I know that people often see "employee experience" as about bean bags and table football etc. Actually employee experience is about a culture, providing employees with a supportive culture.
One such support is the need now for all companies to support employees when it comes to social media. We have all seen examples of where employees post the "wrong thing" and of course the natural reaction for a company is to control. The problem being that the Genie is out of the bottle. Everybody is on social media. Or as a friend said to me "if somebody isn't on social media, what have they got to hide?"
Social Media use is the norm and we may or maynot like it, but it's a fact of society today.
When I was a child I learned to ride a bike because it gave me amazing freedom, but also so I understood what riding a bike means. You have to do it and feel it, to understand it.
We are being bombarded by messages on a daily basis. Advertising, cold calling, spam is all designed to interrupt what we are doing. So we filter it out, through our own "brain filters" (we don't look at ads in a magazine), by using legislation (GDPR) or by using technology (fast forwarding through ads or ad-blockers etc).
All corporations do is create content that we again don't believe and we block out. We are the greatest, we are number one, we are market leader, just does not resonate with us. Anything that feels like an advert or a pitch, we just ignore "they would say that, wouldn't they" is what we hear in our heads.
The only unique companies have is their employees. Creating a culture and experience that employees like, they will want to share this. We live afterall in a sharing society.
Companies must stop being controlling and embrace this new way of working and activate their employees on social. This makes sense to reduce or stop the mistakes and it makes sense so that companies can harness the power of the employee on social.
(Note this isn't stuffing social with corporate content).
This is about empowering employees to talk, in their own voice on matters that impact them, their lives and the everyday work. The business issues they encounter within the clients and how they solve them. The changes that they see that need to take place in the clients to transform. The business case for those changes. Or whatever it is that takes their fancy, within the guidelines that you have given them.
Employees have the opportunity to makes those changes and employers need to provide employees with the support and activation as part of the employee experience and as part of a digital transformation
Work is radically evolving in the 21st century, with software set to disrupt most traditional industries in the next five to 10 years. Anyone who has ever led a transformation initiative knows that change is hard, but digital transformation is even harder. Whether it’s the scope of change, the adoption of technology or the reorganization of legacy business units, digital transformation affects people, process and technology, making it difficult to get employees to adapt to and embrace change. McKinsey found that organizations with fewer than 100 employees are 2.7 times more likely to report a successful digital transformation than those with more than 50,000 employees.