The question of social software in businesses came up during our Strategic Management class this quarter and I wanted to share some of the ideas we discussed with the larger MCDM community. Social software implementations are popping up in the business world trying to address tough issues around leadership, employee recognition, employee engagement, communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing using a variety of tools from traditional wikis to services such as Yammer and Jive.
MCDM friend, and bestselling author, Charlene Li addressed the use of social media in creating authentic and transparent business culture in her book Open Leadership. Li acknowledges the varying needs and ability for different organizations to be open, but businesses must start from where they are right now and set realistic goals for cultivating a culture and a discipline of transparent behavior internally and externally.
Encourage your organizations to perform a self-check, no matter what degree of openness they currently believe they possess and try to answer these questions:
-How well are decisions explained?
-How are these explanations presented to customers, clients, employees?
-Who is kept up-to-date about the state of the company, products, etc?
-How are updates transmitted?
-Do you have a lot of need-to-know-basis or closed information? Is there really a compelling reason for it to be closed? Can you instead create guidelines and standards for sharing information?
-Who can provide feedback and ideas and how can they provide those?
-Do employees and customers feel safe and encouraged to contribute?
-Do they have easy, visible, accessible tools to submit their contributions?
-Do employees and customers feel like their contributions matter and that they are being listened to and evaluated?
There is no single implementation of social tools that is the magic pill for all your organization’s communications ailments. This is a strategy that needs to be developed incrementally and iteratively: identifying areas for improvement, setting small measurable goals, supporting the change within the organization by defining processes and guidelines, and learning from mistakes quickly.
While the first step is to listen, the ultimate goal is achieve active engagement with employees and clients by building true relationships based on trust. Listening is not sufficient if it is not followed by a conversation. Once the communication channels have been opened, there is an expectation that leaders would keep everyone updated and be willing to explain decisions.
The leadership challenge is not trivial and, over time, requires a transformational change in corporate culture that gives up tight control with an understanding that giving up control does not necessarily mean giving up command. In Li’s words, leadership becomes a catalyst for engendering commitment. The open leader’s role becomes to rally customers and employees around a common vision.
Over the course of nearly twenty years in the corporate world, I find that often times organizational health boils down to how empowered do employees feel to have influence over their work lives. Interestingly, this perception of empowerment often manifests itself as a result of the quality (or lack thereof) of communication and transparency around key issues facing the company and executive decision making.
I’ve seen a handful of examples over the years of managers who make the effort to share the key issues they’re grappling with, and ask for employee input having stronger than average organizational health metrics, greater appreciation for and acceptance of the decisions they make, and high levels of loyalty from their employees.
Its human nature. The more information people have, the more they tend to feel confident, secure, committed to, or at least prepared for what lies ahead. We want this in our everyday personal lives, so why wouldn’t we also want this in our work lives as well? In our personal lives we can often go out “get” this information on our own, but in our work lives, we often need management to share this information with us.
Of course this is easier said than done. Truly interactive exchanges between executive managers and employees are difficult to facilitate. One option often employed is the company-wide email update from the CEO with the possibility of responding to a monitored alias where a business manager would filter out all but a handful of mails that the CEO would respond to and post on some internal website. For more critical issues, the company-wide, or perhaps division-wide meeting might be employed, where the executive will get on stage, provide an update to the employees, and follow it up with 30 – 60 minutes of Q&A. In either case the two way interaction never feels entirely satisfying.
For this reason, I found Charlene Li’s call for the use of social media in creating authentic and transparent business culture in her book Open Leadership to be an extremely compelling example of how social media can gain ground as a critical tool in business that every manager and employee can appreciate. Of course each organization must, as Li suggests, evaluate what is realistic for them to implement and support in terms of creating true two way engagement, but the notion of asking organizations to assess their transparency and how they can utilize social media tools to create/improve that transparency and two-way dialogue is right on.
I suspect that companies that can effectively implement and support these richer types of two way interaction systems internally, will ultimately experience reductions in turn-over, improved employee morale and loyalty. The by-product of these benefits – reduced operational expenses, reduced effort to facilitate buy-in for big change, and perhaps even more employee consumption of company products and/or services.
What do you think? Is the real opportunity to drive wide spread use of social media in business not in marketing, but perhaps in internal communications?
Pingback: Internal Communications: The Real Place for Social Media in Business? « Digital Perspectives by David Jones
Great post, Jay! David, I do think social media is a more natural fit for internal communications than for marketing. The idea has certainly caught on; companies can pay any number of consultants to show them how to implement social media internally, using Coca-Cola, BT, IBM, IKEA, and others as case studies.
