Think Facebook – but with your own company logo
Amplifying your employer brand on social media can be risky given the limited range of information organizations can share with the outside world.
But missing out on the benefits of social media interaction with your own employees can also hurt your chances of building a positive brand image.
How can employers strike a balance between managing reputational risk online and staying digitally connected with their employees?
The top workplaces are now launching their own employer-branded social networking platforms – their own avenue for creative expression and community engagement.
And many are building theirs on the foundation of the world’s most popular social network: Facebook.
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“We wanted to engage our people better,” Marico Sunshine Rodriguez of AXA Philippines shared with an audience of HR leaders in Manila. “We know people nowadays – a second after waking up – check their Facebook account.”
“Why can’t we have something similar to Facebook?” she said. “A social media account that is safe not only for the employees but also for the organization, where everybody can share their opinion, their comments, their remarks.”
As director of talent acquisition and employee relations, Rodriguez knows the value of engaging employees on social media and how this ties in with an organization’s digital transformation.
“The objective is to connect with people and articulate our culture,” she said.
AXA Philippines thus partnered with Workplace by Facebook, the social media company’s enterprise version that can be customized around the needs of a company.
“The social media platform can be made exclusively for your organization,” Rodriguez said. In the case of AXA Philippines, only employees have access to the company’s social network.
Workplace by Facebook can be used just as easily as the original social networking site where friends and family connect, interact and share content with each other.
This time, however, employees and teams connect and collaborate with each other on projects and other cross-functional tasks and even company events.
“On Workplace, you can post employee engagement activities. Instead of posting invitations via email, we post invitations to our events via Workplace and people can view them in real time,” Rodriguez said.
“People won’t need to wait for an email from HR on events or, say, the cancellation of work due to a storm because they can access the information via Workplace.”
AXA Philippines kicked off the social media project as one of its pillars of digital transformation. While the team wasn’t the first in AXA’s global network of companies to launch its own Workplace platform, it learned from the lessons of other teams about how to implement the project.
“We benchmarked with our colleagues in the region, our counterparts in Asia,” Rodriguez recalled. “‘What is working for you, guys?’ When we learned that Workplace was apparently working for them, we explored partnership with Facebook.”
