Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

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Employees share information in their personal lives. Companies can use those skills to improve workplace collaboration.



By TERRI L. GRIFFITH

To recognize the huge potential social networking offers for companies looking to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees, consider these two facts:

• About half of company knowledge-management initiatives stagnate or fail.

• There are about 131 million U.S. Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 64, and more than 500 million world-wide.

That's more than half a billion people using the same kinds of tools so many companies have struggled to put to productive use. In their private lives, users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media are completely at ease forming communities of shared interests and keeping everyone up-to-date with messages, pictures and documents. Now they are ready to put those same tools to work at the office—to help everyone see who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate their work.

In other words, employees already have the skills for more collaboration. It's up to companies to take advantage of them. Here's how to do just that:

Have employees identify areas that would benefit from greater collaboration.

Be explicit. Raise the subject with a question like, "If we had something like Facebook [or Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.], what part of your work would be better?"

It's likely that many of your employees are already thinking about how they might apply these same tools to improve how they get their jobs done. In fact, they may already have started without you.

In some companies, teams have created Facebook groups around their projects to help them get to know their teammates and have a single place to store project documents. Other savvy teams have studied Facebook, and then asked their IT staff to create a similar online space for collaborative work.

In both cases, employees are taking action based on recognizing unmet needs for online collaboration and knowledge-management tools.

Don't say no to social networking because of concerns about public sites.

Continue: http://on.wsj.com/s9Z4BP

-WSJ

Join Professor Griffith for The Plugged-In Manager to continue the conversation.

The Plugged-In Manager

December 15, 2011
5:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Hult International Business School
1355 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94111
Advance Program Check-In

 

 

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