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Chapter 6
Social Media as a Mechanism for Engagement?
Emma Parry and Adriano Solidoro
Abstract
Purpose — This chapter examines the use of social media within organizations in
order to engage with both current and potential future employees.
Design/methodology/approach — It is commonly claimed that social media
technologies can help organizations to engage with both current and potential
employees. This chapter examines these claims through an examination of the use of
social media within two organizations: a UK television company and an international
UK telecommunications company. Data was gathered from the company websites
and via 34 semi-structured interviews.
Findings — The two case studies confirm that social media has promise with regard to
facilitating the engagement of existing employees. However, the findings suggest also
that the use of social media to engage employees will not be successful unless the
culture and leadership of the organization already embraces open communication and
participation.
Research limitations/implications — The findings are limited in that they rely on two
case studies and therefore might not be applicable to other organizations. Despite the
limitations, this chapter has significant implications for organizations considering
the adoption of social media as a means to improve employee engagement. It suggests
that when adopting social media for organizations, the very first step should be to
assess the organizational readiness with a focus on culture and people rather than on
the technology itself. This is because managerial behaviors and styles are central to
the level of engagement individuals feel with an organization. For the same reason
leaders need to be trained to lead collaboratively, and to be able to understand the
new social practices.
Originality/value — The chapter makes an important contribution to an extremely
sparse literature on social media as a means for engaging with employees through the
Social Media in Human Resources Management
Advanced Series in Management, 121–141
Copyright r2013 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1877-6361/doi:10.1108/S1877-6361(2013)0000012010
(C) Emerald Group Publishing
provision of rare empirical data and is therefore valuable both for managers and for
HR scholars and practitioners.
Keywords: Social media; Web 2.0; employee engagement; recruitment; employee
communication
Introduction
One of the commonly espoused uses of social media for employers is to help them
to engage with both existing and potential employees. The precise definition of
‘‘engagement’’ is much debated in the literature and might also vary among
organizations. However, employers do agree that engagement of employees is
essential if organizations are going to be successful and create competitive advantage
(IABC, 2011), Engaged individuals are described as being attentive, emotionally
connected, integrated, focused in their performance (MacLeod & Brady, 2008),
involved with enthusiasm, and willing to exert greater discretionary effort in his or her
work. The engaged employee will typically demonstrate initiative, proactively seeking
opportunities to contribute, be willing to share information with colleagues while
speaking up for the organization, and trying harder to meet customers’ needs.
The contribution of engaged employees is particularly indispensable during a
turbulent period of economic recession such as that currently experienced within
much of the Western world, since they have a strong emotional sense of ownership
and are willing to do whatever is needed to support the organization MacLeod &
Clarke, 2011). Numerous studies (CIPD, 2008; IABC, 2011) show a direct relation-
ship between employee engagement and business results. Engagement contributes
significantly to an organization’s performance, leading to improvements in service
quality, customer satisfaction, as well as higher productivity and financial results. By
contrast, when employees are disengaged, organizational performance declines.
Engagement also serves the individual, fulfilling a basic human need to be connected
to worthwhile endeavors and make a significant contribution. Since individuals
often prefer to be involved (engaged) in meaningful and challenging work, employee
engagement is therefore a classic win–win initiative since it is associated with
employee satisfaction as well as organizational success.
Typically, engagement of employees is discussed at two stages of the employment
cycle. First, job seekers or potential employees need to engage with an organization in
order to feel attracted to that organization and to decide to apply to work there.
Second, once employed by the organization, individuals need to develop high levels of
engagement with their employer in order to facilitate the outcomes discussed above.
At both stages, engagement can be driven by an individual’s perception that they
are involved and listened to, and that they have a role to play in the organization.
With regard to existing employees, the literature has focused on the need to promote
dialogue within the organization in order to facilitate employee participation and
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involvement and therefore improve engagement. For job seekers, dialogue is also
important in order for the job seeker to perceive a fit between their needs and that
of the organization and to understand what the employer can offer them. At both
stages of employment therefore, engagement is about building a relationship between
the individual and employer. It has been claimed that social media can provide the
means by which dialogue and therefore this relationship can be developed. Social
media therefore provide a new dimension to the building of relationships between
employees, their line managers, and senior management.
Social media may therefore support more collaboration, greater transparency, and
increased trust between employees and the organization, becoming an important
vehicle for many aspects of internal communications that are relevant to employee
engagement. For these reasons, the intersection between digital communication’s
omnipresence and the emerging culture of deeper engagement provides many
opportunities to organizations. Thus, more and more companies are recognizing
social media and social networks as valuable tools for refining employee engagement,
responding to the greater than ever need to deliver information to employees in a way
that creates a sense of community. New social and networking media provide a
valuable opportunity for companies to increase engagement with employees through
facilitating dialogue, and to integrate employees into the culture of the organization by
creating a sense of community. Internal social groups can be connected and engaged
through the effective use of social media giving the opportunity to employees to share
ideas, replacing the old style suggestion boxes with a more interactive process.
In successful organizational use of social media, social and business functions
intertwine: forums spring up to connect people in similar job functions or expertise
areas but different locations; people can ask for and quickly get help from peers, or
brainstorm ideas; employees are empowered as authors post useful reference material
and share their expertise. These corporate social networking platforms offer a variety
of engagement and productivity benefits from employee brainstorming, increased
collaboration, and knowledge transfer. Therefore, these enabling technologies
can have an effect on employee satisfaction levels while creating value for the
organization. All of this could be essential to an engaged and productive workforce.
