By Chris Dong, Business Analyst & End User Experience Intern, VMware
We’re excited to launch a new blog series entitled Fearlessly Innovating with Socialcast showcasing the successes of Socialcast as part of the broader VMware community. Socialcast by VMware, a leading enterprise social networking platform, is used by thousands of VMware employees each and every day. Each month, we will highlight how the Socialcast platform is transforming communication and collaboration across the company, leading to increased productivity, efficiency, and transparency. Socialcast is enabling VMware to succeed in an increasingly competitive IT landscape – and with even more robust features around the corner, this is just the beginning.
Connecting Global Interns: The Power of Socialcast Groups
With summer in full swing, there are hundreds of fresh faces at VMware both on Palo Alto campus headquarters and at offices worldwide. As rising leaders and technologists, these individuals are the future of VMware and the IT sector. Our newest “Fearless Innovators” are the 2015 class of interns.
Recruiting young talent is only the first step. The global University Relations (UR) team not only works to bring the highest quality talent to VMware, but also must instill the notion that interns can make a tremendous impact on the future of IT and innovation.
Each year, these students are a global and diverse class of over 400 that span 16 offices in 4 continents.
The logistical demands involved in working with this international audience is no small task. And with each intern receiving both a mentor and a manager to ensure success during their VMware tenure, an additional layer of operational complexity is added.
What is the optimal solution to communicate with this entire audience? Easy. It’s VMware’s Socialcast Community and the Global Intern Group.
VMware interns are worldwide. The Socialcast Global Intern Group connects them all. As part of orientation, all new hires learn the benefits of Socialcast as a transformative social collaboration tool with robust features to enhance productivity and workflow.
For interns specifically, an invitation to the Global Intern Group means an instant portal to connect with a targeted audience of fellow students, mentors, managers, and the UR team.
Within this group, dozens of events are posted during the course of the internship, providing an opportunity for interns to participate in a variety of social and professional activities. These include speaking engagements with senior executives such as CEO, Pat Gelsinger, service learning, workplace development, happy hours, and much more.
As the Global Intern Program Manager, Shawn Sigona acknowledges that a key component to the success of the overall program is the use of Socialcast. “The UR team uses Socialcast to connect our global interns, intern managers, and intern mentors with each other. It’s a great collaboration tool as it helps us coordinate events and make important announcements without needing to inundate our interns and other colleagues with emails and invite reminders.”
Cathy Ji, ESX Technical Staff Intern & USC student, plants tomatoes during a service learning excursion in Palo Alto, CA.
Fewer emails and unnecessary distractions are a huge win, but the power of a Socialcast Group does not stop after an activity occurs. “It’s also great to recap and highlight events that we’ve hosted to raise overall awareness of the intern program company-wide,” Shawn adds.
Most recently, photos from an intern service learning experience were captured and posted onto the Global Intern Group. The VMware Foundation and citizen philanthropy is a major component to VMware culture that extends to the intern program. A group of 30 Palo Alto-based interns volunteered at Hidden Villa, a nonprofit educational organization that uses its organic farm to provide opportunities to learn about environmental and social justice issues. Through photos and comments, their involvement was shared with not only interns internationally, but also the entire company at large.
The UR team realizes that high engagement is key to the success of a Socialcast Group. To encourage dialogue and promote use of Socialcast amongst interns, a summer-long photo contest was launched on the Socialcast Global Intern Group to give students a chance to learn about #VMinternlife. The entire VMware community on Socialcast reviews and votes on photos (with the hashtag #VMinternlife) from dozens of interns who have the opportunity to win prizes including a GoPro camera.
By using the #VMinternlife on Socialcast, interns can keep up on each other’s experiences like this hiking journey through Yosemite National Park.
Ashley Yu, Integrated Marketing Intern and UC Berkeley student explains, “The VMinternlife photo contest on Socialcast allows us to capture our lives outside of VMware and share it with our global community. It’s pretty amazing to get a glimpse of intern life in Beijing or Sao Paulo and see that we’re all connected by the common thread of VMware.”
Like VMware, other companies can effectively position themselves for success by leveraging Socialcast Groups as part of their communications strategy for both interns and full time employees. A culture of fewer emails, open dialogue, and sharing is crucial to the overall productivity and morale of a company. Contact us anytime for more details at [email protected].
Next on the Fearlessly Innovating with Socialcast blog series: From interns to executives, check back soon to see how VMware’s leaders, including our very fearless CIO Bask Iyer, are leveraging the Socialcast Town Hall feature to connect with their globally dispersed organizations.
