You have just come back from a seminar on social media; you feel it could be a new and critically important part of marketing your business.
To date, you have prohibited employees from accessing the Internet and any of their social networks from the workplace. You have heard of horror stories about employees downloading porn, spending hours chatting with their friends and critiquing their companies, all during the workday and don’t want to create the temptation for your employees. Though you say you trust them, you continue to insist that employees should not have access to the Internet.
The seminar you attended introduced you to a more significant role of social media in the business, and thatemployees could be involved in both creating it and maintaining it. This would of course require them access to the Internet. This also could help them focus more on productive and business supporting Internet activities.
Some questions to consider:
- How can you change your Internet access policy?
- How can you use your employees to develop your social media response or hire an outside expert and maintain the controls over Internet access in the company?
- What are three immediate benefits you would see by making these kinds of changes?
- What concerns will you have to address if you make these kinds of changes?
- Who will you have this discussion with employees about how to help employees use their connections to advance the business?
Your people are your profits. Withholding tools from your profit drivers doesn’t help them, or you, be successful. So, in a changing world, it is critical for managers to discuss and offer guidance in how to use the new tools that appear. After all, if you have hired employees who are good at and passionate about their jobs, they are already looking for ways to add value and make a difference. Include them in this discussion and you may discover other ways that your employees (and who and what they know) will advance your business. Talk about important things. Stay connected to your world. Hold your employees accountable for performance.
Contact me to learn about our new program titled, How to Move From Good To Great – Using your Unique Abilities to Step Up and Stand Out in the Workplace. This program helps employees discover their talents, strengths, and passions, then guides them to discover opportunities in their workplace to do what they do best to improve performance and company results.
accountability, chat rooms, employee performance, employee social media, Facebook, internet access, social media, social media in the workplace
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 at 5:55 am and is filed under For Managers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
