In today’s demanding corporate environment, businesses are struggling to boost employee engagement. It is a strategic imperative but no small task given the severity of the problem. According to Gallup Inc.’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace report, only 13 percent of employees say they are engaged at work. Astoundingly, actively disengaged workers continue to outnumber engaged employees at a rate of nearly two to one

1. 6 Ways Social Collaboration Can Boost
Employee Engagement

2. SUCCESSFACTORS / WHITE PAPER
6 WAYS SOCIAL COLLABORATION CAN BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
6 Ways Social Collaboration
Can Boost Employee
Engagement
In today’s demanding corporate environment, businesses are struggling
to boost employee engagement. It is a strategic imperative but no small
task given the severity of the problem. According to Gallup Inc.’s 2013
State of the Global Workplace report, only 13 percent of employees say
they are engaged at work. Astoundingly, actively disengaged workers
continue to outnumber engaged employees at a rate of nearly two to one.
Employee engagement is typically deemed the primary responsibility of human resources
organizations and many have put programs and surveys in place but are not seeing improvements
rapidly enough, if at all. These organizations are left trying to determine why employees aren’t more
engaged and the right measures to put in place to increase employee engagement.
If you look around and identify any business where employees are genuinely happy and productive,
you’ll see that one key to employee engagement is people. People are engaged by people –
productive and satisfied employees like their work, who they work with, and who they work for.
Collaboration, the act of working with other people to achieve business benefit, is vital to employee
engagement. Connecting people to other people – and to the information and processes they need
to get their work done – is a key to unlocking employee potential.
Now, HR and senior executives can take advantage of solutions that bring productive, engaging
social collaboration to the enterprise.
SAP Jam delivers enterprise social collaboration where employees work, connecting customers,
partners, and employees with information, applications, and processes to solve business-critical
problems and to drive results – all in your social network, business applications, or while mobile.
SAP Jam natively integrates with other SAP and SuccessFactors solutions, cloud or on premise,
and brings together people, information, and content, all within the business process.
Using a solution like SAP Jam, HR departments will have concrete solutions for the following
questions:
• What are you doing to increase the engagement of the workforce?
• How can we get new hires engaged and productive faster?
• How can we reduce the cost of training while provide more and better training?
• What are we doing to improve performance management?
• How can we get more employees collaborating and contributing?
• How do we ensure employees can be productive wherever they are – in remote offices, while
traveling, or while mobile?
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3. SUCCESSFACTORS / WHITE PAPER
6 WAYS SOCIAL COLLABORATION CAN BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
The answers to these questions are critical to the success of any employee engagement initiative
and therefore to any company. HR and senior executives need to ensure they have the right
solutions in place to help employees connect and collaborate.
The following are the most important ways that enterprise social collaboration can drive employee
engagement. Using an enterprise social collaboration solution, you can lay a foundation for
successful and productive collaboration that drives employee engagement.
1. Engage employees directly and continuously.
Many organizations are looking for ways to engage more directly and communicate more effectively
with their workforce in a world of an increasing number of remote workers and the need for
authentic, transparent connection. Enterprise social collaboration breaks down organizational silos
by providing a secure, social foundation across the entire business. This foundation can be used to
cascade messages, take pulse checks, manage teams and projects, work with internal and external
parties, find experts, and innovate more effectively. It also ensures that employees have
transparency and an ability to ask questions and express their opinions.
For example, TELUS Communications, a $10.9 billion global telecommunications company, has
had impressive success using a variety of communication and collaboration techniques within SAP
Jam and other tools to advance their corporate strategy. They use conversations, blogs, videos,
status updates, and document sharing to achieve a company-wide conversation that is both
productive and engaging and have seen direct impact on their employee engagement.
2. Minimize time to contribution
New employees often face daunting learning curves when they join an organization, lengthening
the time it takes to reach full productivity. Enterprise social collaboration can connect new hires
with the people and content they need, thereby reducing the time to contribution and ultimately
increasing retention.
Automatic assignment to new hire groups will seamlessly connect new hires with key people,
training, and information. Through integration with back-end HR systems, the system can use
profile information to easily locate the right person to help the task at hand. Additionally, the
extended social network can recommend people and content that is relevant. These best practices
enable new hires to jump right into interaction with key people and content that can answer
questions and direct their learning, making them productive from their first day.
3. Facilitate agile learning
The pressure to lower learning and training costs is intense, while employees are asking for more
comprehensive and flexible learning alternatives. Enterprise social collaboration can help increase
the knowledge retention and productivity of your employees by tapping into their natural, social
learning styles. It can do this by extending learning into the realm of the social, helping connect
people to productively share information in ways that further learning.
HR and senior
executives need
to ensure they
have the right
solutions in place
to help employees
connect and
collaborate.
3

