In the midst of a recession and budget cuts, why are so many of us discussing culture change and online social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other consumer technology for that matter? Here’s why.
These consumer-adopted technologies (and those consumers also happen to be your workforce) affect how groups of individuals share and communicate knowledge, and how we share and communicate information among ourselves. These technologies have increased the power of the individual, and extended communities and communication across previously impervious boundaries. At a time of business uncertainty, they are opening the door to the possibility of reinventing how we implement change, how we learn, and how we nurture our corporate cultures. This can add a productivity dimension that until now has been unimaginable.
Consider the power of your workforce that can result when every individual has a voice, and is connected in a Web that transcends your internal structures, hierarchy, and even company boundaries.
Technologies developed for consumer consumption continue to tweak and pull at the business community — a recent example is Second Life. Most new information and communication technology application advances do not focus on business productivity. Most new technologies increase immediacy and community – to enable close “relationships” among a far larger group of people than ever before. A look at improving business through this new lens of immediacy and community may be closer to culture shock than culture change.
Applying new consumer technologies to business is not easy. Consumer applications have the values of individuality, and freedom of access and speech – the individual is firmly at the center of all decisions about the information broadcast and received. This is not exactly an environment that we’d find in business. Some who have looked at Facebook,, to critique and explore the most popular social media application (now with over 300-million active users), have concluded that it simply supports narcissistic pleasure. Well, that may be something that does fit in well with business.
One of the core functions of online social media is to construct your network of “relationships.” Many Facebook users have worked hard to build networks of hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts. However, “Dunbar’s number” defines the acknowledged limit of how many people you can have a stable social relationship with, and that happens to be about 150 people. Critics will say that anything beyond that is … narcissism.
If Dunbar’s number has validity – we may argue about the actual number – and the average user on Facebook already has 130 friends, then it may be that social media isn’t about relationships but about something far deeper. And what that is may be hard to see, until we look at social media in business.
A voice and a change in power structure
At Web 2.0 conferences you will hear a lot of discussion on how to participate as a company in public social media. This discussion is decidedly about managing the company’s brand, and beginning to explore moving the PR, marketing, advertising, and what might look like spam activities into these networks. The same discussion happened with e-mail and Websites, but the next commercial channel grab is in social media. Thankfully, there seem to be enough warnings in the business environment against going with a traditional communication approach to the masses. Current advice is to be more respectful of the customer, and to spend more energy listening to the channel than shaping it. Experts caution everyone to avoid what we would traditionally call corporate, or PR, speak, along with its frequent faux sincerity.
It started at the business-customer interface. Online forums (probably the simplest form of a social network) on products or companies created disparate groups of enthusiasts (and detractors), who came together to have their voices heard and to debate about complaints, product issues, reviews, and experiences. These have become a rich knowledge base of practical information, though it may require some sifting to get an answer to a specific concern.
This is a powerful shift. In the past, when the best you could do is call customer service, or write a letter to the CEO, it was just the power of one. These forums multiplied that power into the thousands. Companies began to listen to the “blogosphere,” visited forums where customers were discussing their products, and opened up their own discussion forums where customers could come with their issues. In some cases, companies designated an employee moderator to help out in these discussions. No longer is a company in total control of the customer communications channel; there is a new balance.
Within a corporation, applications of social network technology won’t be about “friends,” as it currently is in the consumer world. Instead these applications will aim at creating a community among all those who have elected to work for and advance the mission and goals of your firm. The balance of power in management-employee communication channels will be a direct result of your employees gaining a powerful mass voice. This is the culture shock that awaits business early adopters of social media technologies for internal business use.
Unless you are ready to reconsider, and possibly redesign, your management and business processes and structure, and to explore transformed approaches to business growth and productivity, tread carefully into the online social media realm. Not unlike a democracy, opinion on mission, values, behavior, strategies, and tactics will be up for discussion. That already happens today, of course, but it happens in fairly closed groups. This technology enables a more open, company-wide discussion, and, like a democracy, it probably will be messy. But – could possible advances in business productivity turn social media into a competitive advantage?
The possibilities
It already appears that the simplest applications to deliver tangible value could be the planned outcome of what now happens in public social networks. These outcomes include some new and traditional HR/Learning challenges approached in new ways.
- Peer Learning. Much preferred by next-generation employees as a balance to traditional mentor/teacher-based learning; a social media application opens the door to get questions quickly asked and answered. What could be better than to have direct input from someone who has faced, or is currently facing, a similar situation – right here and now – on-the-job? You can get more than answers (which may also be available in a current learning library or course). You can also interactively discuss it until the situation makes sense to you for your own application. This pedagogic solution however, will almost certainly be out of the reach of LMS functions – how much upset will that cause?
- Knowledge Management (in reality, Knowledge Access). At least 20 years have passed since the knowledge management dilemma was to have been solved. We do keep getting better at it, but it continues to fall apart in its maintenance and update complexity. Some still find that best access to knowledge is to call someone, who will know something. A social network can extend the reach, increase the immediacy, and reduce the mean time to reach a result, compared to the original telephone and e-mail approaches. Once a social network site has been active for a period of time, it becomes the de facto repository of current and applicable knowledge. There is still great opportunity to have meaningless and false data there, so you must apply some kind of moderation architecture, (e.g. voting, facilitating, editing) to have assurance that the information you are reading is correct, up to date, and legal. It is interesting that the social network creates a platform for interactive problem solving, and a transparent knowledge database – no extra work required. Knowledge management and access can be seamlessly integrated into the fiber of work.
- Collegiality. What things are most valued in an offsite meeting? Managers tend to want to say “learning,” but participants tend to speak of “camaraderie,” an opportunity to socialize with colleagues, and to add a personal emotional context to work. Occasionally, participants mention “inspiration.” The opportunity to share and discuss business, and personal perceptions of the business tend to create a closer-knit community. Some of these relationships continue after the offsite meeting, and become part of personal real-life networks. Could an online social network obviate the need for off-sites? Readers who pay attention to time management and productivity will have already computed the numbers. They are considering whether a two-day annual offsite is actually equivalent to 5.76 minutes a day on a social network. (OK: 250 work days, and 2 twelve-hour offsite days.) While reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and travel cost are benefits, certainly company offsite meetings will not be eliminated, just somewhat reduced, with attendees strengthening and extending their personal ties in between events online.
These are the three simplest applications, but trying to apply a technology that was fundamentally designed for a different context has inherent issues. First, consumer technology applications must be modified to work in the business context, a somewhat more closed society. Second, we will probably delegate a decision to explore any of the three possible applications above to HR/Learning (or possibly IT). This is so because these applications sound pretty “soft.” And this may work well until the cultural change – the management-employee power shift – comes to the surface. Third, this is new territory, and we should carefully pilot it in a model group of closed-ended, cross-functional, and hierarchical users, designed and measured for specific business results. Fourth, if not designed specifically to deliver business value in your culture, to skeptics it may appear, and may become, another application that takes precious time and minds away from the focus on the business work at hand.
With these technologies we are tinkering with the core of how a company actually works – beyond its systems and processes. Such efforts are most dangerous when the changes are simply dropped into the existing context of business process and culture. Using these tools will appear to take time from heads-down productive work. What must be proven is a step-change increase both in the value of the work actually getting accomplished, and in the resolution of issues, long before they become bigger problems.
The name and some of the underlying structure of this technology will have to change before its implementation can be acceptable in corporations – it cannot be just a social event.
