SBA

Social Media - Fit for the Workplace?

At a recent CW500 I was privileged to listen to and debate with JP Rangaswami (of http://confusedofcalcutta.com - a senior BT director, past Global CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein etc.). about the future of corporate information, and specifically his assertion that corporates need to adopt social networking technologies as part of their internal interaction and communication infrastructure. His premise is that social networking is a (the?) IT toolkit that most bright young people understand and use in interacting with their peers to achieve things, solve problems etc., and in order to attract those bright young people into our businesses we need to adopt the tools and technologies they are comfortable with and understand how to use into our businesses, so that we can facilitate them in solving business problems and generating business achievement. If companies do not adopt social networking & media technologies into their internal IT platforms they will disadvantage and inhibit these bright young people from achieving, and ultimately cause the best of them to select as employers companies who have adopted social media technologies above those companies still stuck in the dark ages.

If JP is correct, and I think he is, then the Social Media Landscape is going to change dramatically - not only is it going to become much more ubiquitous, but it will be the new orthodoxy, with massively higher penetration - use of it will become a required skillset for business in the way that word processing, spreadsheets and email are the essential general purpose business technology tools of today.

Currently around 10% of employees in information-driven companies actively use social media as an important social communication tool, generally the younger staff. In some companies it is higher - in Vanilla Group I have identified c. 20% of the office-based employees within Facebook! But Vanilla has an unusually young office-based workforce (and a mature field workforce), and almost all the office-based staff are "information workers" so computer literacy is essential.

Unlike many IT chiefs I have not banned the use of Facebook, MySpace et. al. in the office. I generally tolerate light personal use of the corporate IT facilities - as long as the employee does not waste too much time on it and diminish their productivity I don't really care. I cannot control what they are thinking while at work, I don't really see why I should curtail their web use unless it interferes with the delivery of their work objectives or threatens the IT infrastructure in some way. Some managers have expressed that perhaps we should consider banning such sites as has been done in many other companies, on each occasion the suggestion is made I have pressed them as to why, and it has always been concerns about a specific employee. I tell them to fix the employee, if they are right in their suspicions I will provide the evidence from the Internet logs if necessary. The huge majority of our employees are responsible in their Internet usage at work, and I see no need to regulate what is generally a lunchtime or coffee-break activity. I am (relative to most of Vanilla's staff) an old fart, not a natural user of social media myself, but I have learnt a lot about it by observing our employees. It has clear benefits, much of the interaction I see is between employees, improving social cohesion within the organisation, breaking down departmental and divisional walls and thus improving the overall execution of process in the business. I think the organisation wins more than it loses by allowing responsible usage of Facebook etc. in the office.

JP was not talking about using Facebook though - although closed groups within Facebook might be an approach to implementing in-house "social" networking, but more about implementing Facebook-like tools within the corporate IT portfolio to enable and empower our bright young people. Technically this is not an issue, any organisation could do it today using hosted services such as Ning, which allows anyone to create a new social network, but organisationally it is a major challenge.

Consider the following: Fred, who works in distribution, has a problem delivering equipment to a customer. The customer isn't ready to receive it because electricity installation preparations are behind schedule. Fred puts this on the issues list for the week, it gets reviewed by his manager who contacts the Installations manager, who in turn contacts the installer, gets an explanation for the problem, and confirms the cause of the delay - insufficient capacity in the local fuse box which will have to be upgraded prior to delivery of the equipment - back to the Distribution manager. All the players have done their bit, executed the process, but we are no further forward, we are waiting on someone to upgrade the fuse box.

An alternative scenario to the same problem: Fred posts details of his problem on the organisation's private social network, where it is visible to the whole company. Later that day it is seen by the Technical Sales Projects Surveyor who originally specified the installation for the site. He contacts Fred for clarification, gets the name of the installer, and contacts him directly. On discussing the problem with the installer he realises there is a work around - an alternate supply source for the electricity required, so rather than upgrading the fuse panel that was originally to be used but has insufficient capacity, he suggests taking the supply from another fuse panel located nearby. The installer checks, yes that fuse panel has sufficient capacity, and puts in the required electricity supply. He informs Fred, and the equipment is despatched, installed and, most importantly, invoiced.

