SocialChorus: empowering companies to work as one
Nicole Alvino CoFounder and Chief Strategy Officer at SocialChorus discusses industry trends and 2020 predictions within the workforce communications industry.
Could you tell me a little bit about your company and your role at the company?
SocialChorus is the leading workforce communications platform that empowers companies to work as one. We believe a business is only as strong as its people which is why we built the only end-to-end solution that can reach, inform, and align every worker with their organisation.
SocialChorus enables employees to feel like an important part of something greater than themselves and find meaning in a job well done. Communicators and leaders can focus on the message, while the platform ensures the content is delivered to the right place, seen by the right people, and acted on in a measurable way.
As Chief Strategy Officer I oversee the strategic direction and growth of our Fortune 500 customer base - including 10 of the Fortune 50. I am grateful to spend my days with leaders of the world's largest brands, both in the US and across Europe, who are passionate about transforming the employee experience.
What are the current trends within your industry?
I wouldn’t call it a trend but one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen this year is the proliferation of ‘fake news’ spill out of the political sphere and make its way into organisations. Companies are now battling new frontiers we’ve never seen before; from the fight against deepfakes, to ‘digital water coolers’ running rampant among employees, to the spread of social and collaboration platforms that make it easy for anyone to spread disinformation.
In the coming year, these forces will come to a head for business leaders as they look to combat the infiltration of ‘fake news’ and deliver a unified message to employees. Organisations will risk losing trust and transparency with their workforce. They need to drive a single source of truth for company communications, establishing ‘truth ambassadors’ as trusted sources and building mechanisms for transparency and feedback.
What makes your company competitive?
Our people and the cohesive culture make us the leader in our space - driving transformation in the biggest companies in the world. We have world-class engineers who constantly innovate to deliver a differentiated must-have product. Everyone in customer-facing roles are passionate about delivering true business results. Executives in our customer base can use our insights and intelligence to manage their business more effectively. I want to be in a place where leaders cannot run their business without SocialChorus!
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What innovations has your company been developing during 2019?
Last month we launched Analyze. It’s a new data-driven communications tool engineered for the complex enterprise, designed to provide answers to some of the most challenging and elusive questions about the health of an organisation. With Analyze, companies can measure the effectiveness of employee communications, optimise business initiatives to improve employee alignment, elevate the employee experience and impact the bottom line.
Whether it’s HR running onboarding campaigns or the CIO driving digital transformation initiatives, Analyze gives leaders the ability to correlate communications with business outcomes. Workforce communications should drive the bottom line for any organisation and Analyze now helps to prove it.
What are your predictions for the industry in 2020?
Ethical leadership will make or break the bottom line
Throughout 2019, a myriad of factors have forced companies to recognise the importance of ethical leadership. From employee protests and walkouts to GDPR and the data privacy troubles of companies like Facebook, ethics has become the crux of both employee satisfaction and business success as employees demand more out of their employers. Especially with forecasts predicting a potential economic slowdown, in 2020 we will see the C-suite grasp ethical practices as a competitive advantage, revamping and restructuring corporate social responsibility programmes and efforts to demonstrate their commitment. Ethical leadership will no longer be an option, but an imperative that directly impacts the bottom line, pushing companies to build ethics into policies and practices, place a renewed focus on company culture and seek ways to measure the impact of their efforts.
Employee engagement strategies will center on the multi-generational workforce
We’ve all heard the talk of millennials and Gen Z taking over the workplace, and organisations can no longer ignore this seismic demographic shift when it comes to the employee experience. Businesses today are facing an employee engagement crisis, grappling with more factors and distractions among employees than ever before - from decreased attention spans to the proliferation of chat tools, social platforms and consumer-like technologies that have changed how employees consume information. With so many varied preferences, behaviours and devices across generations, organisations will need to adopt a multi-generational, multi-channel engagement strategy in order to win employees’ mindshare in 2020. This type of approach allows for flexibility, targeting and personalisation so businesses can deliver the right message to the right demographic; and retain workers before they go elsewhere.
Insights from employee communications will deliver organizational intelligence
Communications and HR teams will adopt a data-driven approach to employee engagement and communications, one that focuses on micro-moments and behaviour instead of relying on annual or even quarterly surveys. They will implement quantitative methods that correlate effectiveness of communications with business performance; from reduction of safety incidents to delivering business transformation to sales. This will allow leaders to get a real-time pulse on their organisation that will be invaluable to predict and enable high performers, as well as predict and intervene on retention issues.
Is there any exciting news you’d like to share with our readers at Business Chief USA?
We’ve just announced our fifth annual FutureComms conference will take place on April 29-30, 2020 at Convene at 225 Liberty in New York City. We’re expecting more than 400 communications, HR, IT and business leaders to join us for speaking sessions, breakout groups and an interactive Learning Lab with hands-on demos to prepare them for the workplace of the future.
The theme for the two-day event will be “Tackle Transformation,” and discussions will focus on how business and communications leaders can make their organisations more agile and competitive amid rapid change, digital transformation and evolving workforce dynamics and preferences.
For more information on business topics in the United States, please take a look at the latest edition of Business Chief USA.
