It’s no surprise that, in most companies, external audiences get all the social media attention. As the McKinsey Global Institute reported in August, adoption of social media is on the rise, but not so much when it comes to employing social software to engage employees.

New research demonstrates that, from several angles, ignoring internal social media is a mistake, and quite likely a costly one. Results of The Social Workplace Trust Study—released today—examines “how organizations are using social media, and the impact that workplace trust, passion and social media use have on select employee activities and attitudes.”

Considering who was involved in the study, it’s worth paying attention to. Launched by Human 1.0, the study was developed in collaboration with IABC, the Great Places to Work Institute, and the Society for New Communications Research.

Many of the study’s results point to one conclusion: Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don’t appear in the report, it’s clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the organization.

Some of the findings are blinding flashes of the obvious. For example, the study finds:

When companies provide employees with straight answers, provide involvement in decisions that affect their jobs, demonstrate interest in them as people and not just employees, and don’t restrict their use of social media at work, their employees are much more likely to trust management, express job satisfaction, have loyalty to the company, feel motivated, speak proudly about the company, and consider themselves as having larger social networks.

Even so, simply flipping a switch to activate social media in a company isn’t enough to produce these kinds of results. Questions dealing with trust in management to be truthful with employees, management’s interest in workers’ views, and the degree to which leadership trusts employees correlate higher with the characteristics of engagement than the use of social media. When all five levers are pulled together, though, employees who are engaged tend to talk more about the company via social media, expressing pride in the organization and serving as ambassadors to the brand.

What color is the sky in the C-suite?

Part of the problem is that management already thinks it’s doing all the right things to engage the workforce. For example, 71% of senior and executive managers believe they give straight answers, while significantly fewer middle managers and entry-level employees agree. Do leaders’ actions match their words? Sixty-six percent of leaders think so, but only 44% of middle management and 43% of entry-level staff agree. The numbers are depressingly similar for leaders showing appreciation of employees, involving staff in decision making, and showing interest in employees.

The report notes that leaders should use internal social media as a monitoring tool to get “a better, real-time view of the sentiment of their colleagues, and a better way of accurately gauging key aspects of their organizational culture and sub-cultures.”

According to a recent study from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, leaders can (and should) also use social media to build emotional capital among employees. A subset of social capital, emotional capital is the collective feeling of goodwill among staff toward their company and how it operates. According to the study, when executives use internal social media to build emotional capital, workflows and collaboration improve, turnover drops, motivation rises and communication gets better.

Engaged employees are awesome ambassadors to external audiences

Consumers are most likely to trust a front-line employee than any other internal source, as the Edelman Trust Barometer shows year after year, so you would think that leaders would commit resources to grow the number of engaged employees (who contribute to better company performance and improved efficiencies) and prepare them to represent the company online.

Sadly, the study reinforces the results of McKinsey’s social media adoption study:

Over two-thirds of respondents report that their organizations use social media more externally than internally. This bias toward external use might forfeit important internal opportunities to use social media and result in increased business risk.

The report cites McKinsey’s 2012 study, The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, which sees employees spending 35% less time looking for information and improving productivity up to 25% “if they become fully networked enterprises.”

An internal focus also produces lower risks, the Human 1.0 study argues, since external missteps are more visible. Further, the risks inherent in external social media can be minimized if only the organization invested more in creating more employees who are adept at using social media. Most respondents said their companies aren’t training employees about the acceptable use of social media and half believe the company would rather they not engage at all.

Mass media isn’t enough

Most internal communication efforts—even the digital ones—adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, producing articles, videos and other assets to push to employees. If that alone were enough, all employees would share the same levels of trust and believe to the same degree that they could make a difference. However, the study found that management was most likely to trust management (a big surprise there), experience job satisfaction, feel loyalty, believe they can make a difference, are appreciated by management, and feel pride when talking about their work. Human Resources staff have a lot of job satisfaction but feel woefully unappreciated, while communicators and marketers have low levels of trust in management, don’t feel appreciated, and are less loyal.

Why is this inconsistency across job types important? “What if Human Resources is recruiting new hires with messaging that is only true for employees in the Human Resources function?” the report asks. “What sort of experience will a new hire have when she enters the senior management ranks, where people have a much different view than Human Resources does?”

The disparity speaks to the need to get leaders, managers and staff at all levels to play a role in communications to ensure messages delivered from the top are relevant and meaningful in the stakeholder groups with which employees self-identify: work teams, project teams, and the line manager relationship.

Other findings

But wait (as the saying goes), there’s more:

• It’s not just young people engaging in social media. Fifty-three percent of senior and executive leadership respondents say they use social media at work for work purposes, and more executives use social media from home for work purposes than middle management or entry-level staff.
• Most respondents see social media as one of the best ways to get information about a company.
• There’s a shortage of trained and capable talent that is hampering organizational efforts to get the most out of social media.
• Most companies allow the use of social media during work hours (only 20% report their companies block access), which makes the lack of training in most organizations all the more puzzling.
• Most respondents don’t believe using social media at work hurts productivity.