Organisations that are not yet using enterprise social are missing out on valuable opportunities to increase productivity and effectiveness as well as improve organisational culture. Enterprise social uses social media and communication technologies, such as chat and mobile tools, to provide a framework for collaborative working. 

Studies have shown that businesses prioritising collaboration experience a 131 per cent increase in operational efficiency and a 245 per cent higher rate of sales reps achieving their targets. 

Every organisation can benefit from enterprise social in different ways. Firstly, organisations need to understand what they are trying to achieve. Understanding the issues and use cases that social technologies can remediate and support is the first and most important step before choosing the right enterprise social solution. The technology is the easy part. The focus should be on people and change management. When implemented correctly, enterprise social allows employees to engage with co-workers like never before. 

OBS has identified five benefits of a collaborative approach: 

1. Improved Knowledge Management 

Shared knowledge is a key feature of enterprise social as there is an organisational cost associated with each employee needing to find, learn or re-discover information. 

Up to 28 hours are week are spent by the average employee just on finding information required for their role, communicating via email and collaborating with co-workers. This is a large amount of time being spent ineffectively.” 

Having a central information repository for everyone in the business encourages better knowledge sharing, collaboration and effectively reduces the effort and time spent finding information. 

2. Better team collaboration and organisation 

Enterprise social supports better team collaboration by making it easy to interact with colleagues regardless of department or geographical location. Often great ideas come from collaboration between team members that do not usually work together. Team members can share documents quickly and easily, and any required updates can be done straight away. 

3. Improved productivity and turn-around times 

Enterprise social allows users to crowdsource ideas and problems. It generally provides a larger audience than email can. It can also uncover hidden organisational knowledge and talent which are often forgotten and filed away in employees’ resumes. 

Working on a shared platform means that more than one person can work on a document at any given time and provide instant feedback to other team members. Colleagues can see changes as soon as they are made as well as have an informal discussion around the document. Other co-workers can then be brought into the conversation and contribute where needed. This can significantly reduce approval times, improving customer service levels and productivity. 

4. Improved employee engagement 

Improved employee engagement often creates the most value and ROI. High employee engagement is directly correlated with higher productivity. Improved engagement levels are assisted by feeling socially ‘connected’ with an organisation. The sensation of having a voice, contributing to the bigger picture, connecting with other like-minded employees and generally feeling valued are all attributes that assist the facilitation of engagement levels. 

Enterprise social can also help remove organisational silos and flatten hierarchy by providing an open, transparent platform and encouraging collaborative interactions at all levels. It enables ‘collective intelligence’, which is the development and aggregation of knowledge across an organisation. Employees have an outlet to create and discuss ideas with relevant people around the business and then share any learnings. This makes employees feel valued and heard. It also maximises efficiencies and avoids the same mistakes being made across multiple departments. 

A survey conducted by Gallup revealed that only 13 per cent of employees feel they are engaged at work. Further studies showed that companies with socially engaged employees see 18 per cent higher productivity and a 51 per cent lower turnover. 

5. Improved HR functions 

Employee on boarding is a large cost incurred by almost every organisation, yet only 8 per cent of large companies feel they have necessary programs to help employees adapt. Enterprise social assists in reducing the costs associated with training and upskilling of brand new employees during the period of which they do not provide full output. Essentially, new staff can be productive sooner with less training. 

An enterprise social platform means that all knowledge is in one centralised place for future users. This makes learning resources easily accessible to everyone in the business. It also lets an organisation maximise their online courses and training opportunities across teams, offices and even different countries. With up to 80 per cent of people learning through informal methods learning shouldn’t stop at the training room. 

People are inherently used to interacting across social platforms in their private lives. To get the best from their employees businesses should reflect this in the workplace.