The instant opinion of many corporate decision makers is that enabling employees to use social media while at work is a bad thing. Maybe they don't want people to spend too much time at work organising their social calendars and tracking what their friends and family members are doing, but there are many principles of social media that can add huge benefit and value to the workplace in a workforce collaboration or #socialworkforce scenario.
Most organisations today have an on-line presence and many already use social media in some way to market and communicate to their current and prospective customers and clients. They therefore already see the added value that pull-based, self-selecting, relationship-driven interactions can bring compared to the pushing out of unsolicited information. It seems strange that they aren't thinking about what value of these technologies can bring internally.
Maybe it's due to the bad publicity around the amount of time employees spend (waste) on personal use of social media at work coupled with the confusion between social media and workforce collaboration (which uses many of the same technologies and principles plus many more). However, I expect that more enlightened employees are already using consumer social media applications to help them do their everyday jobs, even though the tools aren't optimised for the task required.
For example, one of the things that frustrates me most at work is when I am working on a project and have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information. I might know that this knowledge exists somewhere but I can't find it. Sometimes I'm even looking for a document that I've written myself and can't remember where I've filed it on my laptop, the Intranet or the file share. At other times it's something I remember that someone once sent to me as an e-mail attachment which I don't have anymore (because I of course deleted it as I didn't want it at the time and was running out of space in my mailbox)! Quite often in these cases, Microsoft's 'find' facility just doesn't do the trick. It would be so helpful to quickly and easily find all the people who might have the answer, gather them together into a working group, create a 'project' around my topic, collect their input and track it over time - 'meeting up' as and when required. This is one of the main ways that people use social media (for example Facebook users can connect, keep in touch with and share information with anyone in the world who has access to the Internet) and it is also one of the first principles of a workforce collaboration solution.
We've all seen file sharing systems, Intranets, portals, wikis and document management systems presented as the answer to this type of challenge, but none of them have quite solved the problem. I think it's partly because there are too many options, people don't know or can't remember which one to choose, partly because people are generally bad at filing things in central repositories and partly because it's too difficult to find things in someone else's filing system.
Marina Stedman
