By Ken Comée, CEO, Badgeville
To nurture top performers,leaders need to borrow from the many user experiences and shifts in employee motivation that social media culture has surfaced. Some tips:
- Embrace the social enterprise. Leaders should not only encourage usage of social collaboration tools such as Chatter, Yammer, and Tibbr, but should focus on how to drive engagement within these experiences. Leaders also must focus on connecting these user experiences across employee, partner, developer, and customer networks.
- Focus on ongoing employee growth. Many employees are used to the real-time feedback found in social experiences vs. annual performance reviews. Create programs within your organization and teams to reward engagement and performance with ongoing opportunities for growth, such as access to programs and executives.
- Know that status > bonus. According to a new study by employee motivation research firm Make Their Day, 70 percent of employees value no-cost rewards such as recognition, status, and virtual gifts above monetary rewards, up from 57 percent in 2007.
- Nurture mobile collaboration. Mobile enterprise applications connect employees on the go, and enable leaders to have more visibility into the productivity and performance of their disparate workforce.
- Realize that fun matters. According to the Make Their Day study, 90 percent of employees find a fun work environment highly motivating. Highly engaged employees are 26 percent more productive and their companies earned 13 percent greater total returns for shareholders over a five-year period, according to a study by WorkUSA.