How you engage your employees to use and communicate on social media has an enormous correlation on how much they buy into the company mission.
A study from Opinion Research Corporation suggests that employees are two times more likely to go the extra mile for their organization and almost four times more likely to recommend their company if they’re satisfied with how the business communicates tough decisions.
Positive communications about your company can boost employee motivation and is the starting ground for employee advocacy. But some of the resistance to employee advocacy lies within the older workforce who did not grow up being digital natives. Unlike their millennial counterparts, social media, the Internet, and mobile technology are not second nature.
There’s often a sense of fear, hesitation, and misunderstanding on how to use social media. Brandy Wilson, Manager, Global Communications and Marketing at BCD Travel dealt with similar challenges within her organization. Brandy mentioned, “we found that people who are not used to social media are a bit hesitant to get out there, but we knew how important it was for our people to get out there because of their reach, impact, and expertise.”
The digital divide between your older workforce and social media is real but it isn’t a bridge that can’t be crossed.
Bridging the Gap Between the Older Workforce and Social Media
For many of us, social media usage is now ingrained in our daily lives, both personally and professionally. Today’s modern employee uses social media on the job to take mental breaks, connect with friends and colleagues, and even source information that helps solve problems at work.
Pew Research found that social media use can “enhance worker productivity by fostering connections with colleagues and resources around the globe.” After surveying 2,003 American adults on how they use social media, they found:
- 34% use social media while at work to take a mental break from their job
- 27% connect with friends and family while at work
- 24% make or support professional connections
- 20% get information that helps them solve problems at work
- 17% build or strengthen personal relationships with coworkers
- 17% learn about someone they work with
- 12% ask work-related questions of people outside their organization
- 12% ask such questions of people inside their organization
Using Social Media at Work
Whether sanctioned in the workplace or not, social networking platforms are increasingly promoting the real-time sharing of thoughts and experiences, further blurring the work versus personal divide.
For Millennials, social media is simply just a part of life and the way they interact with the world around them. Despite contrary belief, even older generations have gone social; Facebook has now become the platform of choice for baby boomers. Younger generations have moved on to newer social platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat.
Through our recent research with Golfdale Consulting, we found that on average, employees spend almost three hours per day on social platforms. Nearly half of this use occurs in the workplace, with employees reporting they spend on average 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on social media. If companies either require or allow their employees to use their own mobile devices at work, then many are checking their social profiles and feeds over ten times a day.
Building Relationships in the Social Age
Past perceptions of social media in the workforce were often noted as negative and unproductive. However, as businesses become more social, there is a large opportunity to tap into employees’ social networks for business purposes. One of the most common use cases for the older generation is building relationships.
Building relationships are still relevant as social selling programs continue to grow within organizations. In most cases, social selling has helped pave the way for one-to-one relationship building at scale through platforms like LinkedIn. This is beneficial for both the employee building their personal networks and the business acquiring new customers.
As an older organization, BCD Travel went through a similar revelation where their employees had access to much larger networks yet they were untapped due to a lack of social media knowledge. As Brandy mentioned, “we had to overcome the challenge of people that were unfamiliar with the platform so we wanted to introduce in a way that was easier and something they wanted to do.”
Social media makes peer-to-peer relationship building and connecting with the people that matter most to your business is easier than ever. LinkedIn has replaced the traditional Rolodex and in most cases business cards as well.
Their social media profiles allow you to gain a better understanding of their interests and what matters most to them.
Enabling the Older Workforce to Use Social Media
Similar to how social media has changed the relationship between company and customer, it is also affecting the relationship between employee and employer as well. For the employer who understands the value of social media, there are several ways they can help their employees get a better grasp of technology.
1. Social Media Training
Offer social media training to ensure employees know how to use it, see the value of it, and understand the best practices for each different network. Dell, for instance, has trained 10,000 employees to use social media to augment their jobs. Nationwide used reverse mentoring to train senior executives on the benefits and use of social media and other internal communications.
You want to make sure you offer social media training in a way that will help employees absorb the information as easily as possible. Offering an in-person social media training because you’ll have the most attention and fewest distractions.
The team will be in the same room, focusing on absorbing that information. It’s also helpful for you to be able to answer their questions live. Webinars are a good option if your team is remote and scattered across the globe. Webinars still have that live engagement, but you don’t necessarily all have to be in the same room at the same time. Some other ways to reinforce this training is through email campaigns. Create a drip campaign with digestible, bite-sized pieces of information on social media.
2. Guide, Not Command
Establishing policies, guidelines and best practices for social media and employee advocacy is important, not only for employers to manage risk, but also to enhance trust among employees. Social media guidelines commonly outline approaches to content creation, content sourcing, and content sharing. Posting work content on personal social media profiles can be intimidating for some employees so organizations need to instill confidence.
While top-down strategies driven by management tend to be more common than strategies where employees have more autonomy, it is important to keep in mind that too much control can make messaging seem inauthentic. Having a ‘single voice’ online may seem less credible by the company’s stakeholder groups, especially to prospective new customers.
Organizations that instill employees with company values and brand messaging through good communication can ultimately trust and allow employees to add a personal touch to their employee advocacy.
3. Make it Easy
Making social media easy requires the latest social technology management. Efficient corporate employee advocacy platforms have several requirements: they must be mobile optimized, user-friendly, integrate with enterprise tools, support multiple document types, and have intelligently designed workflows for content suggestions and approvals.
Employees need to be able to share company content and add their commentary easily. Again, less than half of employees are currently doing so.
It is also essential to ensure that there is a steady stream of new and interesting content available. Software platforms make it easy for employees to share this content through the social media channel of their choice, regardless of the individual’s social savviness. Providing numerous options for sharing increases accessibility. The number of mechanisms available to employees positively correlates with the number of expressions of employee voice.
Can the Older Workforce Be Good on Social Media?
Despite the benefit of being a social-savvy Millennial, there are several core strengths of being a baby boomer on social media. These center around their network size, relationship building skills, and expertise.
Social media presents an opportunity for organizations. Leveraging baby boomers are essential because they’re adept at relationship building. It is up to the organization to train their older workforce on social media best practices and the benefits of leveraging social media advocacy. Then the relationship between engaged employees and social media can be quite positive for both the employee and the organization.
