Organization name: VMWare
Industry: Software
Name of Contact: Patrick P. Gelsinger, CEO
VMWare, a software company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with a Canadian office located in Burlington, ON provides cloud and virtualization software and services. Socialcast is the name of the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) software that VMWare acquired and rolled out in 2011. For those who aren’t familiar, an ESN is an internal social media networking platform. According to the Socialcast website, ESN’s are used by 79% of companies to “unlock expertise and creativity, enhance employee satisfaction, and improve speed-to-market.”
Built into Socialcast are tools to “measure and analyse social media-based activities inside the enterprise.” This Deloitte University Press article and this Socialcast promotional video do a good job of outlining the postive outcomes for both a company – regarding exception handling, operating procedure and customer service, and employees – regarding recognition, creativity and onboarding of new hires.
Just as businesses strive to engage customers with social media, thereby instilling brand loyalty, companies now also find that engaging their employees with internal social media platforms helps to do the same thing. An engaged employee, one who is given the ability through their companies’ internal social platforms to share, collaborate and problem solve is more likely to be retained by the organization due to a higher satisfaction level at work. This short video is a testimonial to the benefits that SAS Institute has realized in terms of employee retention since implementation of Socialcast: SAS loses only 4% of it’s employee base per year compared to the industry average of 22%. Less turnover of employees can translate into less time and money spent orienting and training new hires and more time and money for a company to pursue it’s other vital interests like hitting sales targets, research and development and better customer service.
Listen to podcast #190 – Socialcast: the new way to work as some VMWare principals including (then) Director, Product Management Alexi Robichaux explain the benefits that companies using Socialcast software enjoy. Tune in about the 17 min. mark to hear this info and the announcement that Socialcast is now available for free to organizations with less than 50 users.
Greater good indeed: Socialcast is a win-win for employee and the organization they work for.
References:
Building Employee Engagement on Internal Social Platforms
http://www.socialcast.com/
http://podbay.fm/show/292461263
Submitted by: Shelby Mulligan, SMBP Student, University of Waterloo
To contact the author of this entry please email: shelby@midlandculturalcentre.com
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