The little research that is available about social media and employee engagement
bears this idea out. In 2008 an Aberdeen Group (2008) reported that organizations
using blogs, wikis, and social networking tools achieved an average year-on-year
improvement in employee engagement of 18%, compared with 1% for organizations
that do not use social networking tools. The study reported that organizations that
achieved the leading performance designation in the use of blogs, wikis, corporate
social networking, and other online collaboration tools throughout the talent
management life cycle demonstrated a 39% reduction in training costs while
simultaneously improving engagement and quality of hire by 33%. A 2012 study by
APCI and Gagen McDonald (2012) reveals how internal social media use can bring
major benefits to a number of employee engagement areas, and isolates the key
attributes that such programs require. They found that 58% of the workers polled
would prefer to work at a company that uses social media; 86% would refer others for
employment; 61% felt it became easier to collaborate, while 60% were likely to feel
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their company is innovative. Employees were 60% more likely to give their company
the benefit of the doubt in a crisis, and two-thirds of employees were likely to support
government policies their company supports. They are also 78% more likely to
purchase the company’s stock. It seems evident, then, that social media platforms and
social intranets can offer some positive solutions to the complex problem of employee
engagement.
Despite the two consultancy-based studies above, academic research into the use
of social media for engaging with potential and current employees is sparse. In
particular, there is little in-depth research that looks at the ways in which companies
are using social media tools for these purposes and whether these social media satisfy
their objectives with regard to improving engagement. This chapter will therefore
examine the use of social media for engagement with existing and potential employees
through the use of two organizational examples. We will proceed by discussing in
more detail the literature on employee engagement and social media before describing
our organizational examples.
Background and Literature Review
In order to study the literature relevant to the focus of our chapter, we will
concentrate first on what is known about employee engagement generally. We will
look at what is known about engagement of both existing employers and of potential
employees through a brief analysis of the literature on employee branding, employee
value propositions, and the psychological contract. We will then move onto to
examine the role of social media in engaging both current and potential future
employees.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement has emerged relatively recently as a concept within human
resource management (HRM) and therefore has, so far, been subject to only a small
amount of empirical research. Despite this, the idea of employee engagement appears
to have resonated with employers, and so it has already become prominent in the
world of HR practice and within organizations (Vance, 2006). Employee engagement
can be defined as ‘‘the extent to which an employee is psychologically present in a
particular organizational role’’ (Saks, 2006, p. 604). Robinson, Perryman, and
Hayday (2004) suggested that engagement is a positive attitude that employees have
toward their organization and its values.
Khan (1990) was one of the first scholars to discuss the notion of engagement in
relation to employees and HRM. Khan suggested that people have various degrees of
engagement or disengagement at work. The consequence of this is that people use
various amounts of their personal selves (cognitive, emotionally, and physically) in
their working lives and roles. High employee engagement is characterized by
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high levels of activation and identification with the organization and employer.
Alternatively, Schaufeli, Martinez, Pinto, Salanova, and Bakker (2002) suggested that
high levels of engagement are represented by ‘‘a positive, fulfilling, work-related state
of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication and absorption’’ (p. 72). More
recently, Macey and Schneider (2008) divided the concept of engagement into three
components: trait engagement, focusing on personal level attributes such as
personality; behavioral engagement, focusing on the actions of employees; and
psychological state engagement, represented by affect and feelings of energy.
Engagement has been adopted by HR practitioners as a characteristic of employees
that is related to high productivity. Specifically, recent research in the United
Kingdom suggested that high levels of engagement can lead to lower sickness absence,
higher customer service, and better retention, as well as higher innovation and better
overall performance (MacLeod & Clarke, 2009). Therefore most of the attention in
discussions of engagement has focused on how employers might develop high levels of
engagement in their workforce. As with engagement more broadly, empirical research
in this area is generally sparse. However, what research there is has suggested a
connection between effective performance management systems and high employee
engagement, and in particular one aspect of engagement — employee commitment
(Gardner, Moynihan, Park, & Wright, 2001). In addition, work climate has been
suggested as having a relationship with employee engagement. Indeed, work climate,
defined as a combination of factors such as perceived organizational justice and trust
in their employer, has long been seen as important in affecting employee outcomes
(Greenberg, 1990; Macky & Boxall, 2007). One factor that has been related to both
work climate and employee engagement, and is of particular interest to this study, is
that of communication (Cartwright & Holmes, 2007;Lockwood, 2007). Indeed, Ruck
and Welch (2012) connect engagement to effective internal communication, under-
lying the fact that organizations need to evaluate and improve communication
especially in increasingly difficult economic pressures. If communication is an
important antecedent of employee engagement, then it might be that information-
communication technologies (ICT), such as social media, can also be used to promote
employee engagement within organizations. In fact one of the most commonly
espoused advantages of social media is that it can facilitate more effective
communication and collaboration, and therefore has the capacity to build relation-
ships between employees and their employers (and therefore potentially improve
engagement). The next section of this chapter will focus on the use of social media for
communication and collaboration and therefore its potential affect on employee
engagement.
