How can Open Social increase your team’s motivation

Who am I?

Hi – my name is Adela and I’m Open Social’s Jr. Market Development Representative located in Amsterdam. You might even notice me in the small chat pop-up window on this website.

I joined Open Social’s sales team in January 2020 and got a crash-course in software, community management, Saas, and open-source. In case you are not familiar with Open Social, you can find more information on our About page.

I studied internal business with a focus on large corporations, and to be honest, I didn’t have much knowledge about open-source and small communities. During my first week, I quickly noticed the freedom, flexibility and other advantages Open Social sets for its clients. This applies to both your organizational and personal needs. For my first insider’s opinion, I will focus purely on employee motivation because there are many ways how you can improve without costly chaotic company trips and activities.

Typically, internal communications and human resource departments are responsible for increasing your team’s motivation and Open Social proves that it does not take a whole department and many hours to motivate your employees.

#4 elements to increase your employee motivation with Open Social

1. Working environment

Company culture is important, no matter what your company does. According to Rand Fishkin, CEO, and founder of Moz, there are three important aspects of company culture: identity, growth strategy, and relationships. Open Social sets its value by being open, collaborative and trustworthy. After all, this is our vision:

“A pro-privacy, anti-monopoly and open web that inspires trusted connections and collaboration.”

With Open Social, you can digitize your organizational and team vision and mission, by implementing it throughout various points of your internal communication tool. We can guarantee a quick set-up and launch (I can confirm that from a first-hand experience with BIO), and branding to your standards while providing some tips and tricks for your structure. Whether your culture is complex and intertwined or simple and straight-forward, you can translate this to your platform with landing pages to orientate your users, groups to share knowledge with the intended audience, and content tags to easily search and find what you need. And these are just a few of many ways to help you work towards your mission and vision while improving your team’s culture. Your team can share what they are working on for others to provide insights. This can lead to discussions and brainstorms which help solve problems while building a team. All these combined keep an open culture and close relationships alongside increasing productivity and motivation, for all sizes of teams.

2. Communication

Team meetings hardly allow enough time and opportunities for all of your team members to share their opinion. Meetings have an agenda, are time-bound, and someone always talks way too long. Let’s not forget that communication does not happen only during meetings but also in between meetings and during lunch and breaks. While there are many ways to make your meetings more effective, moving your team to a digital tool ensures your team does not need to find a time-slot that fits everyone. Updates and summaries never disappear and it’s never too late to share your opinion with a reliant notification center. Your team can communicate by creating stream posts, blogs, events, groups and more. And if that is not enough, they can privately message their favorite colleague or with a group of people.

Your internal communication tool does not have to be for work purposes only. You can use it for fun updates, parties and events to encourage friendly relationships. Even in Open Social, we use our product as a community to organize company events, vote on ideas, share fun posts and never miss a colleagues’ birthday. This was my latest post:

3. Team building

If you’ve been reading from the beginning, this might be quite clear already. Open Social lets your users (employees) decide on the look of their profiles by setting profile and header images and creating a personal introduction, expertise, and interests. This allows everyone to share something personal and connect with others better. After all, we spend the majority of our life at work and connecting over personal aspects deepens your knowledge of each other. In many cases, this can be beneficial for communicating urgent tasks or even explaining a complicated topic. People who know you are more likely to lower your stress levels, give honest feedback and help you achieve your goals.

Not all team-building exercises have to be organized trips with games and other activities. Your team can share housewarmings, barbeques, brunches, tournaments and much more. In my opinion, large company trips can be stressful and messy while smaller and more frequent events might connect your team better. With Open Social, all your team members can see and create upcoming events and easily join.

4. Freedom and trust

Generally, I’ve encountered two types of managers – those who believe you have to earn their trust and those who give you their trust until proven wrong. As an employee, I think a majority can agree the ladder is the preferred choice. With Open Social, your team members are free to choose what activities they participate in and free to choose where they work from because Open Social is available globally.

If you want to check up on their progress, as a Site and Content Manager, you can see and edit anything on your platform. But that does not show trust to your employees. Instead, I’d recommend creating challenges. If you have a smaller budget, you can simply create a post in the stream for others to comment on with their answers, or create a topic with a preset topic type to make your challenges easily accessible. With a larger budget, you should get our Crowd Innovation Extension to create time-bound challenges where your team can go through several phases, submit their ideas and collaborate on the best ones. For professional or non-professional topics, challenges enable your team members to feel free and trusted.

Are you convinced that Open Social can help you and your team?

If I haven’t painted a clear picture and sparked your interest, I would be more than happy to chat with you or give you a 1:1 demo. Don’t snooze too long, otherwise, your team might snooze on their goals ?