Project Details
Social media in the workplace is generally frowned upon. However, recent findings have shown that a more connected workforce actually turns out to work better together and is more efficient. Wollstra Tech's Tribe application, aims to fulfill this niche.
Tribe is an enterprise social network that was designed to empower and engage employees. It allows employees to be more integrated to day-to-day occurrences within an organization, which in turn fosters a sense of inclusivity while promoting transparency.
Built with flexibility in mind, Tribe is able to model any organizational structure. This dynamism allows any organization – from large multinational corporations with complex organizational structures to startups with a flat organizational structure – to be able to model their company organizational structure on a digital platform as it is in real life.
This flexibility allows Tribe to implement its most unique feature called Channels. Channels act as forums to which everyone in the company workforce belongs to. For example, think of any entity within an organization such as a department or even something as small as a project team; all of these elements can be made into a channel in such a way so that it exactly models where it is within the organizational structure. All the employees that belong to this entity become members of this channel. In it, they can post updates, comment and “like” on updates others have shared and even create polls! This allows employees who belong to a channel to share ideas and collaborate on their work related activities.
Privacy is another aspect Tribe excels at. When creating channels, they can be created as either private channels or public channels. Public channels allow users who do not belong to a particular channel to be able to follow them to receive and post updates on them. Whereas private channels, as the name implies, do not. For example, a department such as Human Resources can be made into a public channel since all employees of a company needs to be aware of the updates posted by them. In contrast, a department such as Finance does not and requires strict confidentiality. Hence the Finance channel can be made private so that other users can only see updates of it if provided special permission.
Tribe also provides profiles to each of their users so that anyone can visit another user's profile and see their title, their competencies and skills, their certifications and their report-to chain. Displaying the report-to chain allows visitors to a particular profile know where within the chain of command that specific employee is.
To help find employees within an organization, Tribe provides a strong Search feature which allows anyone to search for Channels, Profiles and even Skills so that someone who does not know who they are looking for but knows their skill-set can find that person by searching under their skills.
After finding who they are looking for, employees can initiate contact with them by messaging them using the inbuilt Chat application. This real time chat allows employees to quickly catch-up with one another and allows them to share files with each other as well.
Another feature that Tribe provides are Events. Employees can now create an event to a meeting and invite specific employees or if the whole department requires to attend, an entire channel itself! This allows Tribe to cater for all from small management meetings to large corporate events. Invitees can post on events so notifying event attendees of important updates is a breeze!
Amongst its myriad of features, Tribe also provides HR leave management facilities, where employees are able to open the tribe calendar and tick the days/ weeks they wish to take off. A notification is then sent to the employee’s supervisor for approval, once approved, the employee and the HR department gets notified that leave has been granted.
Delving further into the principle of engaging and empowering employees, Tribe provides a feature called Idea Centre which allows employees to be able to send feedback to the organization. This is a great feature which allows higher management to directly receive updates from individual employees regarding ways the company can improve its internal processes and mechanisms and allows individuals with great ideas to be recognized.
Modern day employees are increasingly mobile. To meet this demand, Tribe is also available as an iOS and Android mobile application, which provides the same functionality as the web app with no feature drop off. This allows employees to be always connected to their colleagues and organization, allowing them to complete their work from anywhere!
