Social, social, social...
It's a word that comes up a lot. Social networking, social collaboration, and "enterprise social networks". So how can we rest assured that all of this 'social stuff' is beneficial to a company's people, and a genuine boon to collaboration and productivity overall?
Well let's start by overcoming the language barrier. If we can forget that the word 'social' has been swept up in a cloud of buzzwords, and remember that it means things like friendly, outgoing, gregarious - predisposed to working with others, rather than in isolation - we'll once again realise that social is unequivocally good. You need and want ?social animals? in your organisation.
Next, let's consider how people socialise within the workplace. People meet at the watercooler, vending machine or equivalent. They talk about life outside of work and, of course, discuss life inside the workplace. Neither of these are innately bad practices (subject to the context and duration).
Improving on the water cooler
What's cool about the social platforms now available for enterprise is that they offer an opportunity, not only to host many of the 'watercooler' conversations centrally and transparently, but also to add real value by offering a way to turn conversation into action.
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Why allow employees to have those conversations on a social platform?
It's not a case of 'allowing' employees to have conversations about life, work, and the universe on your company's social platform. You arguably can't 'allow' something that you can't just as easily 'disallow' ? and you certainly can't do the latter. Sure, it's possible to manage accounts, issue policies about conduct and censor remarks, but in the main this is neither necessary or desirable for the following reasons...
1. Employees have a self-preservation instinct. Although they might like to vent from time to time, they conversely don't want to get in any trouble.
2. Top-down attempts to close social channels will force the conversation elsewhere, where it cannot be heard or seen.
3. Social systems, unless they have been clumsily forced on people, tend to grow from a number of directions. Just as likely bottom-up and sideways, as top-down. They therefore create a sense of community far more intrinsic than traditional IT systems.
What are the benefits to managers and leaders of the business?
Social tools can be great news for managers and leaders.
Leaders can deliver a more visible and dynamic picture of the organisation's aims and objectives, whilst creating an inclusive and conversational forum in which feedback is encouraged and used to improve performance. This is invariably an improvement over drip-feeding carefully selected news bulletins, and is greatly appreciated by any workforce.
Managers can gain a much clearer picture of the characteristics of each team member. Just as the internet as an entity gives everyone a chance, social tools give everyone in a team a chance to have a voice; not just those who shout the loudest in meetings, or those with the most imposing body language.
Social tools are also beginning to redress the balance in how we communicate. If over reliance on email caused a shift away from picking up the telephone, and instant messaging added an unwanted source of interruptions, social tools offer a more moderate, relaxed, and elective form of communication. Generally, users can subscribe to, follow or participate in the channels that are most relevant to them, whilst watching others from afar. If it becomes the modus operandi that all messages relating to a project take place in a particular 'social workspace', this negates both the need and the opportunity for divisive and selective carbon copying (or omission) of team mates.
Why should employers think about using social collaboration tools to attract and retain Gen-Yers?
Gen Yers are ambitious, sociable and self-directed workers. Many of them were raised and educated in an environment that favours openness and collaboration over silos and closed communications. They naturally understand how technology relates to getting things done, having exploited a range of public social tools from SMS through to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A generation Y employee expects collaboration tools in the workplace (as well as remote working, flexible hours and digital freedom). Invariably, if a company does not offer a collaboration platform, people will take the initiative and introduce one. Employers can earn some kudos by making the first move and offering up something like Podio or Yammer.
The most important lesson when it comes to generation Y is not that they are so digitally literate that they instinctively know how to use these platforms. It's that they know why to use them - they understand the importance of building and using a network, of gamification as a motivator and of sharing as a means of demonstrating expertise.
What will happen in five years? time, if you haven?t built in these tools but all your competitors are using them?
Failure to stay on or ahead of the curve when it comes to workplace communication tools will have dire consequences for organisations when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.
A business that does not promote an open and supportive collaboration culture will, for all intents and purposes, look like a business that has no ambition - and therefore one with a bleak future.
