As we continue barreling deeper into the digital landscape of the 21st century, it becomes increasingly clear that employee engagement and trust-building is essential to a business’s success.
Between a nearly constant influx of new technology and global players in just about any given marketplace, the need for meaningful communication has never played a more crucial role in the workforce to keep team members in sync.
Similar to user-generated (UGC), employee-generated internal content (EGIC) has the power to yield positive impact among your employees, management and executives when shared via your intranet, website and across various social media platforms.
- Your High-Impact Team Members Visibly Rise to the Occasion. You may soon find that performance reviews could become a thing of the past when you give your employees the chance to share their strengths daily, through purposeful employee engagement. By encouraging thoughtful EGIC, you get see which employees excel in this environment, thriving to increase employee productivity, profitability and positive perceptions of your brand among their peers.
- EGIC Inspires Increased Employee Commitment to Your Brand. When you ask your employees to become more involved with the processes of your organization, they tend to become inspired to get more involved in the inner workings and overarching goals of your company. One noted example, provided by Shuttlerock, is shown through Reebok’s Instagram and Twitter platforms. Each channel has more than 400,000 and 650,000 followers, respectively. Employees use real language, as opposed to jargon, to share their brand engagement and passion about their work to develop a stronger partnership among fellow employees and management.
- You Avoid Operating Your Business in a Bubble. It is easy to become focused on profits and all things related to the bottom line in a standard business day, which can all-too-easily translate into neglecting your valuable workforce. Your EGIC can help you develop an organic and invaluable feedback loop. Such a loop develops when you can trace the outputs of a system back to inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect. Together, this gradual understanding of inputs and outputs forms a loop or circuit. Finally, EGIC can help provide substantial fodder for sourcing innovation, which provides you with detailed technology and vendor analyses and reviews to solve problems at their origin. Your employees’ perspective on various issues can help your executive and management teams get a jump on arising or underlying issues before they emerge.
How Can You Start Building Stronger Employee Engagement Through Employee-Generated Internal Content?
Ramping up your employee engagement through EGIC may seem challenging at first, but once you start encouraging the concept that your business is a marketplace of welcome ideas from everyone, you may experience an organic shift of tide. However, it never hurts to explore a few ideas to get started:
1. Lead By Example.
The idea of contributing to an intranet platform may come across as a completely foreign concept to some employees. You can help introduce them to the world of EGIC by leading the way with your own use of the idea-sharing tools and inviting comments and follow-up thoughts. With this strategy, you and your fellow executives on the team can set the tone and define the medium while also reinforcing the core idea that the inclusion of each employee’s thoughts and voice is not only permitted; it is encouraged and anticipated.
2. Encourage and Recruit Early Adopters.
As you are set to start populating your corporate intranet environment with sincere employee content, reach out to interested EGIC pioneers who are ready to help you lead by example. Send out a request for contributors to find out who is interested in lending their voice. Also, if you are aware an employee who garners the respect of his or her colleagues or just has a genuinely upbeat and appealing personality—but perhaps hasn’t considered providing written content—reach out to ask if they are willing to become part of your EGIC team.
3. Foster the Idea That EGIC Is Mutually Beneficial.
Treating EGIC as a one-sided benefit for your company is not likely to engender the results you want, so make sure to let employees know that you want them to feel empowered and like an integral part of your team.
4. Train Employees in Best Practices.
Train your employees to develop good and meaningful content. Enlist professionals who can teach them about strong blog post structure, image development and composition, mobile video ideas and more. This introductory investment on each employee will only benefit you because they will have industry-standard skills to deliver their ideas with the quality you need.
5. Build Employee Engagement into Your Hiring Process.
Along with any other desired qualifications you lay out for prospective employees, make sure you let your candidates know that your business relies heavily on their strong communication skills and willingness to share ideas via intranet, providing written and video content for their colleagues, management and executives.
Thanks to an amazing array of socially-focused and communication-friendly technology, along with talented and encouraged employees, building stronger employee engagement is easily within your grasp.
What is employee engagement, who is responsible, and how do you measure it? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this informative how to guide.
