The world is more connected than ever before. Digital, mobile, and social applications have changed the way employees go about their daily activities. They are using social media to get information, answers, and advice for products and services. They are using mobile devices to be productive wherever they are. And they look to apps to make their life easier at every turn.

Employees now have similar expectations at work. They expect to connect, engage, and collaborate with others, especially with shared services like HR teams easily and quickly. Companies need to tap into these employee networks, engage them at scale, and provide great experiences effectively to become employee-centric organizations.

To meet the expectations of today’s employees, HR teams need to operate in the same way. They need to build their processes around technologies like social, mobile, and cloud; they need to develop apps to solve problems quickly and easily. Finally, companies must gather and analyze the data from these processes to understand how each employee’s actions helps predict success or failure. Companies are realizing that engaging with employees fully is the quickest path to fully engaged employees—and they’re looking to new apps and technologies to create that bridge.

In order to be effective, the modern HR team has four key needs:

1. Standardized service, engagement, and experiences across channels for continuous, effortless service
2. Access to relevant and actionable information so they can proactively support employees and foster collaboration
3. A single, 360-degree view of each employee that incorporates all relevant information from other core systems, including history and past interactions
4. A method for empowering employees to help themselves via self-service, self-help options, and collaboration

Meeting these expectations can be difficult, however. HR teams face a variety of challenges, from fragmented channels and technology silos to inefficient processes. In many cases, employees aren’t empowered to help themselves, or HR teams are unable to quickly locate the information they need to collaborate effectively with employees.

That’s where Salesforce Employee Communities comes in. By providing a single hub for employees to ask questions, log cases, search the Knowledge Base, and collaborate with others, it streamlines the relationship between employees and HR teams. Salesforce Employee Communities is built on the Salesforce1 platform, which provides a simple, scalable, mobile-friendly way to add additional custom applications like Health & Wellness or Compensation & Rewards.

In short, Employee Communities enables companies to become proactive, not reactive, service organizations—which in turn creates a superior service experience for all employees.

Join us at the Dreamforce session 'Employee Communities: The Exciting Future of HR Service & Engagement' to learn how to transform your HR organization and drive innovation by leveraging the full power of the Salesforce1 Platform, Service Cloud, Knowledge, Ideas, and Communities. We'll also show a demo on top use case themes and share some great customer success stories, their business impact, and ROI achieved.