Today, leaders face challenges in many different areas. Traditional topics like attrition, engagement, and loyalty have turned from one level to another. The new reality insists that leaders become more socially driven. At the same time, this new reality pushes leaders to move from the offline environment created by the traditional ways of interaction in the workplace. Instead, it shifts its focus to another area – the online platforms. With the opportunities, social platforms in the workplace also create responsibility for making them attractive and generating engagement and connection between them and the people using them.
Promoting an online social environment has become a new norm and is a good predictor of how a company can win or lose the big game for employees and talents.
Leaders invest resources in building platforms for interaction, abandoning them after a year or two or making them obsolete while no one uses them.
And the circle repeatedly goes, moving into the numbers of attrition rates, engagement scores, enablement initiatives, etc.
In this reality, many leaders feel lost and helpless to create something sustainable to ensure the organization’s business continuity.
Online presence remains a hot topic and a real challenge, and leaders struggle with the answer to what can be done to keep the best talents and lower the level of efforts to create a meaningful and long-lasting online community.
Consultants from all over the world have given so much advice on what to do. Plans are executed everywhere. People are being bombarded with information and opportunities to interact more. And still, something isn’t working well. These same people continue to leave companies and report feeling isolated and overwhelmed with initiatives that do not lead to anything meaningful for them and all the others surrounding them.
Leaders should think again about what to improve to win that small battle with disengagement and improve sustainable performance and well-being in time.
Here is where the countless lists come in the game. And every list of possible actions starts with a typical phrase about engagement: “Think about how to engage the right people in the process.”
Here is where I start differently. First, I will offer you my list of things to do to create an excellent, engaging platform for employees in your organization. This list has proved to work within more than 60 projects I have been hired to execute.
Start with:
Addressing affordability
People are bombarded with opportunities, platforms, and wins from everywhere. For the leader to offer a working platform for everyone, they need to communicate it as a tool that is easy to tackle and simultaneously creates opportunities for the users. Such options may be to have more information about company structure, learn about something good that has happened to one of your co-workers, promote learning and growth in different ways, and share information that may trigger more outstanding good initiatives not for everyone but for that person, that looks alone into the new platform. The more individual value is communicated as an opportunity, the higher acceptance the leader can expect from those parts of that platform.
Development of engaging multimedia content
Many people still miss the simple rule that you win if you have the right content for everyone you want to attract. It is like putting your finger on the pulse of the group you create for. The leader who understands that will have more comprehensive coverage for their initiative across the population of people they want to attract. Why multimedia? If you’re going to give advice, you may use only the written form of content. A leader who turns themselves in favor of all employees must think about how these people spend their time – social networks with short video clips, music, and audio platforms offering you free to hear part of the content published. No matter the country or group, people do not want to pay for something or invest too much time to understand it. The more basic the content is, the larger the population for it will be. At the same time, the more static a content list may be, the less attractive it becomes for the auditorium.
Practices application
Great content and excellent practices are not always unique. So many companies and organizations have created so many things so far that uniqueness is impossible. What may look like an uncommon practice in one part of the world may be widely used in another. The best leader does not create uniqueness but can find the most suitable methods to support their teams and organization on the path to evolving internal engagement through creating external enablement.
Promotion through the proper auditorium
“Everyone gets everything, or we better not start this.” I have heard that phrase many times in my life. No matter who has used it, they were always thinking in the same framework – If it doesn’t work for everyone, then it is useless. And there is nothing more wrong than that. Platforms for creating enablement and boosting internal engagement and motivation are not designed to suit everyone. It is not possible. Why didn’t giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon succeed if it was possible? The golden rule for the leader is that there cannot be 100% happy and engaged people. The trick is to find the proper auditorium that will benefit from what you create and create content for them. The closer you are to the specific arena, the stronger connection your actions will make.
Create corporate-partnered programs
Now comes one of the most misunderstood elements – the partnership element. Showing examples from other environments and companies is a good start. Still, a platform boosting internal engagement needs people to see and understand how that platform connects different parts of the whole. For example, programs for entertaining and educating people should be widely spread to cover the largest possible population. Corporate-partnered programs do not result but are values and strategy-driven. The more a platform is connected with the organization’s values and represents the broader and longer strategy to build success and grow in time, the more this platform connects people. Stepping on the values creates a community with the same standards. It evolves a long-term strategy together with all participants in the forum and not in an isolated way from them. It also boosts internal engagement and creates a shared level of understanding and a similar level of acceptance.
Demonstrate and support implications for the future
“We had our processes on paper, now we digitalized them, and we have our internal platform.” – These were the words of the CEO of the largest Oil and Energy company, employing more than 11,000 employees in all its structures. And that was a wrong assumption.
What makes a platform likable and accepted is the value that this platform creates, not for the current moment but for the future.
A leader can understand that he is creating for the future. What an organization makes now must be created with the understanding that it is designed for the future and will bring people, ideas, values, and strategy to one place for the next step in the organization’s run.
Everything else focused on what is only happening now creates storage for current content and nothing for future success.
IN CONCLUSION:
Creating platforms to enable people for the future success of organizations is not a challenging task. But still, many leaders fail in it (according to an HBR survey from 2021, forty-two percent of all initiatives in that area have been unable). To create the right enablement platform that makes people, the leader must first understand what is important and then do their best to ensure sustainable change is happening with the employees and in line with the organization’s plans for the future.
The Human place 