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Lower Employee Attrition with Salesforce Employee Communities

As more and more companies start to realize the value of making their employees happy, there comes the need for community within the workforce. Having an employee community where employees can go to stay engaged, voice ideas, and get questions answered go a long way in lowering employee attrition.

Enter Salesforce Employee Communities

That’s where Salesforce Communities comes in. Communities offer a fast and easy way to set up a community for your employees and connect them to all the resources they need in one place. Not only that, but with built-in personalization and gamification opportunities, your employees will be chomping at the bit to engage on your community.

Features of Salesforce Employee Communities

Your Employee Community can be as robust or basic as you require, based on your company size, investment from leadership, and resources available. Below are some easy-to-set-up features of an Employee Community to get you started quickly:

Reputation

  • For Employees: This is the heart of keeping a community active and engaged. By setting up levels and point thresholds, activities done by your employees in the community count toward “leveling up”.
  • For Admins: You can leverage the reputation engine to reward active members, increasing employee satisfaction and encouraging friendly competition. You can also leverage this tool to find good candidates for moderation of the community.

Chatter Questions

  • For Employees: Users can interact with others’ questions by liking or upvoting, answering the question, and even be fed AI-driven questions to answer, based on their expertise. They can navigate to pre-defined topics, create their own, or view Featured Topics.
  • For Admins: This comes automatically with a new Lightning community. Simply set up Topics to organize conversations and watch the engagement grow. You can monitor posts and comments and be alerted to any number of criteria, set up rules that take action on activity, and even mark answers “best” or “company approved.”

Chatter Groups

  • For Employees: Fairly the same functionality as Chatter Groups for your org, Groups for Communities allows users to have a space to discuss specific projects, collaborate with a certain team, or come to view company announcements. Streams allow for self-curated content from Group feeds, other users, discussions, topics, cases, etc. as a one-stop-shop for checking in on activity missed.
  • For Admins: You must set up Chatter Groups inside the community – Groups from the org are completely separate from those in the Community, as they are on a different network. Once set up, you can set up the Group’s page layout to include related lists for approving membership. Depending on the volume of groups created, you may also want to change ownership to a stakeholder for that group instead of yourself.

Ideas

  • For Employees: Giving your employees the chance to participate in improvements in their own company give them the power to promote change from within. This is huge for employee satisfaction. Salesforce Ideas, brought into a Lightning Community through a quick-to-install AppExchange product like the IdeaZone App, allows users to search, post, comment, and of course vote on ideas. It’s also worth setting up workflow rules to alert them when the status of their idea, or the idea they voted or commented on changes, keeping them in the loop.
  • For Admins: Installing the app, included in which is a guide to set up Salesforce Ideas, is fast and simple, and gets you up and running in under an hour. You can designate users who can act as “experts”, specially flagged on their posts, and have the ability to update statuses of ideas in their assigned zone. You can monitor ideas and direct them to the correct product team for implementation.

Content

  • For Employees: Salesforce has made great strides in making Content and Libraries UI-friendly over the past several releases. Users can view Libraries of content they have access to as a list or as tiles, and preview and download files in a modern modal. This is great to have for Sales documents, onboarding files and forms, company branding (logos, templates, etc.), and frequently used links to other systems or content.
  • For Admins: If you already have your documents in Salesforce Content, surfacing them in the community is that much easier – just drag-and-drop the component onto the page. You can enable permissions for users to create content assets and even setup Quip to allow employees greater collaboration on documents in libraries.

Above and Beyond

Now that you have a good idea of what’s possible with a mostly out-of-the-box implementation of an employee community, it’s good to know how you can take it even further and offer greater functionality to your employees. You can always start with the UI – a well-designed interface that users can easily navigate makes it all the better for them to quickly find the information they need. Custom themes and Lightning Bolt solutions are a great way to do just that. Perficient just so happens to have two free Bolt solutions:

  1. IdeaCentral for Employees: Prebuilt with Ideas, Questions, and Groups already set up, including a configurable UI design elements.
  2. IdeaCentral for Customers: Despite its name, it can easily be leveraged in an employee community where you just want idea generation. The Bolt solution can also expand to include Knowledge, Groups, Chatter, etc., as well.

In addition to pre-defined Bolt solutions, the opportunities are endless. You can set up Flows to walk new hires through an onboarding process, ensuring they complete the steps they need to become a full-fledged employee. You can establish a Knowledgebase of FAQs, How-tos, or other tribal knowledge. You can set up Cases for users to log tickets to the right department (HR, IT, etc.). The “cloud’s” the limit!

Perficient, in addition to having some of the first Bolt solutions on the AppExchange, has had years of experience in scoping, designing, and delivering Salesforce Communities. We actively stay up to date on rollouts and are passionate about delivering the best technology solutions. What would you like to learn about employees? We are happy to help answer your questions about creating an Employee community for your business.

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Laurel Jones, Senior Business Consultant, UI/UX Design

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