Social Media and Employee Engagement
Since a changing communication environment calls for new approaches with an
emphasis on communities, content, and dialogue rather than volume and channels,
opportunities for employee voice and participation can be significantly improved by
taking more account of the impact of social media. Groysberg and Slind (2012)
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indicated that such a more collaborative approach to leadership might be a
prerequisite for the improvement of employee engagement and alignment in today’s
more and more networked (also through social media) organizations. Martin,
Reddington, and Kneafsey (2009) provided examples of social media corporate
applications to key functions in HR and people management as a benchmark for
more effective listening to understand employees and other internal stakeholders.
These included the promotion of the use of employee blogs and online discussion
forums to raise issues that are important to employees, in order to surface authentic
employee voice rather than responses to attitude surveys.
Murphy (2010) reviewed this ability of social media technologies and mobile
computing devices to facilitate and encourage knowledge sharing between ‘‘silo’d’’
groups. The cases analyzed indicated that the collaborative and interactive charac-
teristics of social media had provided organizations with increased capacity to share
information to facilitate problem solving, reduce duplication of effort, and increase
business agility, as well as bringing the side benefits of stronger employee engagement
with senior members of the workforce, and the development of a competitive
advantage in new talent acquisition. Through social media, leaders can facilitate two-
way communication while employees engage in a bottom-up exchange of ideas, and
interact with colleagues through blogs and discussion forums.
By allowing employees to voice their concerns and communicate with employers,
social media applications can therefore contribute to the improvement of employee
engagement. Indeed, Dahl, Lawrence, and Pierce (2011), who took into account
the increasing use of social media to broaden the approach to idea generation and
innovation both within and outside the walls of the organization, suggested that this
provided intangible benefits such as improved internal processes, increased customer
satisfaction, as well as employee engagement. Doherty (2010) provided practical
advice for HR professionals, suggesting that social media represented a great
opportunity for organizations to create a sense of community among employees.
Social media allow HR to promote communication and the sharing of knowledge and
ideas and, as a result, boost employee engagement and ultimately enhance the internal
employer brand, as well as attracting and retaining the most talented individuals.
The potential benefits of social media for communication (and therefore employee
engagement) are therefore strongly promoted in the literature. However, these
espoused benefits have been cast into doubt by an increasing literature that suggests
that achieving improved communication, collaboration, and engagement through
social media might not be as easy as suggested. Interactivity is not just a matter of
finding and deploying the right technology, equally if not more important is the need
to buttress social media with social thinking, in order to avoid that an organization’s
prevailing culture works against any attempt to transform corporate communication
into a two-way affair.
When using social media to better engage employees, managers can tend to focus
on installing the technology, rather than on designing a socio-technical system that
can meet the organization’s goals and foster authentic participation. Therefore, only
organizations that learn how to constructively engage their workers are likely to enjoy
distinct competitive advantage. Taking a more extreme position, MacCormick et al.
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(2012) question whether the increase in the use of social media via mobile devices
could actually lead to conditions under which connectivity was problematic for
engagement. However, McCormick et al.’s empirical research suggested that the use
of a Smartphone appeared to amplify work engagement behaviors, mainly, but not
exclusively, in functional ways.
A number of authors have suggested that the use of social media can only mirror
the existing structure of power and politics within an organization and will not
transform communication in organizations in which openness and trust are not
already a feature of the climate. More specifically, Hodgkinson (2007a, 2007b)
suggested that organizations must ask themselves whether they are truly ready to
collaborate, create, and exploit knowledge and whether existing social interactions are
open or closed. Hodgkinson also proposes that social media will mean an inevitable
loss of control in an organizational environment, and recognizes that the cultural
aspects, particularly those regarding hierarchy, power, and politics are very different
to the peerless, self-managing communities observed in the consumer domain.
Although the technology provides an opportunity to build identity, meaning, and
trust, he questions whether organizations have the critical mass of users that can
spark and subsequently sustain interaction, suggesting that not everyone will be
prepared, or able, to participate — a key factor in creating a truly collaborative
environment. Tapscott and Williams (2007, p. 276) also recognized that social media,
with its sense of openness, democratization, and the ceding of control to the
organization at large, all present challenges to the established cultural and leadership
norms, asking whether the minds of leaders are truly ‘‘wired’’ for Wikinomics.
Hodgkinson (2007a, 2007b) suggested that the change must be managed using
different approaches and that by addressing the psychological and social aspects of
communication (and engagement) organizations could truly unlock the benefits of
community and collaboration. In order to address the more prominent cultural
aspects, Hodgkinson (2007a, 2007b) suggested that organizational leaders needed to
provide a facilitative and moderating environment to secure success, suggesting
leaders must ‘‘let go’’ of their traditional tight controls, and work to foster
collaborative use of social media platforms.
These assertions lack empirical support, therefore we will investigate these ideas in
this chapter through the use of a detailed case study of the use of social media within
an organization.
