EXCLUSIVE: Siemens has launched an internal social media website to help communicate its employee benefits to more than 13,000 employees in the UK.
The Siemens Social Network, which has on average 40% of its employees visiting the site every month, allows the organisation to create groups, post new topics and let employees comment and like to help give its HR team real-time feedback.
The launch has helped the organisation boost communication of its voluntary benefits portal My Deals, provided by Next Jump, as well as its flexible benefits, My Choice, provided by Mercer.
Amanda Bullough, reward consultant at Siemens, said: “It is used for all sorts of communication and it is perfect for voluntary benefits.
“Where voluntary is open all year round it has given us that media feed to communicate as soon as a new benefit or saving goes into the portal.
“Recently we added Simply Cook to help employees get meal packages to make cooking easier and it immediately helped raise the profile of the benefit.”
The social network looks and feels similar to Facebook with news feeds, friends and the ability to join different groups.
It has also helped re-communicate Siemen’s recognition scheme. Before this re-communication some employees did not realise they had points to use to purchase deals in its voluntary benefits portal.
Siemens also uses it to run polls to get real-time feedback from its employees, which helps shape its benefits offering.
The organisation will use the social network to communicate its annual flexible benefits window, which opens in November.
Bullough said: “Using emails to communicate the recognition scheme would have been a difficult task. But by doing a poll we were able to see how people were using it.
“The quality of feedback has also been amazing. We have been able to find out what employees want and how benefits can be improved.
“But we are still finding our feet, we are still on a journey but it is exciting and different. It is really engaging and we want to see it grow.”