Comment: Engaging staff in social media

Over the past 12 months, I talked a lot about making hotels more social and embedding social media into your company’s organisational culture.

I looked at reservations/revenue, housekeeping, engineering, and other key departments, but that’s not where things start, is it? Housekeepers and engineers do not magically appear in your hotel, they need to be brought on board. Truly social hotels then, require social “onboarding” strategies.

Social media is already widely used as a recruitment tool and if you’re not recruiting socially yet, you’re probably missing out.

It’s easy to add a recruitment tab or widget to your LinkedIn or Facebook pages and you can also use other services such as Twitter, and SlideShare to advertise your vacancies and showcase your employer brand. That’s not really what I want to talk about here —not just because I wrote about it in July 2012 already.

Rather, I’d like to look specifically at the onboarding process and how you can grow a social and digital media friendly and supportive workforce.

If you want to be a truly social company, it’s a good idea to make this clear from the start. Perhaps dedicate some time during your employee induction sessions to encourage new starts to follow your LinkedIn company page, link their profiles to it, and engage with updates you post.

On Facebook and Google+, employees can also connect to your official company pages in their own profiles.

Give your new staff members an overview of your various social media accounts and activities and ask them which platforms they’re using. If they are on Twitter, make a note of their Twitter username and ensure your company account connects with them. You could even create a private (as opposed to publicly visible) Twitter list with the usernames of all your employees who are active on the platform.

Today’s employees are very social, whether at work or at home, so offer them social and digital channels to engage with each other and with the company. If you don’t, they’ll do it anyway, but without your involvement, so you’ll be missing out on suggestions, ideas, and, yes, gossip, too!

If you don’t create official social communities on platforms like Facebook (e.g. closed groups for your employees), your associates will create them. Just search for the name of any of the better-known Dubai hotels on Facebook and you’ll see a large number of unofficial groups popping up.

Most of them have been set up by well-meaning employees, but many of them are very brand conform and often such groups feature poor spelling, and sometimes lack suitable privacy settings so that everything posted is publicly visible.

Make it attractive for your employees to join such groups by using them as internal noticeboards and interacting with your associates. You could be sitting on a great focus group to decide on new ideas, or you could give staff a chance to decide on next week’s staff dining menus, etc.

If you inform your employees when they join you about where to find your social communities, you can gently nudge them in the right direction and avoid unofficial groups popping up.

You’ll never avoid them entirely, of course, so your social media team should scan platforms regularly and reach out to the creators and admins of unofficial groups to see if they can be integrated into existing communities.

Using tools like Google hangouts (accessible to everybody with a Gmail address or an account for other Google products like YouTube), you could also offer “virtual Q&A sessions” for employees or even potential employees (virtual open days anybody?).

Being a GM or senior manager in a hotel or restaurant these days, undeniably, has a social edge to it and clever professionals have realised that having two profiles, one for work and one for their private lives, is the way to go on many platforms. You can then connect with employees using your work profiles and mention them in updates, praise them publicly for a job well done, or inform them of events.

For larger companies or chains, or for the more adventurous, a company internal social networking and collaboration tool could be the way forward. Check out platforms like Yammer, Convo, or Jive.

Lastly, social media platforms are also great for collecting employee testimonials. YouTube videos, or shorter Instagram, Twitter, or Vine clips of your employees talking about their jobs are great employer branding tools and you can use them internally, in social media recruitment campaigns, at open days, and job fairs.
Whatever you do: Keep it social!

About the Author:
Martin Kubler is the CEO of Iconsulthotels, a Dubai-based ultra-boutique consulting firm. Iconsulthotels assists companies in achieving their business goals through PR, social/digital media, and customised business strategies. Email: info@iconsulthotels.com.