Organizations that understand social technologies’ key capability – to enable employees to connect with others to boost job and organizational performance – will realize significant benefits. Thus, organizations need to think strategically about using these technologies to help transform themselves into truly collaborative workplaces. These authors, who were integrally involved in one such exercise, describe how it’s done
The use and application of social technologies to move a business forward have become widespread. By social technologies we mean software tools such as blogs, wikis, and bookmarking, social network platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and communication technologies, including video conferencing. One of the most common uses of social technologies today can be found in the realm of collaboration. In this context, one of the biggest benefits of social technologies is to connect employees with each other, overcoming traditional barriers of communication. This article will describe how one organization has benefited from such a use of social technologies.
About this time, Donaldson and Cuomo were introduced to two researchers at Babson College, Salvatore Parise and Bala Iyer, who were interested in researching how to measure the value of social technology. The researchers used social network analysis (SNA), an increasingly popular methodology to understand the connections among “nodes” in an organization. In management and business domains, the nodes are people, and the types of connections are information-based. In other words, asking employees who they turn to for information about their job tasks (i.e., their social networks), allows them to see how work gets performed in an organization. This often differs substantially from the traditional organizational chart that is based on formal reporting structures.
Other researchers have found that employees that have large social networks or who act as a broker or connector to different groups are typically high performers. Donaldson asked the Babson researchers, “What’s new with this research?” The answer was that these social tools complement one’s social network by providing access to a large, broad set of employee contacts. Employees still rely on a trusted set of relationships for certain types of career and job-related information. However, the network of connections that social media tools enable allows knowledge workers to reach a diverse set of experts and content at a very low cost. There is a small twist – it isn’t just the number of contacts that’s important but rather how diverse they are and how large their “reach” is. It matters where these contacts are in the company – it is better to have them across different business units, geographic locations, and junior and senior level staff. It also matters if the people you are following, themselves follow a lot of people. The research also showed that each social tool provides its own ability to increase performance. However, unlike many enterprise-IT tools, the performance was not solely “efficiency-based.” Rather, performance comes from building connections with employees to access valuable information and knowledge.
Reprint from Ivey Business Journal
[© Reprinted and used by permission of the Ivey Business School]