Social Media: Helping Businesses to Actively Engage Employees for L&D
Social media revolution has changed our day-to-day activity. Many of us find life in this virtual world of social media more engaging than the real one. From carrying the way businesses conduct or we seek knowledge and information, all the aspects of our life have a direct or indirect influence of the social networking sites.
On the one hand, where we rejoice social media revolution, there are countless incidents and reports when several business houses hold the very same social media responsible for productivity and work hour losses. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and several others have attention grabbing capacity, due to which employees during their work hours gets easily distracted.
Work Hour and Productivity Loss Due to Social Media: A Case Study
To show dithering productivity and work hour losses of businesses, several researches have been carried. One of such research tells that 1 out of 5 employees waste around 6 working hours per day on the social media. Another research says that employees takes around 23 minutes to get back to work after getting distracted to social media networks. After these researches on ‘work hours and productivity loss’, several organizations from across the world who are witnessing productivity downfall are keeping eagle’s eye on its employees and are forced to either block social networking sites from workstations or conduct employee audit surveillances.
Result of one month long employee audit surveillance amazed everyone. It was found that on average basis each employee was active on social media for 2 hours per day. For this organization with 2500 employees, social media use of 2 hours per day means 5000 work hours loss per day, which is indeed a huge-huge loss for the business.
To prevent productivity loss caused due to the social media, several suggestions were laid down. Many managers of FSC Software Solutions Ltd. suggested for applying a red-carpet ban on use of the social media, while some advised to go for social media breaks, where employees can freely use social media during lunch and tea recess. However, these strategies for preventing employees from getting distracted and causing productivity loss are not the ultimate solutions, as nowadays almost all employees have smart phones through which social networking sites are easily accessible.
Therefore, in such a scenario it is advisable for businesses to come with out of box ideas and creatively use social media for business purposes, such as training and development. At the same time, L&D and corporate training managers recommended to creatively use social media platforms for corporate trainings.
Jack, L&D manager of the organizations advised following ways for using social media creatively for learning and development of employees.
Snapchat, LinkedIn, Facebook and Many More for L&D
Several features of social media platforms such as: photo and video sharing, videoconferencing, and many more have been used for transferring knowledge, advertisements and many more. These features of social media have enabled to easily carry out messages to its target audience like never before. Social media has also helped businesses to engage and train its employees in an attractive way. Out of several available benefits of social networking, Jack suggested following ways for using features of popular social media platforms for learning and development of employees.
Conclusion
Jack while explaining how social media networks can be best used as eLearning tools also said that by transferring training modules through Facebook, Instagram and others, learners can actively engage and enhance their retention capabilities. After Jack’s suggestions on using social media as eLearning tools, FSC Software Solutions Ltd. is using popular social media channels for meeting organization’s learning and development means, which is ultimately helping the business to cut down productivity loss.
