Social Media Roundtable at #AWE13

Alliance for Workplace Excellence

Image from suewaters.wikispaces.com 

The Alliance for Workplace Excellence held its annual award event today. The morning included a series of roundtable discussion on trends in workplace wellness. Judy Ashley kicked off the day by pointing out some trends in workplace wellness. She shared five essential questions and encouraged us to contemplate them as we considered the ideas we picked up during the roundtable discussions. 

1. Will it fit your culture?
2. Will it help develop team building, collaboration and employee inclusion?
3. Will it favor the well-being of customers and employees?
4. Does it help connect the dots between organizational goals, performance, and employee engagement?
5. Can can you see and measure outcomes to determine effectiveness?

The Alliance used a slightly modified version of the "World Cafe" methodology for the meeting and offered round table discussions on:

• Wellness Programs
• Sustainable Workplaces
• Flexible Work Arrangements
• Corporate Philanthropy
• Employee Engagement
• Employee Resource Groups
• Communication Tools to Promote Wellness Programs
• Social Media

Each discussion group lasted 20 minutes and participants had the opportunity to participate in three. I facilitated the discussions on social media. I started by asking folks to share their name, employer, where their employer is on the adoption curve and where they see themselves on the adoption curve. 

Some of the things we talked about:

• Reverse mentoring -- partnering entry level employees that are social media savvy with seasoned executives
• Employees opting out of using business cards and relying on online services instead. I was curious what services people are using. I've used Vizify, Twtbizcard and have been meaning to try the Card Flick app for my iPhone. I tried Bump and, well, I just felt like an idiot using it. No one in the discussion had a favorite. Please share your experience in the comments below. 
• Sarah Halzack shared some of the interesting things NPR is doing with employer branding. Sarah covers employment and workplace issues for the Washington Post's Capital Business and wrote this column about NPR earlier this year -- For nonprofit NPR, social media is ‘a great equalizer’ when it comes to hiring.
• Caroline Wizeman from Near Infinity said they created a tool to gamify social media sharing to encourage employees to share content and build their employer brand. I'm absolutely fascinated by this idea.  
• I shared this grid we developed for an educational series we created for ASHA staff last year.

Social Media Tools Grid from Janet McNichol

It was an interesting morning and I'm grateful to have been part of the discussion. 

Reaching Out to Families

I've been thinking about ways to involve the family members of our staff in our wellness program. I know that an individual's social network can have a profound impact on their health which is a point in a book I'm reading now, Connected. We dipped our toes in these waters when we conducted a smoking cessation program in 2007. We figured it would be extraordinarly difficult to quit smoking if you live with people that smoke, so we encouraged our staff to quit with their family members. Anecdotally, we know that some of our Biggest Loser program spilled over into the participants' families. Now I'm thinking about more formally involving families in our Biggest Mover campaign.

We're using the President's Challenge site to record activities. Participants will join the "ASHA Team" and a smaller workplace team modeled after our Biggest Loser team structure. I think I can also create an "ASHA Friends and Family Team" and encourage staff to involve their families. We have a rarely used ASHA Staff Facebook page, so I'm considering opening it up and using it to communicate health and wellness information. I plan to meet with our social media guru, Maggie McGary, tomorrow to talk about this.

Involving friends, family and community in workplace wellness was the topic of today's #co_health tweet chat. The participants generated enough ideas to lengthen my "to do" list considerably. You can use that link to review a recap and a transcript of the conversation when it's posted.

Please share your ideas for how we can involve the families of our staff in our wellness program.