Companies are beginning to discover that social technology platforms provide a far more efficient way of communicating and collaborating. And, they give companies a way to dig out the “dark matter” of company knowledge that is buried in email inboxes and on hard drives. Unlike email, messages on social platforms are accessible to the entire team in real time, eliminating all the to-ing and fro-ing to get everybody on the same page. Even better, on social platforms, communications become content — forming a searchable archive that can be continually enriched with comments and additions by members of the online community. So, when the expert in the group answers the question about how to account for depreciation in Turkey, everybody can see it or find it later.
We estimate that “interaction workers,” (managers, professionals, sales people, and others whose work requires frequent interpersonal interactions, independent judgment, and access to knowledge) spend 28% of their workdays answering, writing, or responding to email. They also spend another 19% of the time trying to track down information (including searching through their own e-mail files) and 14% collaborating with co-workers. (And these are your most expensive employees, and the ones you count on to do more than routine work; they’re supposed to be innovating, figuring out how to improve business processes, and generally building you a better mousetrap — not wading through e-mail.)
These activities could potentially be done much more efficiently and effectively using social technologies — we figure by 20-25%. This assumes, of course, that time saved by communicating and collaborating via social technology is not used for viewing videos of cute kittens, but is dedicated to the most productive uses.
Naturally, there is also a catch: to capture this value, companies will have to do a lot more than buy some enterprise social technology. To get the improvement in knowledge worker productivity, organizations need robust and widespread participation by all sorts of employees (you never know where that dark matter is hiding). Firstly, social technologies will only succeed if they become part of the daily workflow, not an extra item on a to-do list that will never get checked off. Sometimes this means the company’s workflows need to change, sometimes the social tools must be adapted to workflows, and in many cases, both workflows and technologies will have to be adjusted. For example, in one computer-generated animation company, social tools did not become commonly used until they allowed people to post and interact on video clips — the preferred medium for discussion.
Participation, in turn, depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing, and trust — the sort of culture that many organizations have not yet established. For this to happen, leaders must take the lead — after all, these are social technologies. Leaders will have to role model the use of these technologies, explain how to use them to drive value, observe success stories and help them to scale up to the rest of the enterprise. At the same time, these technologies are only as effective as the degree to which individuals participate, so lessons from consumer social applications can be applied in the enterprise. How do you create applications that are as compelling to corporate employees as they are to those same people in their personal lives? Techniques such as self-reinforcing behavior loops (e.g. gamification), A/B testing, and mobile deployment can be applied in the enterprise, just as they are used in the consumer space. But overall, changing mindsets, behaviors and a culture that celebrates and expects sharing and openness is a real organizational challenge.
