- Fares Laroui
- December 19, 2018
How Communication Professionals can Boost Employee Engagement using eXo Platform
In previous blog posts, we discussed the benefits a digital workplace can bring to your organization as a whole and to your employees from different business roles.
Each business function requires specific tools and applications to perform effectively, blend in with the organization and align with its overall strategy.
Content
In this blog post, we will cover the common workplace communication problems organizations face and how corporate communication specialists can drive engagement using eXo platform.
1. Common workplace communication challenges
Every digital workplace implementation initiative is driven by different challenges. Employee disengagement due to ineffective internal communication is often at the heart of these challenges as this can lead to reduced productivity and contribute to both increased staff turnover and overall poor business performance.
Corporate communication strategies often lie behind lack of staff engagement. A 2018 Nintex study entitled ‘The Definitive Guide to America’s Most Broken Processes” – a survey of 1000 full-time US employees – found that onboarding and conveying company culture are among the major concerns for employees, with 55 per cent having trouble accessing tools and documents that enable good job performance.
Furthermore, 34 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively, consider becoming part of the company culture and being introduced to colleagues as a challenge. Findings from this study demonstrate that corporate communication is directly associated with your employee well-being and the overall performance of the business.
Based on numerous studies and our experience with eXo clients, employees from different organizations use a variety of business tools to communicate and collaborate daily.
As a result, they become overwhelmed and feel under pressure to use these different tools. We have also noticed that employees seldom express that they have received insufficient guidance or inadequate training in using the tools they have at their disposal, resulting in more time spent searching for information and their missing out on critical knowledge.
2. Leveraging communications using eXo Platform to drive engagement
Corporate communication professionals have a responsibility to keep employees engaged, convey corporate culture and encourage knowledge sharing and collective ideation.
Finding a communication channel for top-down, bottom-up, cross-departmental and peer-to-peer communications, all in a single platform, is a good place to start reshaping your corporate communication strategy as it helps in unifying the different tools you already have – for example, email, chat applications, and so on – and helps your employees perform more effectively and efficiently.
eXo Platform, with its rich set of features, can help with this. Here is a list of the different communication challenges eXo can help your business overcome:
Top-down communication
Providing your employees with the latest announcements, corporate news and upcoming events will ensure a more engaged and informed workforce and promote a culture of transparency.
Thanks to the advanced content management capabilities of eXo platform, your communication specialists will be able to easily create, edit, organize and publish different types of content in centralized spaces to respond to specific use cases.
These dedicated spaces are customizable in terms of both design (page layout) and content (microblogs, wikis, etc.).
eXo Platform can be used to dedicate a space to news and announcements in which communication specialists can convey the latest company updates and guidelines.
This is an easy, modern and effective mode of communication as it leverages the enterprise social network functionality.
Messages broadcasted this way notify users (on-site, by email and by mobile) and are displayed in the target users’ activity streams, from which they can respond to them.
Leveraging the familiarity of social networks helps increase the level of engagement of otherwise static corporate top-down communications.
Another way of creating and publishing top-down communications is to use our built-in content management system to display traditional web content, such as corporate blogs and image sliders, thereby highlighting these forms of communication. The home page is a popular place to display such content.
A third example of how your communication team can enhance top-down communication is by combining eXo’s enterprise social network for fluid and easy posting with web content management features for highlighted display.
That way, you’ll be able to post news using the activity stream message composer of spaces that are predefined as corporate communication channels.
Writing a news announcement inside a corporate communications space:
The latest messages from these special spaces are then automatically curated and highlighted in your site’s home page in the form of traditional web content:
Bottom-up communication
eXo Platform can provide your teams with specific features that enable them to participate in discussions about different topics and share their opinions by participating in polls. Employees can post and interact with a variety of content via comments, likes and shares.
Cross-team communication
The conversational and collaborative dimensions of eXo Platform facilitate cross-departmental communication.
Employees from different departments will be able to communicate and collaborate on different projects and get the information they need from a single space.
This eliminates the time spent searching for information and streamlines the knowledge that your communication department, for example, would like to share with other teams.
Peer-to-peer communication
The social aspect of eXo Platform allows users to search and reach colleagues via the activity stream, dedicated spaces and active directory. The exchange of different types of content (files, articles, discussions, photos, videos, etc.) is facilitated by the built-in chat application.
Communication specialists can adopt these features to encourage teams to communicate more effectively, and create discussions around topics not necessarily work-related, resulting in an improved work environment and an embraced company culture.
And finally – a way to further boost engagement around communications
Introduced lately as part of our vision to boost employee engagement, the gamification add-on has been developed by layering game-like features to make the platform more fun to use, thus encouraging internal communication and interaction with the platform.
Every time a user posts a piece of content, or likes, comments or shares his/her peer’s content, he/she will earn a specific number of points.
A badge detailing achievements is displayed on the user’s profile as well as on a leaderboard on the home page, displaying users ranks per specific periods.
This add-on has proved to be a great way of tracking employees’ engagement with our solution and has helped communication specialists achieve their goals of better engagement and a healthy work environment.
Communication in the workplace is a hot topic in today’s business environment. Choosing a digital workplace solution capable of improving communication across your entire organization is key for the well-being of your employees and the overall health of your business.
eXo platform, with its large array of collaborative features, can help your business overcome these challenges.
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I am a product marketing specialist at eXo. My role is to assist marketing and sales teams in their operations and present our digital workplace solution to the world. I mainly blog about the latest tech trends, digital transformation, internal communication and how to navigate through eXo Platform.
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