Human Resources of a company are the building blocks of its success. According to 2015 report on Global Human Capital Trends organized by Bersin Deloitte, a need to create a strategy for employee engagement has been identified. This is a response to the growing worries of employee retention, owing to challenges of diversity in culture.
How can you involve in the process, and empower your employees towards becoming company citizens? Housed under the motto “Empower individuals, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate content from anywhere and on any device”, SharePoint is a web app that integrates with Microsoft Office. It contains a range of software tools aimed at initiating and sustaining the employee engagement in a company. There are two versions of SharePoint, namely – SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server.
How can you use SharePoint to increase employee involvement in your company?
- Initiation into SharePoint HR Portal and site
The first step towards encouraging employee participation is to clearly define the roles of the company staff. This will include: job description, the potential for growth and ways to fulfill this potential. Create a SharePoint HR Portal where you can store this information for each of your employees. When your employee is aware that the company recognizes her skills, she will be motivated to participate in company activities with greater zeal.
Once you have recognized the series of talents that inhabit your company, you should create a SharePoint site. There are two ways of deciding on how you intend to develop talent in your company: firstly, by focusing on teams, recognizing their talent pool and secondly, by having a common list of work skills, including the talents of the entire employees and having a discussion on it every week.
The best method is generally to fuse these two methods such that you hold weekly SharePoint discussions on common work skills. Employees can sync their calendar with Outlook to make sure they are up-to-date with the mentoring meetups and discussions between the management and the employee.
- My Sites in SharePoint
One of the most important factors in employee engagement is consistent and healthy interaction between the employee and manager. Use SharePoint MySites to exhibit the work completed on collaboration, to share content that the manager might have passed on and also to put out your goal document. This can be topped off with a calendar and task list to keep a scheduled track on the employee progress.
- Creating Team Sites and Community Sites
Working at office is not simply being confined to a cubicle anymore. Teams are in contact with each other from across the world. How do you ensure that team members are connected with each other?
Team members can create MySite where they can mention their interests, habits, talents, domain knowledge and colleague relations. Apart from individual MySites, you can also create Team and Community Sites. Team sites allow a group to pool in their resources on a project by sharing documents, events, discussions, surveys and tasks. Members can also put up their queries on Community sites. The degree of involvement in the community and team sites can help in rewarding the deserving employees for their contribution.
- Surveys to Help in Decision-Making
The employees must realize that the company takes decisions keeping in account their interests. To manifest such an attitude, you can include self-review as a step in evaluation process. You can create surveys in SharePoint to pool in as many opinions as possible and export these results to an excel sheet and track progress in the involvement of employees over time. While creating company reports, the contribution of such surveys towards decision making must be cited.
- Nurturing Leadership using SharePoint’s Badge System
Employee involvement is highly dependent on the level to which managers engage them in tasks. This can be done by delegating duties and keeping track of their work progress. You can also use SharePoint permissions to delegate the task of going through and providing feedback on important files to a certain set of workers.
SharePoint badge system creates a healthy way to identify leadership qualities among workers. By using badges like moderator or MVP, you can exhibit the role of a member. Depending on the culture of your organization, you can personalize the badges. When a member is awarded a badge in SharePoint, the badge is put up as a special icon accompanying the member’s name in the list.