Social Media and Recruitment
So far, we have focused on the engagement of existing employees. Indeed, the sparse
literature on employee engagement also focuses on the engagement of current
employees. However, employers also spend a lot of time and money engaging with
potential future employees, or job seekers. We often talk about ‘‘engaging’’ with
potential employees or job seekers, but recruitment is rarely thought of in terms of
employee engagement. In fact, recruitment is the first step on the journey to engaging
with employees as the perceptions that potential employees form about the values of
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an employer and what an organization can offer them are vital in developing the
psychological contract between employer and employee. It is through the recruitment
process that a (potential) employee forms the seeds of their relationship with an
employer and also ‘‘buys in’’ to the role that they will adopt. It can be suggested
therefore that the recruitment process lays the foundations for whether an employee is
‘‘psychologically present’’ (Saks, 2006) in the role that they may eventually adopt in
the organization. It can therefore be suggested that the recruitment process provides
the basis for an employee’s engagement with a role and organization. Within this
chapter, we will therefore also investigate the use of social media for engaging with
potential employees as part of the recruitment process.
In fact, much of the attention given to the use of social media within HRM has
focused on the use of social media tools for engaging with potential future employees.
Social media potentially could have a significant impact in changing the nature of the
recruitment process, by allowing recruiters access to a wider pool of passive, as well as
active, job seekers. Girard and Fallery (2010) have described ‘‘e-recruitment 2.0’’ as
using social capital to tap into both active and passive job seekers’ online social
networks through the use of social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as
other Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, RSS feeds, and virtual worlds. Social media allows
employers to directly contact individuals who are not actively seeking work. The
evolution of social media means that employers now have easy access to a wide
variety of social networks, without the need to employ an executive search agent.
Websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter contain a significant amount of
information about potential employees that can be accessed relatively easily.
Miller-Merrell (2012) also underlined the attractiveness of employer branding
promoted through social media, since it gives significant opportunities for HR
professionals to get involved in activities beyond their traditional HR tasks. Also
recruiting can become more interesting and efficient by tweeting a job opening; head
hunting can be facilitated by the vast number of Linked profiles; and allowing
employees to blog about how it is to work in that company could enhance the
organizational image, thus increasing the number of applications interested in that
company. The outcomes and benefits of social media diffusion of information could
therefore be of major interest for companies willing to establish a strong employer
branding reputation in order to influence engagement with both employees and
applicants. Recent studies suggest the reasons a company should engage in recruiting
and employer branding via social media: 43% of recruiters who use social recruiting
saw an increase in candidate quality; and 31% of recruiters using social recruiting have
seen a sustained increase in employee referrals (Jobvite, 2012). In other research, 62%
of employer information in social networks was considered useful and a third of all
online connections with a company happened because of an interest in company culture
(eMarketer, 2010). In combination, these data illustrate how, when used effectively,
social media are a powerful tool for improving reputation and a stronger employer
brand, for both internal and external marketing.
Since members of the newest generation of job seekers and employees constitute
the future largest segment in the workforce, it is important for employers to research,
plan, and engage in new ways to reach the most skilled members of this generation
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because they will be the ones who steer the future of the most competitive
organizations. For this reason, Rai (2012) attempts to understand concepts of
employee engagement and social media while presenting an outline into the charac-
teristics of Generation Y and their influencing factors in the organizational context.
Rai (2012) investigated how specific characteristics of Gen Y and their connectivity to
a digital world impact organizational processes like workplace environment, internal
communication, employee well-being, in turn impacting their commitment levels
and perception toward their organizations. These are all processes vital for the success
of employee engagement. Organizations, thus, might have significant benefits to
realize through the use of social media in recruitment, particularly in recruiting
generation Y.
Research Questions
Based on the discussion above we have two areas of interest: first is how organizations
are actually using social media to engage with both existing and potential future
employees. We are also interested in how effective these methods are. For this second
question we will focus on existing employees due to the ease of obtaining feedback
from these individuals. Therefore, we have three overarching research questions:
1. How can an employer use social media to engage with potential employees?
2. How can an employer use social media to engage with existing employees?
3. How effective is social media as a means of improving employee communication
and collaboration and therefore promoting employee engagement?
The Case Studies and Method
In order to investigate the research questions above, we collected data from two
organizations. The first, a UK television company, has adopted social media
extensively as a tool for recruitment. The second, an international UK telecommu-
nications company, uses social media to facilitate communication and collaboration
among existing employees and managers. For the purpose of this chapter, these
companies will be called TVCo and Telco respectively. We will first describe the two
organizations and the method used to collect data from each below. We will then take
each of the three research questions above in turn and address each question using
data from the appropriate organization.
UK Television Company (TVCo)
TVCo is the largest commercial television network in the United Kingdom.
It operates a family of channels and delivers content across multiple platforms.
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TVCo Studios produce and sell programs and formats across the United Kingdom
and worldwide. Following the Television Act of 1954 which made commercial
television in the United Kingdom possible, TVCo first began broadcasting in 1955 in
the London area, before moving country-wide. TVCo has recently expanded its
family of channels with the launch of new channels in 1998, 2004, 2005, and 2006.
TVCo has around 4000 employees on permanent or fixed-term contracts and another
2-300 contractors.
TVCo is governed by a management team who is overseen by a Board of Directors.
Human Resource Management is headed by their Group HR Director who sits on the
Management Board. Each business area has an HR representative at HRD, Head of
HR, and HR Manager level. Centers of Expertise exist within the HR Business
Partner structure in Pensions, Reward, Operations and Systems, Learning and
Development, Internal Communications, and Recruitment.
