How to Eliminate Communication Barriers in the Workplace with Employee Generated Content

Employee generated content can play a useful role in boosting engagement, encouraging frontline participation, and giving employees a voice. But one of its most important benefits is that it can break down communication barriers that stand in the way of a seamless information flow.

In this article, we’ll explain how employee generated content can help your company to overcome common communication obstacles, as part of your marketing strategy. 

What is employee generated content?

Before understanding how it breaks down borders, we need to first understand what it is. Employee generated content (EGC) refers to any content created by employees within an organization that showcases their experiences, knowledge, insights, and perspectives. This type of content can include articles, videos, images, podcasts, social media updates, or any other form of media that employees produce and share.

Employee generated is valuable for a whole host of reasons. It helps to humanize the company, fostering a sense of authenticity and trust among customers and potential clients. It also encourages employee engagement and participation, as they feel more connected to the company’s mission and values when they contribute their own content. 

What are some examples of employee generated content?

It helps to understand how employee generated content can function if we’re familiar with some examples. Here are three common kinds of employee generated content that are commonly used in corporations:

Employee Testimonials

When employees share their personal experiences working at the company, highlighting the positive aspects of the work environment, company culture, and team camaraderie. These testimonials can be shared on the company communication channels, or social media channels.

Video Training Sessions

When experienced employees create short video tutorials sharing their expertise on specific topics, tools, or processes relevant to their job role. These videos can be uploaded to the company’s internal knowledge base or learning management system (LMS) for other employees to access and learn from.

Collaborative Project Showcases

A company-wide event where teams present their ongoing projects, successes, and challenges through various content formats like slideshows, infographics, or blog posts. This promotes cross-team collaboration, knowledge sharing, and a sense of pride in the work being accomplished within the organization.

Of course, employee generated content can take many other forms, but these are three relatively common examples.

To summarize :

Why is employee generated content so important & what are the benefits of an employee generated content strategy?

There is one important function of employee generated content that renders it truly crucial for virtually any organization. In fact, EGC can be a powerful tool in breaking down barriers between departments and hierarchy levels within an organization. It is an equalizer of sorts when it comes to how information flows within a company.

Here are several reasons why EGC contributes to this:

Encourages collaboration and dialogue

When employees create and share content, it often sparks conversations and encourages interaction between team members from different departments and levels of the organization. This exchange of ideas and perspectives fosters a collaborative environment where employees feel comfortable discussing work-related topics, regardless of their position in the company.

Humanizes the workforce

EGC showcases the personalities, interests, and expertise of individual employees. By sharing their experiences and insights, employees can relate to one another on a more personal level, which helps break down the barriers that may exist due to departmental or hierarchical differences.

Promotes transparency and trust

When employees openly communicate through content creation, it demonstrates a commitment to transparency within the organization. This openness can help build trust among team members, as they become more aware of each other’s roles, responsibilities, and challenges. This increased understanding can lead to greater empathy and cooperation across departments and hierarchy levels.

Empowers employees at all levels

EGC provides a platform for employees at all levels to voice their opinions and showcase their expertise. This sense of empowerment can help level the playing field, as individuals are valued for their contributions rather than their titles or positions within the company.

Fosters a culture of learning and growth

As employees share their knowledge and experiences through EGC, they create opportunities for others to learn and grow. This culture of continuous learning can help break down barriers, as employees across departments and hierarchy levels come together to exchange ideas, ask questions, and seek advice.

What are the barriers for the employee generated content creation process?

To convince your workforce to create employee generated content is easier said than done, however. There are barriers that stand in the way, and employees may not feel at ease producing their own content for a number of reasons. These can include:

Social distance and physical barriers

The new, digital workplace includes remote work and hybrid office scenarios where workers sometimes feel disconnected,and unfamiliar with other employees. They may not be comfortable creating and sharing content in an unknown environment.

Demographic and cultural differences

In global companies, factors like language barriers, cultural differences, and different ways of working can be a barrier to comprehension, and discourage employee generated content. 

Lack of personalization

Sometimes employees are afraid to create their own content and build their personal brand, so they create company content that has no personal touch instead, with a result that’s less authentic and engaging. 

Wrong communication channels for effective communication

Employees may not know what to do with created content, where to post it, or fear sharing it on a channel where it might look out of place or be misunderstood. 

Wrong communication technology to foster communication skills

For example, making a video when the company doesn’t provide the right technology to share it internally, or even sharing it company wide when it was really intended for a specific audience. The organization may not have the tools to facilitate the proper sharing of content.

10 tips for sourcing more employee generated content

So what steps can you take to start producing more employee generated content? Here are 10 techniques you can put into action that will produce results, and break down traditional communication barriers.

