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2. REWARDS & RECOGNITION Rewarding and recognizing employees has been made more effective through the use of social media and social media tools. Companies have realized that public recognition of employees through social media can lead to great work motivation as well as feeling of pride in working with the organization. For an individual it’s a great feeling to earn something tangible that can be shared with friends and families. It also encourages peerto-peer acknowledgement, helps executives reach their employees and hence serves as an effective tool to reward staff and boost morale. Some of the best practices of employee recognition through social media are: • Highlighting employee achievements on Facebook by tagging employee pictures receiving an award or by promoting their stories of accomplishments. Avi Spl is one such company that uses their Facebook page to recognize employees. • Second is by creating hashtag for all employee recognition tweets so that Twitter groups them together for easy search. Deloitte makes use of social media by letting employees share their badges on Twitter, LinkedIn earned by completing various training modules. 3. EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Social media has given employers a way to spread the word as well as a way to channel employee comments by shifting patterns of communication, from being one-way to being multi-way. Some organizations use corporate Facebook page to communicate new programs or policies to their employees. While others make use of corporate blog or video 22 • Designfreebies Magazine • www.designfreebies.org sharing to keep employees around the world engaged. It is seen by them as an excellent tool for quickly disseminating information related to organization and lets everyone feel involved and connected. Some such companies using social media for internal communication are Dell, Nokia & Nestle. Dell objective is to make employees more productive and to interact more easily and frequently particularly when they are working remotely and around the globe. It enables employees to follow their leaders’ updates and interact with them on an open platform thereby increasing engagement. The idea of the Nokia Social Media Communications is to encourage the use of social media internally to bring out the company’s unique authentic voice and to engage in social media externally on behalf of Nokia contributing to product and service announcements. 4. LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT Another application of social media lies in learning & development of em