Up until 18 months before this case study, TVCo did not have a recruitment
function. Recruitment of fixed term and permanent paid employees was undertaken
by line managers with support from the HR department and relied heavily on the use
of agencies. A new Head of Recruitment was employed in 2010 in order to review
recruitment practices within the organization. She created an in-house recruitment
team (of nine people at the time of data collection) and facilitated the move from
agency recruitment to direct sourcing. The decision to move to direct sourcing was
made for a number of reasons: to reduce costs; to ensure ownership of recruitment;
and to create a robust recruitment process. In addition, the move represented a desire
to take a longer-term view of recruitment and recruit employees for future as well as
current company requirements. At the time of writing, 97% of recruitment was
undertaken directly rather than via the use of agencies.
Data about TVCo was gathered from the internet and via an interview with the
Head of Recruitment. A semi-structured interview protocol was used to gather data
about the organization’s use of social media for recruitment, the reasons for the
adoption of this technology, and the perceived impact of the use of social media.
Unfortunately access to job seekers/candidates was not available; therefore data from
this organization will be limited only to the use of social media rather than the
reactions of candidates.
UK Telecommunications Company (Telco)
Telco provides communications and IT solutions and services to consumer, small
medium enterprise businesses, corporate customers, and communications providers in
over 170 countries worldwide and employs around 150,000 people. Telco was
originally a (once nationalized) UK plc that has experienced significant changes in a
relatively short space of time and has been particularly hard hit by the global financial
crisis. Telco has long been associated with innovation and the adoption of new tech-
nologies, places great emphasis on knowledge work, and has a history of facilitating
communities of interests and collaborative working.
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Three business units from Telco were selected to be included in this research. The
three business units were selected based upon their use of the technology and their
overall level of employee engagement in decision making. This allows us to obtain a
range of responses to the social media. The first business unit had relatively high use
of technology and relatively low employee engagement. This business unit is
responsible for IT and network development, employs approximately 18,000 largely
desk-based knowledge workers, and comprises of a management team who have
pioneered the use of social media both within and outside the organization under
study. The second business unit had a relatively moderate use of technology and
relatively modest employee engagement. This business unit was responsible for IT
and network operations and employs approximately 18,000 people, including a
substantial field-force. The final business unit had a relatively minimal use of
technology and relatively high employee engagement. This business unit is a market-
facing unit discharging the organization’s wholesale business, and employs approxi-
mately 4000 people including a mix of sales, marketing, product, operational, and
customer service agents. A unit with high employee engagement and high use of
technology could not be found in the case study organization.
These data were collected as part of a larger study into the impact of social media
(see Denyer, Parry, & Flowers, 2011). In order to allow us to investigate the
effectiveness of social media technology for communicating and engaging with
employees, 33 semi-structured interviews with individual respondents were under-
taken. First, 12 interviews were conducted with individuals responsible for policy and
business direction to understand the strategic importance of social media and its role
within the organization. Second, 21 face-to-face interviews were carried out with
members of the three business units, using a standard interview protocol developed
from a literature review. These interviews were recorded and transcribed. The
interview data was then analyzed with the support of NVivo in order to identify
emerging themes about the perceptions of the use and impact of social media within
Telco.
Findings
Information from the two case studies will now be discussed in relation to the three
research questions.
1. How can an employer use social media to engage with potential employees?
The recruitment process in TVCo relies heavily on social media tools, specifically
LinkedIn and Twitter. The choice of social media tools was based upon the need to
communicate the company’s brand. It was felt that TVCo had a well-known brand
generally, but not as an employer. The primary driver for using social media was to
access passive as well as active job seekers.
TVCo subscribe to LinkedIn so that they have access to the profiles of all LinkedIn
members. In addition to this access, they have developed a number of careers pages
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on LinkedIn. The pages contain information about the employer brand, the jobs that
are available, and testimonials from employees. These pages are bespoke to particular
job roles or areas. People entering the TVCo careers pages will automatically be
directed to the page that is relevant to their work experience (based on an analysis of
the information on their profile). TVCo can also search profiles for particular skills
and contact LinkedIn members directly. They allow applicants to apply for jobs via
their careers website using their LinkedIn profile, rather than having to create a
separate CV. The company’s use of LinkedIn has been very successful. The company
now has over 16,000 ‘‘followers’’ and is the second most popular company with
students on LinkedIn.
TVCo also has a careers page and account on Twitter. They regularly ‘‘tweet’’
content and news via this account and link readers to their careers website. They use
a Twitter scheduling tool to send previously created tweets at particular times.
They also encourage candidates to tweet about their experiences. The tweets are then
re-tweeted regularly; the company also makes sure that they use popular hash tags
(subject areas) so that they are found by people searching Twitter. For example,
TVCo launched a recent graduate recruitment scheme on Twitter, by sending two
tweets a day about the scheme for two weeks prior to the launch and then
encouraging both recruiters and candidates to tweet during the assessment process.
They also provided a number of 30-minute Twitter ‘‘chats’’ for potential applicants.
Twitter has also proved to be a successful tool for recruitment. In particular, it is very
cheap. Twitter itself costs nothing to use and the scheduling tool costs very little.
The use of social media is supported by an applicant tracking system and company
careers website. The company also uses Google Analytics in order to track where
applications have originated and therefore assess the success of their social media
promotions and has done a lot of work on search engine optimization in order to
ensure that they are located by search engines. It is the combination of social media
tools and online support mechanisms such as these that allows TVCo to use social
media effectively.
