Have you ever overheard your employees gossiping about your expensive enterprise social network? You are not alone. Often employees resist these tools or drop out of it soon. This leads to much wastage of resources and money. Yet more than 80% of the companies in the West prefer using social collaboration or enterprise collaboration tools for efficient communication. Here’s how you can prevent the drop-out rate of employees from enterprise collaboration software.

Not why they ‘should’ but why they ‘need’

Introducing the social media enterprise collaboration tools must happen formally. The employees must be formally told why they ‘need’ the tool and how exactly this will make their work faster, more accountable and efficient. The ‘should use’ approach gives the employees an indirect message that the company only wants them to stay efficient and the tool is one of the ways to do so.

Effective communication BEFORE a collaboration tool!

Collaboration tools come with an assumption that – good communication is happening within the organization. The tool will only make this communication smoother and more effective and most importantly it would help record such a communication for future reference. However, if the company has a culture of isolated teams who don’t work together or wayward individuals who don’t communicate, a shiny communication tool won’t help matters either. Before introducing a collaboration tool, make sure that you create a clear system of inter-personal communication.

Choose a tool that empathizes

Choosing the right enterprise collaboration tool itself should be given a lot of thought. The objective of enterprise collaboration software is to prevent wastage of knowledge, make people more accountable, encourage more official communication and so on. Yet, the tool must deliberately have options such as ‘private chat mode’ to send out a message to the employees that the tool is meant to empower them not restrict them.

Communicate business goals at all levels

Employees at all levels – lower, middle and higher – must be communicated business goals clearly. They should all be brought on the same page and told about the various merits of using the tool and how it is aligned with achieving the collective business goals. In addition, the IT managers need to orient each of the teams separately to explain how the tool is effective in say, a sales scenario or HR recruitment scenario. If the employees are able to contextualize their problems with the help of the tool, they will use it without making it mandatory.

Enterprise collaboration tools with social networking bent work best for most employees. If employees feel like they are interacting within the organization just like they do on social media, they will love any kind of custom social network or enterprise collaboration software at workplace.