When I was a younger man and filled with a bit more spitfire, I went to work for a start-up company. I was just out of high school and had spent an unsuccessful year at college when I was offered a job for SolidWorks. At the time the company was 300 people with 3 offices globally. The company was positioning itself to grab a large portion of the market share in the 3D Design and CAD industry. The founders had built a low cost, highly functional solution that allowed any draftsmen or engineer the ability to design on a personal computer. This is something that hadn’t existed in the market place at the time that was affordable to the small and medium-sized businesses.
In order to make this happen, the founders built a core team of executives and managers that were given specific instructions on the people they were to onboard. They wanted to build what the CEO at the time called “emotional equity” in the brand and the mission. The company expected longer than average hours with specific goals in mind to reach certain goals. They continually built a team that bought in on the idea that the company they worked for is going to change the world. They gave everyone a bit of skin in the game through developing a profit share program quarterly and then offering shares of stock annually. Health care was free, and they supplied other things such as lunches daily, and other fringe benefits. Soon these teams became like family, and the entire organization became a well-oiled machine steaming towards conquering the market. Soon enough, Dassault Systemes decided on purchasing the company which allotted them the capital to do so. The people who bought in and stayed on through the years were compensated, but the work was not complete. To me, this is what emotional capital is. When leadership is driven and they can lead the way with the same grit and determination as to their employees and can sell people on changing the world, there is no better way to get a company to move forward. When the payoff comes, that equity is turned in. As the author of the article put it, they utilized monetary means, positive messaging, and fringe benefits to building emotional capital.
In my experience with internal social media use, working at a tech company a lot of our daily interaction with processes was done through a social media site that was built off of their business software, Peoplesoft. Dassault had heavily invested in the Peoplesoft implementation and decided to tweak a few features to develop a customizable platform that allowed its users to interact with personal interests, creating clubs, developing internal relationships, and post company news on it. It was set up as a mixture of Facebook and Twitter. Executives were active on it utilizing a platform like Twitter, and employees would discuss topics and share ideas across multiple departments. It quickly became an environment for collaboration and the messaging systems inside of Peoplesoft nearly replaced email. The collaboration in the platform led to meetings in the game rooms and then plan developments to build better products or business processes.
The platform is used as a company calendar for family and employee events also. Like Facebook, it sends you an invitation to an event where you have the option to decline or accept. At the time they would announce new software updates, advancements in the business, and also would be a stop for quarterly monetary updates.
The greatest upside to this platform is you are connected to colleagues around the world and have the ability to plan travel from office to office. The platform allowed you to book travel and hotels if required. It was a one-stop-shop for all aspects of the business. This brought the company closer and kept the ideas rolling out. The platform acted as a wiki for internal information. and also can be accessed by customers to engage with people internally and utilize knowledgebase libraries built into the platform.
I have been pushing to develop an internal social media site for the company I work for now where teams can collaborate. This is achievable with not much capital.