#1. Find the right employees 

When building a community of ambassadors, it’s crucial to select employees who possess certain qualities and characteristics that align with your company‘s values and goals. Passionate, enthusiastic, positive individuals with excellent communication skills and the knowledge and experience to back it up. These are the ideal content creators for effective communication. 

#2. Build an employer brand ambassador network to create some momentum

Building a sense of community among a company’s ambassadors is important, because it fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, camaraderie, encouragement, and continuous improvement. 

With Sociabble the employee platform, for example, it’s possible to create a single audience and channel for company ambassadors, so that they can share experiences, tips and tricks, new ideas, and even motivate one another. Give them their own space and watch them shine.

#3. Ask the highly engaged employees in your employee resource groups (ERGs) to lead the charge 

Employee resource groups (also known as ERGs, affinity groups, or business network groups) are groups of employees who join together in the workplace, bound by a common interest. This can include environmental topics, community service, workplace wellness, or even sports activities. Those communities are very powerful from a comms perspective, and can be leveraged just as much as teams/departments/jobs.

#4. Recognize employees in company-wide communications to gain momentum

Recognize employees who take the time to share their stories, both individually and collectively. Giving them this recognition will provide an example others can follow, and also motivate content creators to do their best. 

With Sociabble, this is especially easy thanks to its peer-to-peer recognition feature, achievement badges, and challenges. A little friendly competition never hurts!

#5. Create a brand-specific hashtag (or multiple)

Create a company hashtag to share employee generated content so that it’s easily trackable, while also conveying pride and building a sense of camaraderie among employees. You’ll be able to know what user generated content is being created, while also giving that content a specific place within your brand identity. 

#6. Create different channels for employees to send their content to

This can include channels like educational content, company life, social events, customer related content–whatever is most useful and relevant at your organization for specific tasks and specific teams. 

With Sociabble, admins can create specific channels on a topic, or for a specific audience, ensuring that useful and relevant information can be found when needed, and get to the employees who need it. 

#7. Leverage technology

In today’s digital workplace, there are so many possibilities for utilizing tech to your advantage. It’s important that all employees know the options before them, in terms of communication platforms and tools. For example, this could mean giving them training in and access to the digital tools they need to create videos, which generally perform better than any other content.

With Sociabble, it’s simple for employees to record a video and post it on the company’s communication platform, thanks to Sociabble Enterprise Video. It provides the best security and compliance for internal videos, and it’s available for all employees, even frontline workers who rely on their mobile devices. 

#8. Deploy an employee advocacy program

Few things are as effective for building positive brand awareness online as an employee advocacy program. Helping employees become content-creating ambassadors can totally define how the company is viewed by the public. To accomplish this, however, employees need the right encouragement and the right digital tools for sharing employee generated content.

Sociabble empowers employees to do precisely that, as they can create user generated content easily, and in many formats, including videos. They can also share content created on their own personal social media accounts with just one simple click, turning existing employees instantly into brand advocates who communicate effectively, breaking down communication barriers. 

#9. Think about what kind of social media training your employees may (or may not!) need

Not everybody is going to be at ease with social media, while others are already going to be social media pros and influential content creators, with their own personal brand. It’s important to identify and teach those who need a little help, while engaging those who already have some expertise. 

With Sociabble, you can accomplish this by sharing tips and tricks through a dedicated channel, offering courses and live training sessions, and of course, seminars on social media best practices as it pertains to encouraging employees to create content. 

#10. Leverage employee generated content to build company culture

Because it embodies all jobs and all countries, employee generated content gives your brand authenticity and fosters employee engagement within the organization. Employees can learn about what their colleagues are doing in other departments, offices, and countries.

Language translation can help facilitate this at international companies, which is why Sociabble offers a real-time automatic translation feature equipped to handle more than 50 languages, making physical communication barriers a thing of the past.

Sociabble to empower your employee generated content & employee engagement 

In conclusion, employee generated content helps break down barriers between departments and hierarchy levels by promoting collaboration, humanizing the workforce, increasing transparency and trust, empowering employees, and fostering a culture of learning and growth. By implementing EGC initiatives, organizations can create a more connected, engaged, and unified workforce.

The Sociabble employee communication platform is the perfect tool to enable EGC. It encourages the creation and sharing of employee generated content thanks to:

• Themed channels
• Audience targeting
• Sociabble Enterprise Video
• Employee recognition features
• Instant translation
• Employee advocacy features & one-click social media posts sharing

We’ve already teamed up with industry leaders like Coca-Cola CCEP, Primark, L’Occitane en Provence, and Renault Group to bring employee communications and employee generated content to the forefront, and we’d love to discuss ways we can help your organization do the same.

Just click here to learn more and receive a free personalized Sociabble demo.