By Jeff White
I read this article recently titled, “How to use social media to create happy employees.” In my opinion, with a change to some of the examples it could aptly be titled, “How to coach a team.”
Here are a couple of the highlights with my spin on them:
Embrace Your Company Culture. The article talks about sharing your company culture and spotlighting history and employees on social media. We’ve enjoyed doing this, especially through our “Story of this Photo” blog series and with Throwback Thursday social media posts. But when it comes to coaching our team in person, one of our core values at Induron is reliability. Recently, we had a quality luncheon that was based on quarterly goals. We have very stringent goals for our manufacturing and shipping departments that almost call for perfection. When we meet these goals, as a group we have lunch, make sure everyone understands the achievement and award those responsible with a gift. There’s no social media involved here, but it’s an effort that also makes employees feel important and involved.
Empower Employees. We encourage all of our employees to be active on social media with their personal accounts and to interact with our company accounts. We have a relationship with customers and prospects as a whole, but it’s great when individual sales guys also engage. Internally, it is fun to work at a third generation family owned company. We have a number of employees from manufacturing, shipping and sales who are second generation employees. I know from my perspective as a first generation employee that started in sales, what makes it fun is to have input into the direction of the company within my scope of responsibilities. I know many of our folks enjoy that same freedom to make a difference.
The article makes several other good points as well. See them here.