75% Telenor employees say yes to ‘Facebook at Work’

NEW DELHI: As part of its efforts to inculcate positive digital habits among its employees, Telenor India has introduced an innovative way to improve engagement and promote collaboration among teams.

In March this year, the company became the first telecom operator to launch Facebook at Work. And within 60 days of introducing it globally Telenor India has 75% of its employees collaborating and interacting on the social media platform.

Facebook at Work is an enterprise offering from Facebook that allows users to connect with their colleagues, see newsfeed, comment and share posts, create groups and chat using Work Chat. The access is managed by the organization and if an employee leaves, the login ceases to work and hence, the corporate data stay safe. Telenor was among the first 450 companies to roll out FB@work from over 60,000 companies who had signed up for the pilot last year.

“By adopting Facebook at Work, we are meaningfully integrating social networking behaviour of our employees to share information and encourage cross functional and cross border discussion and collaboration. This is part of our digital journey and uses social media as a productivity tool. While we strive to become the preferred partner in the digital life of our customers, we also realise that unless we change our mindset internally we will not be able to make the transition,” said Sharad Mehrotra, chief executive officer, Telenor (India) Communications.

Telenor India has moved most of its employee engagement and communication to Facebook at Work. It can be used to spread awareness around hot topics and update employees on company activities. It bridges the gap between employees and senior leadership team and, most importantly, being a two-way communication channel, it enables the top management to get direct feedback and understand employee needs better. Telenor has been using various features and innovating to create and launch interesting campaigns for its employees. Few initiatives such as Manthan (on social issues), Tring tring (Comic strip) and #GeekOut (technology related information) have successfully started employee engagement and have seen high participation levels.

“Facebook at Work removes hierarchies. It is a state-of-the-art tool for knowledge sharing, collaboration and teamwork. This new tool has created a more connected Telenor resulting in quick exchange of best practices, sharing of creative pursuits and more constructive engagement with multi-location teams for guidance on complex issues. As most of us are on Facebook, it is very intuitive to adapt FB@Work features and start sharing,” said Pooja Thakran, Chief Communication Officer and Social Responsibility Head, Telenor (India) Communications.

Within Telenor Group, Facebook at Work is available to over 36,000 of its employees spread across 13 business units in Europe and Asia. With this new internal social media platform, the company has taken its principles of open office and transparent communication to a new level.