Connecting Employees
May 23rd, 2008 by Patti Osha
One of the hottest topics in internal communications right now is harnessing the power of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for social networking and peer-to-peer employee communications. This was a big topic of conversation at a networking meeting of top internal communicators Insidedge hosted recently in Dallas called MindShare.
During that day of brainstorming and strategy sharing, Al Comeaux, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, for Sabre Holdings Corp. (owner of Travelocity and other travel-related companies) shared SabreTown, a virtual village where you can connect with co-workers on a personal and business basis, share contacts and information and rack up “karma points” that allow you to post photos and other fun insights. Sabre has a history of taking internal work tools and turning them into full-fledged, money-making enterprises a la Travelocity and now they’re looking to incubate and repeat that success with their employee tool (being marketed externally as cubeless).
Maybe Sabre is onto something here? I think if you were to ask Peter Vogt, head of eBay’s Internal Communications, he’d agree. eBay, which dubs itself as “the first social networking company on the Internet,” communicates internally almost exclusively by electronic methods. Peter was in Dallas last week to address the local chapter of IABC. At eBay, employee communications is no longer a series of top-down executive messages; it’s a by-product of how employees across world geographies live and work together virtually. The intranet is the central communications hub where 70% of the content is employee generated and employees can have their own blogs and wikis and Facebook-like pages. And get this, the company hosts 35-40 webcasts a year to connect employees to the business.
So perhaps it’s time to shift the debate from whether or not companies should block access to social networking sites during work time and instead figure out how to measure a link between increased worker-to-worker connection and employee engagement?
Tags: intranet, peer-to-peer, Social networking
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:38 am
Thanks for the shout-out for cubeless, Patti. We keep getting stories of people who have asked questions on cubeless, the relevance engine has found the most relevant people to send those questions to, and they’ve received answers on their needed work (or play) questions very quickly. A colleague this week needed to convert something from another program to our system, and after all kinds of time on Microsoft’s help area, she asked the community how best to translate the files; an answer came back in minutes from someone tucked away in a far corner of the company. Anyway, it’s fun and useful and we’re excited about it. Al
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Has anyone got any case studies about how they have used RSS news feeds or employee portals to improve internal communications? According to this article – http://www.internal-communications.info/tinc?key=7O6EeU0L&id=2&design-output-mode=js&design-css-mode=standard – General Motors in the US has had significant success with using this technology for internal comms. They used it to reach all 190,000 employees with information they didn’t have access to before. I’m looking for more info.
February 27th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
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May 20th, 2010 at 8:31 am
Appreciate you sharing, great post.Really thank you! Awesome.