2. How can an employer use social media to engage with existing employees?
Telco has made increasing use of social media since 2004, following the
appointment of a new CEO for the business unit responsible for IT and network
development and operations. For example, blogs and podcasts are frequently used by
senior leaders for the purpose of corporate communications, corporate blogging
policies have been developed, social media guidelines and tools have been established,
and standardized tools have been selected and deployed across the organization to
support project or organization-based wiki’s. Existing communication channels have
been extended to include RSS news-feeds. Other interventions include an internal
version of Wikipedia, an internal version of MySpace, and the extension of the online
news service to include spaces for discussion. Many of these tools can be accessed
directly from the organizations’ intranet homepage. The professional communities of
interest have also extensively deployed social media technologies to share information
and create communities of interest and more recently an initiative to encourage
people to create video podcasts as part of the learning and development agenda has
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been piloted. Second Life style avatars are being used as part of a Web 2.0 talent
academy. In addition, a number of campaigns have been launched to encourage usage
and a range of social media was used during a recent consultation on the future of the
company pension scheme.
Interviewees described a number of uses of social media technologies, mainly
within professional communities of interest. These included collaboration, maintain-
ing contact between individuals, learning, and professional development. Interestingly
for this chapter, none of the interviewees saw social media as a means by which to
engage employees.
3. How effective is social media as a means of improving employee communication
and collaboration and therefore promoting employee engagement?
Despite the extensive development of social media tools the success of these tools
within Telco has been mixed. In some departments, web social media have proved to
be a cost and time efficient means of promoting communication and collaboration
and therefore might have promoted employee engagement. However, in other
departments, little evidence of any positive impact of the technology on commu-
nication and employee engagement was found. This was due to a number of reasons.
In all three business units, some of the interviewees were reluctant to speak up
because they were not convinced that it was ‘‘safe’’ to express their opinions without
any negative consequences.
It all depends what you mean by safe yI still think people tend not to because they are not
confident it is safe. It’s encouraged obviously but people would think twice about posting certain
things I would have thought.
In addition, the level of comfort that employees felt in speaking up was dependent
on the leadership style of both their line manager and senior leadership. So in some,
cases, interviewees felt that social media were used as a vehicle for propaganda from
management. In particular, people commented on the way in which some individuals
exploited the channel to serve their own purposes, and the way in which the
technology was treated as part of a ‘‘corporate machine’’ so that ‘‘leaders get to tell
you what they want you to know’’ and the ‘‘party line.’’ Leaders, too, acknowledged
that social media were used to distribute propaganda, with one stating that some
blogs are:
clearly a management propaganda tool. It is like [newsdesk] on the web, you know it is sunny and
upbeat and it never rains ypeople just see it as just another media medium for management to
get the message across.
In other cases managers suppressed debate. One leader explained:
We generally try to close things down. What we will try to do is answer in such a way that no one
else feels that they should comment on it, or ask another question. Generally the response has
been to try and close it down rather than allow it to run and let people have their say.
In other cases, interviewees explained that conversations that managers were not
happy with had been continued offline. It was also noted that managers tended to
select the topics included in any debate so that they were setting the agenda. In other
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cases, leaders chose to avoid the conversation completely by not engaging with the
technology. Other interviewees suggested that many leaders felt the need to be ‘‘seen
to be doing something,’’ so tended to adopt the technology for the sake of it, or
because it was fashionable. One middle-manager felt that
people hardly left any comments, but I think that was done for the wrong reasons, I think it was
trying to get discussion taking place without any compelling subject matter.
A number of interviewees suggested that even when workers did engage with
the technology, it was to discuss topics that were not of any great importance to the
organization. It can therefore be seen that overall many interviewees were of the
opinion that workers were not engaged with the technology in such a way as to make
use of it in the way that was intended.
Some differences were observed based upon the level of engagement of the
employees in each business unit. In the business unit with high levels of employee
engagement people suggested that a key reason for implementing social media was to
help leaders to be more open and accessible. Many of them argued that using social
media to engage employees was ‘‘the right thing to do.’’ However, in the business unit
perceived by actors to already have low levels of employee engagement, little interest
in the use of social media for the purpose of increasing employee participation in
decision making was described. Indeed, many people felt that the technology was used
to inform employees, rather than to facilitate two-way conversations and that the
organization itself, rather than the employees, was the ultimate beneficiary of social
media. It is of course difficult to establish cause and effect between these attitudes, but
these observations do suggest that it is impossible for social media to facilitate
improved employee engagement in departments or organizations where the will to
engage with employees through increased communication or participation is not
already present.
Discussion
This chapter has examined the use of social media within organizations in order to
engage with both current and potential future employees. An increasing number of
companies use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote
communication and collaboration among employees, announce job openings, and
search for potential qualified personnel as well as marketing their employer brand
both internally and externally. We have examined how two UK companies are using
social media for the engagement of current and potential future employees and also
examined the effectiveness of social media for internal engagement.
