Five Recommendations to Power-Up Employee Communication Trending

How would you like to keep track of trending topics within your distributed workforce at any given moment in time? This valuable tool would give the chief human resource officer the ability to apprise the CEO of internal workforce trends.  Important workforce and operational decisions could be made quickly by taking advantage of this Internet technology.

Having served as a chief human resource officer for a large private energy company located in several countries, the ability to keep track of trending workforce and operational issues would have made the employee survey process, including flash surveys, look like the Pony Express.  I think we can agree that real time information is extremely valuable.

Twitter is a company that has tapped the power of instantaneous information. Twitter users can Tweet micro-blogs with up to 140 characters to followers quickly and easily. According to Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, on BusinessInsider.com in September 2011, Twitter had 100 million users, 400 million monthly unique visitors, up to 230 million tweets sent per day, and three million websites had the Tweet button on their sites.

Twitter users now spread news and information instantaneously around the world in seconds. During recent major international events, political unrest and natural disasters, Twitter has been the source of instantaneous news for media and the digital population.

So how does micro-blogging relate to the C-Suite? If you want to understand your workforce and your operation on a daily basis, we must rid ourselves of social media paranoia.  Social media will evolve and likely become faster, better, cheaper, easier, while increasing the numbers of savvy participants on this worldwide digitized communication platform.

Below are five recommendations to power-up employee communication trending within your organization:

1. Determine your digital communication platform.
2. Share company information frequently.
3. Listen to employee comments and operational trends.
4. Initiate changes based upon feedback and trends.
5. Embrace the benefits freedom of communication brings.