The best talent in the marketplace will look for somewhere to build a career. This means an organisation that has the best systems and tools in place; tools that support mobile and flexible working while maintaining a sense of community, connectedness and collaboration (as opposed to isolation, too much autonomy and loneliness).
The benefits of this culture will permeate across the board, also creating a coherent customer experience and better products and services too.
Vision, values & behaviours
How can it help foster top down vision, company values, behaviours and objectives?
Having a clear vision and a well understood execution path has never been so important. It's not good enough to write down the company's vision in a glossy prospectus, or as part of the mission statement, which is quickly learnt and just as quickly forgotten by new joiners a couple of weeks in.
It needs to be in line of sight on a day to day basis, and the agile enterprise needs to ensure that changes of course, can be quickly communicated in a way that inspires engagement and action. The enterprise social platform provides this instant communication network that works in any direction - not just top-down.
Collaboration & innovation
Can you talk about how a social platform allows for collaboration of projects, documents?
In the world of email, sending out a project plan or budget spreadsheet to twenty people as an attachment creates a lot of work and confusion. Keeping track of what happens next can be, at best, difficult. Some people will respond, attaching a revised version of the spreadsheet. They may or may not have adopted a sensible naming convention. Others are yet to respond. They in turn may already be confused as to which version of the spreadsheet to look at, and they may for some reason not have been copied in on the latest part of the conversation. Social collaboration tools offer a much cleaner, more transparent and better-recorded way of working. Many tools either have their own methods for supporting co-editing of documents, or integrate with solutions like Dropbox, Box, Google Docs or Office 365, to cure the chaos. It's a refreshingly simple and sane way of working and a major productivity boost.
How can a platform encourage innovation?
Innovation is increasingly embraced as part of corporate ideology, but this is meaningless without the right implementation platform. The wise enterprise can easily capture ideas from employees at any level, gain consensus through rating/voting and ignite improvement through sharing expertise and posting comments. You can have a great means of realising creative ideas and inspire everyone to participate in the organisation's future at the same time! Well thought-out doses of gamification, reward and recognition can go a long way to bringing ideas to the fore.
Building community & culture
What's the impact on flexible/remote working?
Initial reports of the home working revolution pointed to an idyllic lifestyle away from the intensity of the day-to-day commute. This has settled down to reflect the more accurate reality of a lifestyle that is, for many people, convenient, yet carries with it the ominous threat of isolation, a sense of being disconnected, and the paralysing inability to swivel around and bounce an idea off your ?desk buddy?. It's as if the hardware and infrastructure (laptops and broadband) that made remote working possible, have been waiting for the right software and collaboration tools to emerge in order to balance things out. That time is now.
With a system like IBM Connections or Podio in place, remote workers can easily see who's online, what they're working on, and can connect with them in a way that has greater context than instant messaging, email or a standalone phonecall. Furthermore, the fact that these systems are generally device agnostic and web based, offers the remote worker the opportunity to work from anywhere that has a wi-fi connection.
How is global mobility affected?
The connected enterprise is also a place where global mobility begins to get a whole lot easier.
For starters, employees tend to know a lot more about their worldwide locations and colleagues in the first place, due to increased transparency and the practice of sharing news and expertise. Moreover, documentation, policies and procedures are easily found, and there are invariably no special hardware and software prerequisites, making both the geographical and the cultural shift a lot easier. There need be no surprises for an employee on secondment to a new location.
Conclusion
As the dust begins to settle from a whirlwind of new ?enterprise social networks?, organisations are beginning to realise that (hype notwithstanding), they offer an irresistible means of improving the way people communicate, collaborate and get things done.
Given that these solutions represent the future of work, there?s a lot at stake when it comes to the what, the why and the how.
- Victoria
Source: http://www.ovalbusinesssolutions.co.uk/blogs/productivity-collaboration/stop-collaborate-and-listen/
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