Four ways to foster innovation by social collaboration

Engaging employees beyond their routine work is challenging for most organizations. Yet engaged workforce is often the most innovative. Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace study had revealed that “companies with more engaged workers registered a median of 10% higher customer ratings, 22% more profits, a 21% increase in productivity and 41% fewer defects (i.e. more quality) when compared to bottom-quartile units.”

Innovation cannot happen unless employees are engaged creatively. But that’s easier said than done. One of the biggest challenges of innovative engagement is the storage and retention of data. This problem is now being solved by disruptive enterprise collaboration platforms or social collaborations. Let’s find out how exactly an enterprise can foster innovation by social tools:

1. Idea forums: Generating of ideas or brainstorming is not a one-time process, it needs to be ongoing in order to be productive. It’s only when hundreds of ideas are generated on a daily basis that some of them see the light of the day. These ideas eventually lead to groundbreaking innovations. Social collaboration tools enable enterprises to create idea forums where employees, managers and team leaders can share ideas on a daily basis with safe preservation of data. Ragan Award Winner ‘Dollar Finance’ successfully implemented some innovative strategies by using idea forums.

2. Open communication: Open communication successfully fosters innovation. Make sure that your social tool allows a centralized space for communication applicable both up and down the organizational hierarchy. As an enterprise, let seniors give a positive feedback to contributors whether or not their ideas are used.

3. Weekly/monthly awards: If you have been doing this offline, it’s time to take it on a digital platform so get the best of both worlds. Fostering a culture of rewarding employees always leads to innovation because it opens up their minds to think out of the box. When employees feel appreciated, they are more likely to contribute in innovation.

4. Product innovation cycle: Many enterprise social networks or collaboration platforms allow you to customize the platform according to needs. These social tools can help bring the entire product innovation cycle on an online platform. Such a platform would make everyone feel part of the innovation process and amazing ideas may come from the most unlikely places. A food producer ‘Genius Gluten Free’ implemented an internal forum for innovation lifecycle. This shortened the process of amendments in the ingredients to less than six months and they were able to constantly scale up their products due to positive changes.

Innovative organizations often progress faster and often come up with disruptive products and services. Today innovation is the difference between winning and losing.

If you wish to engage employees on an efficient enterprise social network, give us a cal  l.