However — and I think this is a point of Li’s, though (full disclosure) I have only read excerpts from the book — it still seems that much of the buzz around corporate social media has to do with increasing productivity through collaboration, or creating brand ambassadors. After all, if you’re a social media consultant, you need to give executives a reason to buy your services. Increased productivity is a good selling point.
But so is employee retention. If the cost of employee turnover represents 30% to 200% of the employee’s salary, stemming turnover has value as well. Most HR teams now use social media for recruiting, but they could be making a mistake by not also using social media for retention.
For instance, many large companies have yearly polls to monitor the health of the business. Social media tools have the potential to address areas where employees are dissatisfied. They can be used to address lack of management/employee transparency, as David mentioned. They could also be used for recognition and rewards, as Jay wrote in her original post. Lack of recognition and rewards is typically one of the highest sources of employee dissatisfaction. They can be tailored to the environment — for instance, in more conservative work environments, providing employees with dedicated forums to ask & answer questions anonymously could allow employees to feel heard but not exposed.
I’m not familiar with many examples of HR retention efforts that use social media. Would love to hear about them if they exist. Anyone got any?
Has anyone been involved with the effective use of social media as an internal communications tool? I’d be really interested in hearing some success stories. While a great deal of opportunity for intra-organizational engagement exists, it seems like there would be significant challenges to implementing an appropriate set of policies and tools in most organizations.
The ownership of the network seems a fundamental concern. Microsoft certainly wouldn’t want its executives planning long-term strategy on Facebook, for instance. Facebook’s patchy record with privacy and broad exposure of its user’s social graphs make its use a measured choice even for small businesses. That said, building your own internal network is no small task. As we’ve seen with MediaSpace, even a good tool poses challenges to adoption; folks want to manage day-to-day communication via tools they already understand rather than spend time learning new tools and idioms.
If you are able to establish your own network and get employee buy-in, the challenge becomes determining the appropriate degree of transparency. This leads to some tough questions: will the airing of pre-consensus executive disagreements damage your organizational culture? We’ve seen from Facebook that partitioning an individual’s social networks can be a particularly sticky problem; can your organization weather leaks from your HR department? Product development?
I certainly don’t pretend to know the answers to the above, but I’d suggest this: deeply ingraining social media tools into your internal communications could radically alter your organization’s structure and in addition to its culture. Some may argue that this is the point, but the implications would certainly be worth serious consideration.
I’d love to hear some examples of folks who’ve tried this, and some of the issues and concerns that they’ve had to deal with!
Good stuff!
PS – RE Retention–I really like the idea of using not just social networks, but social games. Leaderboards are already common in the sales context, but it could be possible to use that sort of social reinforcement to build a reward and incentive structure in a social network for other types of tasks as well. See: http://www.totalengagement.org/
Great questions, Jay.
With limited corporate experience, I sometimes wonder who the transparency is really for when it comes to inter-office communications. While fostering an open dialogue and avoiding the creation of a “sounding board” is the key to success for an internal social communications system, it sometimes concerns me that it’s really just a way for entry and mid-management jobs to feel listened to – not that there’s anything wrong with that. Are top managers and directors really contributing to the conversation in the same way associates and junior executives are? Should they be?
As I said, with only minimal corporate and office culture experience these are sincere questions.
Ashley makes a great point when she mentions the cost of replacing an employee. Retention is a major way to save money and protect company assets and if a solution can be found in fostering an open, communicative, transparent work environment, then do it. It should be an easy sell. But of course, it’s not. Corporate culture is deeply ingrained in so many workplaces. Stepping out and promoting a social communications tool can be incredibly difficult. Organization leaders are smart to ask, “Is this right for MY company?”. In some form or another, transparency and dialogue are always good choices, but, as Jay points out, must be incorporated in manageable increments.
Great post Jay, It has begun a very interesting discussion about strategic management. I think that Li has touched on the fundamentals of what makes a successful modern business. The recipe being trust, transparency, and transformation… but change does not come easy. Before anything, change management should be considered. C-scape author Larry Kramer emphasizes that it is not the business model change that is a challenge, it is the mentality.
Business practices are in a state of transformation. This transformation is something that people will need to adjust to. I believe Li has it right about addressing trust. Since trust is a major part of accepting change. Corporate culture is shaky in the current climate, so if we are to evolve to more efficient process we need to work on change management.