Social media can allow organizations to promote themselves externally to a large
number of potential employees with little effort or expense. In contrast to more
traditional recruitment advertising techniques, social media can allow companies to
access passive as well as active job seekers, as our examination of practice in TVCo
showed. Indeed, the experience in TVCo appears to show, anecdotally, a certain
degree of success in engaging with potential employees via the use of LinkedIn and
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Twitter. The Head of Recruitment in TVCo suggested that the use of social media had
enabled the company to move from recruiting predominantly via agencies to a system
whereby 97% of recruitment was conducted in-house, therefore reducing costs
substantially. Unfortunately, little empirical data is available regarding the actual
success of recruitment via social media or the impact of using this media of potential
employees, but the TVCo experience seem to suggest that this provides valuable
alternative to more expensive traditional methods of engaging with job seekers.
TVCo have focused their recruitment efforts to date on just two social media
channels — Twitter and LinkedIn. They could of course expand this to other channels
such as Facebook, the use of YouTube to post original and creative videos on
YouTube about the everyday life of an employer within that company, or creating a
blog for the current employees and management to post stories about the company.
These factors could all represent a successful employer branding strategy. Indeed,
information about a company as reported through any media outlet, including social
media sites can have an influence on public perception and help an organization to
engage with potential employees.
Of course, the impact of social media in creating an employer brand is not limited
only to potential future employees. As social media becomes integrated commonly
into employee engagement strategies the differences between internal and external
communication are blurring. Organizations that communicate effectively through
social media might find that it enhances a positive workplace culture and improves
employee engagement as well as enforcing a positive external reputation. Also for this
reason and in order to gain competitive advantage, more companies are investing in
creating an identity inside and outside the company. The basic principle of employer
branding is therefore that all employees are consumers who must be recruited
and retained. This is because existing employees (as well as customers) like to be
associated with distinctive organizations. One aim of employer branding should be
then to distinguish the employer in the minds of the employees, creating commitment,
satisfaction, and developing emotional attachment — and employees who are
committed and satisfied also create better relationships with customers.
In the future, social media may not only influence recruiting processes and
employer branding value proposition, but also internal marketing, making it become
a more effective back-up for external marketing. Through social media employees can
be ambassadors of the organization, agents of the company who make part of the
employer branding outside the company in way which are not even always conscious.
Moving on to focus on the role of social media in engaging with existing
employees, the popular media has espoused that social media can increase the degree
of involvement and engagement of employees, by creating an open, inclusive, and
collaborative environment, as well as a sense of belonging to a community, identity,
and organizational citizenship. Making employees feel a part of the company and a
part of the decision-making process has been suggested to have a large impact on the
employees’ behavior.
We took a more in-depth focus on the use of social media to promote the engagement
of current employees. Popular media has suggested that social media can improve
employee collaboration and communication and promote employee participation,
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therefore leading to higher levels of employee engagement. Indeed, our examination
of the use of social media within Telco demonstrated that this company had widely
introduced social media, including blogs and wikis, with the purpose of increasing
employee collaboration and communication, building a greater sense of community
within the organization and therefore ultimately improving employee engagement.
However, and more importantly, our analysis of social media use within this
organization showed that the introduction of social media technologies does not
necessarily lead to increased engagement, or indeed collaboration, even in an organ-
ization such as Telco that has a long history of using cutting edge technology. In
Telco, despite several campaigns to promote and encourage the use of social media,
use of these tools was still patchy at best and there was little, if any, evidence that the
widespread introduction of social media for employees had any great impact on
collaboration, communication, or employee engagement.
Our examination of social media use within Telco demonstrated that the success of
social media in increasing employee engagement is dependent on the existing culture
of the organization and the attitudes and behavior of the organization’s leaders. Our
interviewees suggested that employees were not embracing social media technologies
because they did not feel safe to speak up openly without retribution, because the
tools were being used to facilitate propaganda and promote company messages rather
than genuinely create two-way communication channels and because, in some cases,
leaders were actively suppressing or controlling the online debate. Our evidence from
Telco suggests that social media can only be effective in promoting employee
engagement and communication if the existing culture and leadership style is already
conducive to employee voice and participation. In fact, it appears to be impossible
for social media to facilitate improved employee engagement in organizational
environments where the will to engage with employees through increased commu-
nication or participation is not already present.
This is not to say that social media cannot improve communication processes and
therefore also have a positive impact on employee engagement. The fact that social
media can allow employees and managers to communicate quickly and easily can
have a positive effect on organizations. Indeed, in Telco, we saw that social media
were being used within communities of practice to maintain contact between
individuals and for learning and professional development. This is in support of the
idea that social media tools and technology can enhance internal communications,
while supporting the development of internal communities. Indeed, communication
between employees pursuing similar interests and the creation of internal workplace
communities can spur innovation, improve processes, and help to break down ‘‘silos.’’
We might also expect that this would contribute to a high sense of engagement.
Indeed, effective communications processes have been suggested as a key driver of
employee engagement (Cartwright & Holmes, 2007;Lockwood, 2007; Ruck & Welch,
2012). However, no real impact of the use of social media for communication and
increased employee engagement was obvious within Telco. It is likely that this is
because of the tension between the ethos of social media and the culture and
leadership of the organization, as described above. Indeed, it appears that social
media cannot work miracles but can only operate within the existing organizational
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culture. If open communication and employee participation is not already part of this
culture then the impact of social media will be limited.
