- Driving force behind digitization: Deutsche Telekom’s social collaboration platform has 100,000 registered users
- New approach: Deutsche Telekom goes for direct dialog, dispenses with classical intranet for employee communication
- Survey: Social collaboration platforms are all the rage
Deutsche Telekom has adopted a new approach to employee communication and now relies on its social collaboration platform. Employees like it; 100,000 of them are now active users. Unlike a conventional static intranet portal this platform enables all Telekom employees to connect and engage in dialog on an equal basis across hierarchies and area boundaries. Colleagues not only maintain virtual contact with each other but also collaborate in groups, sharing information and experiences. An entirely new form of employee communication takes shape as a result. It is communication that is more direct, more authentic, and faster.
The platform is also used internationally and is being extended consistently. The aim is to achieve more effective cooperation across departmental and country boundaries and thereby, of course, to embark on a cultural change to make Deutsche Telekom an agile enterprise that actively shapes progress toward digitization.
Long experience of social media
In-house, Telekom employees have gained experience of social media since 2006, sharing views in Wikis or blogs. In parallel, a classical intranet has until now supplied employees with all of the important news from across the Group.
A platform for and by employees
That has since changed. The contents of the central intranet have been transferred to the social collaboration platform. “Only a very few companies rely so consistently on a social collaboration platform as Deutsche Telekom. We are delighted that employees have taken up the offer and are using it so diligently. Our platform is the driving force behind digitization in the Group. In the long term we aim to develop it into a central collaboration hub and turnstile for all employee applications at Deutsche Telekom,” says Philipp Schindera, Head of Corporate Communications.
Awards for in-house social collaboration platform
The experts have also hailed the Group’s social media activities. CEO Timotheus Höttges’ in-house blog Tim’s Base won this year’s platinum award of the German Public Relations Association. “Tim’s Base is absolutely up to date and close to the boss,” the jury explained. The Intranet Innovation Awards jury also praised Telekom’s social collaboration tool, inter alia for its transparency and for the ways in which employees can help shape it.
Survey: Social collaboration platforms are all the rage
A recent TNS survey commissioned by Deutsche Telekom revealed that more and more companies are relying on IT-based platforms to promote internal exchange and collaboration. Around two in three respondents from the midrange and large German businesses polled anticipate increasing importance of social intranet platforms in the next two years.
At present they are mainly used for information and knowledge management, so about one in three of the companies polled also hope they will improve the transparency of their corporate culture. Further uses for corporate collaboration platforms already include supporting in-house decisions or voting. In addition to team coordination, product development decisions are also supported. Nearly half of the companies polled said they could imagine using social collaboration platforms to coordinate personnel selection in the future.
In customer communication social platforms are already established, especially at large corporations. More than half the companies polled said their customer service already used social channels – with an upward trend – and nearly half felt that this form of customer communication was going to increase in importance. The survey was undertaken in May 2015 and 500 companies in Germany took part in it.
About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with around 151 million mobile customers, 30 million fixed-network lines and more than 17 million broadband lines (as of December 31, 2014). The Group provides fixed network, mobile communications, Internet and IPTV products and services for consumers and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in more than 50 countries and has approximately 228,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 62.7 billion in the 2014 financial year – more than 60 percent of it outside Germany.