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5 reasons why companies should encourage employees to blog

Guest post by: Shrinidhi

Article Overview: This article lists 5 basic advantages a company would gain if it encourages its employees to blog actively- either internally or externally.

5 reasons why companies should encourage employees to blog

Typically, an employee interacts only with a small group in the organization- his team, managers and subordinates and discussion will be mainly related to work. Providing a blogging platform within the corporate intranet and encouraging the staff to blog gives an employer following unique advantages which otherwise are difficult to derive:

1 A platform to display his creative writing abilities-
Ability to write well is a talent-but most of the jobs today may not have anything to do with creative writing. Blogging gives employees to explore their command over words-showcase their ability to write good articles, poem, stories and more.

2 Encouraging employee to open up
An employee usually doesn't share personal details with his management or other employees, excluding may be few close friends. Blogging encourages people to share their joy and sorrow, what they did where they went, what they think and what they feel. This helps managers and HR to understand their people better.

3 Facilitate interactions within employees
Employees across the organization, irrespective of their departments/projects/seniority can come together under the umbrella of corporate blog and interact effectively to discuss subjects of common interest

4 Allow managers to take preventive measures towards employee grievances
If any employee is not happy about anything in the company (company policy, pay, his colleagues/project etc) and writes about it in the blog, management can take note of that and initiate preventive measures to ensure employee satisfaction is not compromised. Without an effective platform to air his grievances, an employee may sometime look for opportunities outside the organization, without even making an effort to resolve his concerns with his employers. Blogging can bring down attrition, if used effectively.

5 Explore hidden talents
A programmer who is assigned the task of coding might be very good at pre sales or business analysis, someone working on JAVA may also have strong expertise in another technology such as .net or SAP. When an employee displays is interest and expertise in a specific field which may be different from what he is working currently, management can make note of such talents and use them effectively when there is a need.

Because of these and many more advantages, several corporate houses have launched internal blogs for their employees. Most of the leading IT companies in India have internal blogs and non IT companies are also recognizing the need for such a platform in their enterprise. The list of companies jumping to corporate blogging bandwagon is on a steady rise. In future articles, let us review other aspects of corporate blogging-such as measuring ROI from blogging

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Article Tags: blogs, corporate blogs, employee blogging, new media, social media



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