Conclusions
This chapter has provided some evidence of the way in which social media can be used
within organizations in order to engage with both existing and potential future
employees. For engaging with potential employees, anecdotally at least, social media
appear to be a useful means of reaching a large number of both active and passive job
seekers in a cost-effective manner. We provided a more in-depth analysis of the use of
social media for engaging with existing employees and found that, while this
technology had the potential to increase internal communication among employees
and managers, this did not necessarily translate into increased employee engagement.
In fact, the culture of the organization and style of the leaders were more crucial than
the technology itself in dictating whether employees engaged both with the social
media and at a wider level with the organization.
This chapter has provided only an initial exploratory analysis of these factors in
two organizations. Indeed the use of only two organizations means that our findings
might not be applicable to other organizations and other adoptions of social media.
In particular, the information about TVCo was based only on secondary information
available from the website and an interview with the Head of Recruitment. Further
research should provide a more in-depth analysis of the actual effectiveness of social
media in recruitment and should also examine the reactions of job seekers to the use
of social media for recruitment. Future research could also compare the effectiveness
of these channels at engaging with potential employees with other methods such as
headhunters, agencies, or more traditional recruitment advertising. With regard to the
use of social media to engage with existing employees, it would be interesting to
examine the use of these technologies across other organizations, particularly those
with a more participatory culture.
Despite the limitations and need for future research above, this chapter makes
an important contribution to an extremely sparse literature. The popular media has
espoused the impact of social media as revolutionary with regard to communication
and collaboration and therefore potentially employee engagement. Our contribution
has been to add an important note of caution to these claims. Employers cannot
expect social media to have a significant impact on the participation and engagement
of their employees unless they are also willing to create an organizational culture
that promotes open communication and employee voice.
Practical Implications
This chapter has significant implications for organizations considering the adoption
of social media as a means to improve employee engagement. We might suggest that
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the social media can enhance employee engagement when it is aligned with the
organizational culture and vision. Indeed, social media provide organizations with the
means to share knowledge and expertise, enabling people to communicate directly
with each other and cross boundaries between different departments. But when
adopting social media for organizations, the very first step should be to assess the
organizational readiness with a focus on culture and people rather than on the
technology itself.
Not all companies are comfortable with a world where employees can speak
so freely with each other, express their thoughts, and where management has
increasingly less control over the information available within the organization. This
is a matter of leadership attitude, as well as organizational culture. Our findings
confirm that managerial behaviors and styles are central to the level of engagement
individuals feel with an organization. Social media technologies enable forms of
communications and collaborations that are much more pervasive, fluid, free, and
transparent. And increasingly, this calls for the creation of collaborative cultures,
and, thus, of a collaborative leadership. So far few leaders have been trained to lead
collaboratively, and in many cases the culture and reward systems in organizations
discourage collaboration. Senior management might not engage in social media for
reasons such as being reluctant to give away their power, not knowing how their
actions relate to larger changes in an organization or not understanding the new
social practices. Thus, success in social media adoption depends on creating an
environment of trust, mutual respect, and shared aspiration in which all can
contribute openly. Many companies are just now recognizing the need of a new
mindset and different skills, as well as a consistent set of systems and processes that
enable participants to communicate, learn, and work together.
Employee engagement depends on strong, effective communications. Furthermore,
senior management communication and open, effective communication strategies
are recognized as having a crucial role in the development of positive employee
engagement (Bakker, Albrecht, & Leiter, 2011; Bindl & Parker, 2010; Saks, 2006).
Nevertheless, top managers are too often out of the conversations, and while they
may use a wide array of communication methods, including social media, these are
often in the form of ‘‘top-down’’ communication, rather than giving employees a
voice. It is important for employee to have their contributions recognized by their
superiors and to receive credit for any ideas they share in the organization. Previous
studies, for example, indicate that employee recognition from senior management
directly motivates people to share knowledge (Oliver & Kandadi, 2006). Inclusive
leaders, by including employees among relevant organization stakeholders, turn those
employees into experienced conversation partners, enabling them as frontline content
providers, and raising thus the level of employee engagement.
Social media is in fact not something that can be managed by just a dedicated
team or a department. Every individual can play a role in the social media arena, in
facilitating participation, communication, and sharing. The use of social media as a
tool for employee engagement should not be perceived as a matter of exclusive interest
of a charismatic and visionary leader or of a specific and determined organizational
function. Notwithstanding, the adoption of social media by the organization might
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have a big impact on the way that HR professionals perform their duties therefore
needing different capabilities, skills, and knowledge. HR professionals should enhance
their communication, IT, Internet, social, and business knowledge and, in particular,
an in-depth knowledge of the social media concept, what can and cannot be achieved
with it, and how it can be used effectively. Through the use of social media to attract
and recruit candidates, some HR departments have already understood the power of
information sharing. To make sure the capabilities and skills to use social media are
truly embedded in an organization, HR needs to think innovatively and coach
the entire organization in social media use. They should also provide precise
guidelines and teach employees how to behave in the social media space. Therefore,
HR has to be a role model for their employees on how to use social media devices
effectively.
The evolution of social media both outside and within organizations represents an
exciting time that could have a great positive impact on organizations and employees.
Our research has shown, that in relation to communication, participation, and
employee engagement, achieving this positive impact is not simple or revolutionary as
some media suggest, Instead, it requires significant work on the part of the
organization to ensure that the culture and leadership of the organization supports
the effective use of social media to improve employee engagement.
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