4. SUCCESSFACTORS / WHITE PAPER
6 WAYS SOCIAL COLLABORATION CAN BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
From mentoring to communities to collaboration, enterprise social collaboration enables use of
discovery, collaboration, peer resources, and expert finding to find new and inventive ways to get
answers and further on the job learning. Additionally, communities of learners can work together
prior to classes or based on specific topics of interest, creating communities to ask questions,
engage and share information, hold informal events, use polls, and discuss topics of interest.
These collaborative, engaging techniques facilitate agile learning while keeping costs down.
4. Enable employee connection and collaboration
With workers across the globe, in multiple sites, and highly mobile, companies need a way to easily
keep employees connected wherever they are. Enterprise collaboration solutions provide a flexible,
easy-to-use solution for connecting employees to other employees as well as to the applications
and information they need to get their job done.
Whether working on an impromptu team, a task force or special project, or regular ongoing
departmental interactions, these solutions support employee collaboration in the context of
business that deepens and enriches collaboration. These solutions provide decision-making
support, monitor and update back-end data, enable notification, and facilitate discussions, in the
context of the back-end applications and process employees interact with every day. When you
allow your workforce to leverage the wisdom of the crowd, preserve knowledge, share successes,
and get fast answers, your employees will find it easier and faster to make good business decisions.
5. Transform performance management
Performance management can be a burdensome and frustrating process, yet it is critical to
developing employees and managers across the organization. Enterprise social collaboration
solutions enable you to cascade messages and guidance easily and help your workforce create
and share goals. They put people at the center of the process with social capabilities to ensure the
process is inclusive, collaborative, and results-driven.
One way to increase compliance with the talent management process is to ensure everyone
understands the intent and details of the process. Enterprise social collaboration solutions
streamline and enhance communication with videos, messages, and annotated documents that
can be easily created and distributed to actively guide all employees or specific groups through the
performance management process. They also connect various levels of your organization to ensure
managers are up to date with the latest information and can share best practices.
The individual level is where things really get interesting. Enterprise social collaboration enables the
setting and managing of goals in a collaborative, open manner. Private performance rooms can help
team members track and stay on top of their goals as well as provide a forum for managers to work
with individual employees on specific issues. All of this results in faster and better goal alignment
and completion, which increases the level of control and engagement of every employee.
When you allow
your workforce to
leverage the
wisdom of the
crowd, preserve
knowledge, share
successes, and
get fast answers,
your employees will
find it easier and
faster to make
good business
decisions.
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5. SUCCESSFACTORS / WHITE PAPER
6 WAYS SOCIAL COLLABORATION CAN BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
6. Keep employees connected and productive
63% of US companies allow employees to work from a flexible location, either from home or by
telecommuting, according to a 2012 study by National Study of Employers. Key to ensuring
employee productivity – and more importantly, employee engagement – is providing the foundation
that enables employees to work productively, regardless of location.
The most effective and efficient way to enable remote productivity is to ensure that the business
applications employees use every day, such as CRM or Financials, enable employees to connect
and collaborate directly from where they work every day. If your enterprise social collaboration
solution is disconnected from business applications, it becomes just another task on a long list of
to-dos. Because of this, employees are less likely to take advantage of the collaboration capabilities
and what will result is a siloed application with minimal usage.
Remote work is one side of the equation; the critical other half is to ensure workers can take
advantage of intelligent collaboration features while mobile. The use of phones and tablets in the
enterprise has seen tremendous growth and enabling enterprise social collaboration on these
devices ensures that your employees can access the information and people they need while
mobile and never miss a beat.
By deploying SAP Jam, a cloud-based solution, HR and senior executives enable their workforce
to engage and collaborate like never before, thereby increasing employee engagement. Enable
connection and collaboration with other employees, customers, and partners, as well as the
information, applications, and processes needed to solve business critical problems and
drive results.
Contact us to see how SAP Jam can help HR and senior leadership enable unparalleled enterprise
social collaboration today.
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v. 01 2014
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