Imagine how powerful that is if that company is a competitor of yours. They may not be more cutting edge or have a better product than you, but they trust their employees to connect, collaborate and work together to become more efficient, therefore giving them a competitive advantage. Their empowered employees increase their organizational productivity.

UK serviced office firm, Business Environment uses Interact Intranet and they surpassed McKinsey’s 25 percent estimate to 98 percent employee participation and vastly increased productivity, which is discussed in March’s Nielsen Norman Groups Enterprise 2.0 report.

They and a number of Interact Intranet customers follow these four steps to engage and empower their employees:

Implement the Right Blend

Use the best tools available to meet a business challenge and utilise the right blend of traditional and social tools. Facilities management company, Romec saved £2m per year by using electronic forms on their intranet to carry out essential business processes. Waterstones and American Golf use their intranets for critical communication between head office and stores.

In all three cases, collaborative tools such as team areas and forums are effectively used for two-way communication that supplement business processes.

Empowered employees can be more productive when they are able to leverage multiple forms of communication and use the right tool for the task.

Make it Easy

Putting a tool out there doesn’t guarantee successful adoption. Tools need to be easy to use and resemble the social media actions employees make in their daily lives including; liking, sharing or hashtagging. All these are one-click steps to catalyse knowledge sharing and collaboration.

These tools are critical in connecting relevant content to people regardless of department. Interact Intranet customer Bauer Media has seen 69 percent of all questions asked across their global intranet answered by different departments. Remember, the expert for your question is rarely sitting in the same office as you.

Optimizing the user experience enables empowered employees to communicate and collaborate via a company’s internal network more efficiently and effectively.

Let Content Find People

In an effective collaborative environment a lot of conversations will be irrelevant to certain people. By using intelligent social intranet software the noise will be filtered to bring the appropriate content to the user, just like Amazon recommends products to you based on your behaviours and interests.

Major retailer Superdrug have utilised this so effectively that they were shortlisted for the Technology Initiative of the Year at the Oracle Retail Awards.

Intelligent software that adapts to individual users’ actions helps empowered employees focus their effort and energy on the most relevant activities.

Trust your Employees

Europe’s largest housing association, Glasgow Housing Association, trusted their employees to be a large part of their success during their change programme.

One blog by a frontline worker attracted 1,330 employees from a possible 1,360 to read, learn and engage with their change programme. This influenced a whole organisation’s attitude far more than cascaded communication could ever achieve.

The biggest commitment to establishing this success is not cost but trust. Enable your employees to maximise productivity by trusting and enabling them to create and maximise their networks, all based on need, not location or department.

Trust is critical to creating a cadre of empowered employees.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][divider_line][vc_column_text]

Nigel Danson PhD is an intranet expert and CEO & Founder of Interact. He has vast experience of not only designing and implementing effective intranet solutions within the public and private sector, but also of helping organisations maintain user centric, effective and up-to-date intranet.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Related Posts:

Private Social Networks: Every Organization Needs Them Reducing the Role of Email in Organizations: Change is Overdue What Factors are Relevant to Becoming a Social Enterprise? Social Media Reality Check: Four Mental Shifts Leaders Need to Make A Digital Transformation Framework, using a Bricks-and-Mortar Metaphor