Employees' anxiety for status updates — via tweets, blogs and social networking sites — is a frequent finding in employee surveys these days. The millennial workforce expects to use the same tools and methods of networking that it uses in its social life, to create business value even in professional life.

Social technologies have given birth to a “counter culture” that asks employers to make employees willing co-creators. However, it raises some questions: Whether to go the social way? If yes, to what extent? Why? Personally, I am for social engagement even if the engagement sometimes happens during office hours. However, I am also for coordination, monitoring, mentoring, governance and the alignment of social engagement to make it fruitful for both the business and the employee.

The social media should solve customers' problems and create knowledge. Ultimately, social engagement should become part of value co-creation — that is the challenge.

I am convinced that businesses need to act like organised ‘engagement exchanges' that promote, mentor and align employees' engagement with other internal and external stakeholders. Employers will have to host the conversations, networking activities and collaborations between employees and external stakeholders. The three engagement areas worth promoting are: engagement with management, with co-workers, and engagement with stakeholders.

Engagement with management

Today organisations offer their employees the chance to contribute in corporate thinking and decision-making that was once confined to boardrooms. Companies such as IBM and NEC, through their extensive co-creation exercises, are successful case studies for engaging employees in creating managerial value that governs everything from what goes into the product to management of organisational functions.

After about 100 years of its founding, IBM co-created its corporate value in 2003. Using a co-creation platform, IBM asked its employees to re-examine the company's core values. This initiative resulted in IBM employees creating corporate values that “shape everything” IBMers do and “every choice” they “make on behalf of the company and their clients”.

NEC, Japan, conducted ‘dialogue sessions' and ‘town meetings' at every workplace to co-create the Group Vision 2017 and Core Values.

Engagement with co-workers

Today's employees — knowledge workers — identify themselves not so much with their job titles as with their professions. The chief characteristic of knowledge workers, as Peter Drucker observes in one of his books on the knowledge economy, is that they identify themselves with, and are more loyal to, their professional practices such as quality management, marketing and customer relations than to their organisations.

Companies have to identify the professional identities of their employees and help them nurture those identities through collaboration within and outside the organisational boundaries. To quote Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, it is the “identities” that offer “a sense of belonging to a community” and are “a resource, like capital”. Hence, social media should be considered a business resource — social capital that can be practically applied to day jobs.

Already many organisations have seen the merit in introducing social tools on the corporate Intranet. Enterprise application and product lifecycle management tools come with Facebook-like interfaces that enable organisations to co-create value in all phases of wealth generation and distribution, with both internal and external stakeholders. This means employees — say production guys — can not only mail, but tweet, blog, status-update, alert, mobile upload, submit, rate and comment — to manage a project or develop a product.

Engagement with stakeholders

Employees also want to authentically engage with the society on behalf of their organisation in creating shared value. They are required to collaborate with external stakeholders to justify their roles — for instance, a customer relations executive would need to engage with customers, potential customers, lead users, and even ex-customers, to gather ideas and insights that would help the company increase customer satisfaction and market share. Hence, businesses can map their external stakeholders — right from Government, media, suppliers, customers, partners and civil society — and match them with the roles of employee groups and think of creating opportunities for interactions between them.

Companies such as Dell, Intel, GE, and Starbucks have gained enormous brand value by letting their employees engage — either individually or collectively — with external stakeholders for generating more revenue, ideas, and for honouring their contract with society.

To sum up, the business benefits of having an engaging and empowered workforce in terms of attracting and retaining talent and customers is being proved beyond doubt. Instead of resisting the change, businesses need to actively evolve organisational approach, training, and governance for engaging employees with management, co-workers and external stakeholders that will not only help them advance their business interests, but also help the employees further their professional aspirations — the ultimate way to boost the employment brand.

E. Balaji is MD & CEO, Ma Foi Randstad.

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