The "process" has been subverted. Worked around. Pushed aside. The business objective - install equipment and send invoice - has been achieved. The Technical Sales Projects Surveyor has stepped outside his job role, the management process has been usurped, but we are a winner - junior staff have solved the business problem.

The next problem is how to reward Fred - who usurped the management process, and the Technical Sales Project Surveyor, who facilitated a rapid solution to the issue? In several respects both were taking on responsibility above their job grades in addition to breaking company procedures. If they act "above their pay grade" and outside their job role on a regular basis to solve problems they will expect recognition. Within the social networking world there is commonly a peer review process - the ability to endorse a person or their contributions to discussions / problems. Clearly it would be possible to use this to weigh the value of employees - 35 colleagues found Fred helpful ... - and factor this into the remuneration scheme so that people become paid for the contribution they make to a business, rather than the role and hierarchical position they occupy.

The electronic interaction provided by social networking technology connects diverse people - that much is obvious. Less obvious in the corporate environment is that it connects people in diverse locations - to the extent that location becomes unimportant. We have heard of Virtual Companies, which operate without central offices, but these are all small businesses where there are relatively few people needing to communicate and interact. In larger organisations we work in office buildings, where we can hold meetings, walk across to a colleagues desk to discuss an issue etc. These office building exist primarily to congregate people for the purpose of communication in the execution of the process. Observation of social networks shows that they achieve the same goal without needing to centralise the people - networks of hundred or thousands of related contacts are interacting continuously, in many cases without ever having met their fellow contacts. Social networking technology provides us with the means to create the Virtual Corporation - a much bigger entity than the Virtual Companies seen today - and expect it to work.

One of the other reasons for congregating people is supervision - how can their managers evaluate and control their performance if they cannot see them? That evaluation is then used to promote, reward or discipline employees as appropriate, and by removing the communication-driven need for a central office location we would seriously disrupt the people management process, Line Managers would find it much more difficult to exercise their man-management functions. Would this be a bad thing? probably not. Most man-management within companies is based on evaluation of how well an employee executes the process assigned to them. We grade and reward staff based upon the significance and commercial impact of the process they execute. We have already seen that usurping the process in problem situations may be beneficial, because the process is usurped to accelerate achievement of the business objective. Our customers in general do not pay us for execution of process, they pay us for achievement of business objective, the process is merely our internal toolkit to help us make delivery of business objective more reliable. So why do we measure it and pay people  accordingly? Probably because we have no effective way of measuring their contribution to achieving the business objective. Within the social networking toolkit that is no longer true - using the peer review of colleagues mentioned above, we can reward staff to a much greater extent based on the business impact they have, rather than the process we expect them to execute.

In summary, Social Networking technology has knock on consequences that reach far beyond the obvious communication infrastructure it provides, it enables and promotes virtual corporate structures to replace the largely office-bound hierarchical corporate structures we have today. It can allow us to reward according to contribution instead of position and process, and it gives us to access the "power of the crowd" - instead of being dependent on the role-based knowledge of niche experts we can tap the total  wisdom of the entire corporate population in solving our problems and achieving our objectives. It has the power to be very, very good, at a price! The price we must pay is to abandon role and seniority-based reward structures; suppress the authoritarian tendencies which demand that we supervise, command and control our resources; acknowledge that the power of the crowd is always superior to the power of the individual, however clever and talented they may be; and accept that achieving the objective is always superior to executing the process. I think this is a price too high for many business managers - letting go of control, learning to trust junior staff, delegating authority and responsibility etc., having to relinquish management and embrace leadership - it is simply too much of a change, too unsettling, too insecure. But for some business leaders it will be a panacea, freed from the burden of management and process they will be able to lead their organisations to greater acheivements. If you are one of the latter:  hang on and enjoy the ride!