Employee engagement and social media

Tonight I had the pleasure of meeting with a room full of comms pros as I led a Social Summer session at the headquarters of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in London. I always enjoy discussing all things internal communication, and it was lovely to meet people I’ve Tweeted with for a while in real life.

Organisations are increasingly placing importance on employee engagement and recognising the benefits of having an engaged workforce. The evidence is stacking up and movements like Engage for Success @engage4success, are helping to drive awareness of the benefits for people, businesses and the economy.

Enhancing engagement
I looked at how to engage employees and whether social media has a role to play in helping organisations communicate with their colleagues and stakeholders. I discussed how internal communication is changing because of social media and looked at ways to enhance engagement.

The definition of employee engagement I used was: “A workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.” Plus “Creating the conditions in which employees offer more of their capability and potential.” These definitions are from Engage for Success.

Regular readers will know I went to Rome in May to help establish the Italian version of the movement, ImpresAperta, and speak at the launch of their task force. If you’d like to see how they are doing, check out their website or find them on Twitter @Impresaperta.

Thank you to Headlines who sent me some of the employee engagement toolkits they produced, to give out tonight. It includes an infographic packed full of statistics and information to equip conversations about employee engagement in organisations.

There was plenty of time for questions and answers this evening. Queries included how to help senior leaders get comfortable with social media, the role of employee engagement in smaller companies (check out this case study for thoughts on this topic) and the role of authenticity in internal communication.

I talked about Share This and Share This Too, the books I’ve contributed to alongside my fellow CIPR Social Media Panel members that I wrote about yesterday.

Thank you to CIPR for asking me to lead this session and to everyone who came to listen to me speak. I enjoyed hearing the views of those who attended and sharing the good work of Engage for Success. You can see my upcoming speaking engagements here.

You can see my slides below. As ever, context is king. But hopefully you’ll be able to glean a sense of the conversation and I’ve created a Storify of the Tweets and pics from people who attended tonight to give you a flavour of the discussion.

Rachel

Further reading

If you want to read more about employee engagement, see my previous articles and resources page:

• How to engage people with disabilities
• Engaging for success in Italy – overview of my visit to Rome to help launch their version of E4S.
• BlogTalkRadio – weekly radio show, Monday 4pm BST, on employee engagement. Includes a listen again feature
• How to engage for success
• Milan social media week: Italy gets engaged
• Engaging workplaces for a sustainable future
• The Sunday night blues