Community Cloud for Employees: Bringing Collaboration to Your Organization

Salesforce’s Community Clouds brings a 360° view of your organization by providing tools that support your partners, customers, and employees. Community Clouds enable your CRM to be the central hub for all of your data and interactions with each of these essential groups that make your business a success and allow you to leverage your Salesforce platform to its fullest potential.

The Community Cloud for Employees provides a way for employees who are not a part of your leading CRM user group to interact with the data housed in Salesforce. Community Cloud Employees can interact with custom built applications and gain access to data without the cost associated with a full license.

Giving all of your employees access to Salesforce data breaks down silos within your organization and ensures that you are giving your teams a tool that promotes collaboration and information sharing. It allows your employees to gain access to both customer and company data from anywhere using a mobile device or laptop.

Replace Your Intranet

Company intranets rarely see the light of day. No one updates them, and no one reads them. According to a survey conducted by Prescient Digital Media, only 13 percent of employees report using their intranets on a daily basis while 31 percent admitted that they have never used it!

Yet companies continually site “online learning resources” and “online access to HR policies” as an integral part of their onboarding process. Community Cloud for Employees provides a place where employees can interact with traditional employee/HR tasks, like benefit changes and payroll inquiries, and serve as a central hub for onboarding, career development, and corporate education. In addition, Salesforce Community Cloud for Employees can remain an integral part of your workforce’s everyday tasks through Groups, Files, Topics, and Chatter.

Salesforce Groups provides a structure for discussions and activities. Groups can be created to support events, teams, projects, or campaigns. Files give employees secure, social and mobile access to records and syncs the data across the entire organization into a central location. Topics are autogenerated based on your employee’s discussions. They create a perfect snapshot of information and make it easy for employees to leverage co-worker knowledge. Chatter is a quick and easy way to engage. It allows employees to find experts within the organization and open communication lines with anyone in the company.

Each of these features enables your team to better connect with one another and allows your business to leverage to full power of your team’s collective skillsets. Expert Search functions allow your employees to comb through employee profiles to find an expert that can answer their needs. For the many companies that now operate a virtualized workforce, this is a critical feature.

When companies provide tools that simplify access to information and collaboration, employee engagement soars. A recent survey by Dale Carnegie Training found that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202 percent.

“Community Cloud has really helped break down barriers within the organization. It’s massively changed the way we communicate.” ~ Paul Frodsham, AstraZeneca

Breaking Down Organizational Silos at AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca, the biopharmaceutical leader, implemented Community Cloud for their employees. The solution replaced their outdated intranet and provided a vehicle for collaboration among their 60,000 employees that span the globe and interact in a variety of languages.

One of the most significant benefits AstraZeneca has realized is an increase in collaboration driven by the social aspects of Community Cloud. Paul Frodsham, Enterprise Social Lead at AstraZeneca notes that before implementing Community Cloud for their employees, people were siloed and consistently networked with only a set group of individuals. However, since the implementation, the company has seen the launch of 2,000 active groups and over 17,000 monthly posts and comments.

“When employees thought about collaboration from a work context, they had this view of it being a grand thing people did. In reality, they’re finding that the Community has made the small things they do on a daily basis much easier,” Frodsham says.

“Highly engaged businesses see a 20 percent increase in sales.” ~ OfficeVibe

Gamifying Wellness for Employees

Preventure promotes employee health through wellness initiatives that demonstrate the impact of a healthy workforce on the bottom line. With 25 years of experience, the company has a deep treasure trove of knowledge and data and is already utilizing Sales Cloud as part of their technology toolset. When the time came to re-imagine their platform, the team at Preventure turned to Salesforce Community Cloud to create an employee engagement platform that provides personalized experiences that can target both teams and individuals.

Teaming up with Salesforce allowed the company to bring their platform to market much faster than the competition and even enabled the integration of IoT devices like Fitbit to track wellness metrics for their participants. With the inclusion of Marketing Cloud, the Preventure team sends push notification based on the activities of employees to motivate and encourage a healthy lifestyle. “This aspect of the community actively encourages employees to participate, even if they’ve disengaged for awhile. The goal is a deep, personal engagement and the Community gives us the tools to consistently make that happen,” Laura Walmsley, Chief Business Development Officer says.

Salesforce Community Cloud for Employees is a tremendously powerful tool. In many cases, organizations are unsure about how to best optimize their implementation of Community Cloud to ensure that they receive the highest ROI — both in terms of employee engagement and in dollars.

Implementation partners that have the business experience to evaluate your current processes and workforce can guide you through the entire process, from determining the right licenses to suit your organization to customizing your experience, launching, and training your teams.

Whether your goal is to ensure access to specific Salesforce data across the organization, increase collaboration, or drive change through employee initiatives, Salesforce Community Cloud provides you with a platform to bring your employees together.

Michael Rockford, CEO and Founder of Radialspark, a registered Salesforce partner and leader in custom software development and implementations.

Originally published on www.radialspark.com.