A bit more detail – do enterprise social networks save time?

1. Social networks are for teenagers at the mall, right?
2. Social media is wasted time, especially if you’re doing it at work.
3. I’m already really busy – where am I going to find time for yet another app?

Firstly, take your assumption in for an overdue oil change: teenagers don’t hang out in malls as much anymore…

Secondly, and following on from the previous post in a bit more detail, enterprise social networks can improve productivity.

The McKinsey Global Institute’s report The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies looked at the economic impact of social networking tools and applications in 2012 (yes, that was already five years ago…). In particular the opportunity to:

…extend the capabilities of such high-skill workers (who are increasingly in short supply) by streamlining communication and collaboration, lowering barriers between functional silos, and even redrawing the boundaries of the enterprise to bring in additional knowledge and expertise in “extended networked enterprises.”

Which is essentially also the description of using collaboration to drive innovation: streamlining communications, lowering barriers, extended networks…

And in response to complaint #3, the authors of the report estimated that 30 percent of email time could be repurposed by moving communication to a social platform, or around 8 percent of the total work week (three and bit hours in a forty hour week). A parallel benefit is that in an open social platform all correspondence and information is available and searchable, leading to an estimated 35% reduction in searching times (or 6% in the total workweek which is another two and bit hours). Is email’s reign of overwhelm coming to an end?

There are plenty of apps out there vying to be the next big thing, but of course it won’t happen overnight as email is deeply embedded (even among those teenagers not hanging out at the mall).

One further aside I find fascinating is a glimpse of corporate life in a social network paradigm. The McKinsey report refers to ‘redrawing boundaries of the enterprise’, but in the sense of external boundaries of how an organisation collaborates with others. In a scenario raised during the study tour, there will also be enormous impact on internal boundaries:

An organisation started posting IT help requests in a social media app so a requester could see where they are in the queue. Tick the transparency box – and perhaps a little social pressure on the IT department to get the requests seen to. What happened was that some of the requests where then answered by people from outside IT. In part it was because many of the problems were more about business processes than IT and the social network tapped into the collective wisdom. In part because there were plenty of IT-savvy people elsewhere in the business that knew their stuff.

Upside: requests are getting answered quickly and there is some self-filtering going on so the IT team can focus on the problems they are best placed to deal with.

Downside: it flies in the face of conventional management process. In the scenario, an IT-savvy employee outside IT has been answering some requests and doing it well. Those requesters are happy, their problems have been solved and the organisation as a whole has benefited. But it’s not their job and the employee’s manager is not happy.

It’s not a new problem. We will all know people who have sought-after wisdom beyond their nominal job, or are easily distracted from their set tasks, or a bit of both. On the other side, there are plenty of silo-bound transactional managers who cannot abide one of their team going outside the box, especially if it involves wasting time on that interweb thingy. Enterprise social networks are going to bring this clash of cultures and expectations to the fore, do we have the management tools in place to cope?

Clearly you can’t run an organisation by social media with people picking and choosing which requests to work on. Yet it also points to new ways for an organisation to structure itself. For innovation to work there has to be a degree of freedom to allow the time for ideas and actions to flow across the hierarchy. It happens anyway and should be encouraged. Some managers are going to need help with accepting that and structuring their teams work requirements to  encourage that broader collaboration for the greater benefit of the organisation.