Worries about security and lost productivity are the two biggest reasons organizations restrict the adoption of social enterprise tools, a study commissioned by Microsoft reports.
This shows that corporate culture, and not necessarily the technology itself, has the largest impact on the success of social enterprise tools in the workplace. In fact, 40 percent of employees believe there should be more collaboration and that social tools could help, according to a CIO.com article citing the study.
The goal of any social enterprise tool is to bring people together on a closer level to help foster increased collaboration across the organization. Therefore, engagement is what should be driving businesses to invest time, energy and capital into implementing such tools.
Workers seem to recognize that potential value and are bringing social tools to work without IT supporting them or even realizing what’s happening. The survey reveals that 34 percent of employees believe their company doesn’t understand the benefit of social tools. Furthermore, 37 percent stated that having management’s support of social tools would help them to do their jobs better.
It’s clear that there is disconnect between employees and executives at many companies when it comes to social enterprise tools. How can organizations develop a social strategy that satisfies both management and employees?
For starters, we recommend combining traditional collaboration tools and user empowerment technologies with social enterprise features as an integral part of day-to-day work. New technologies and processes require time and effort to build user adoption, and if companies don’t identify the benefit to their employees and clearly communicate it, employees will have a hard time adopting the solution.
“You can’t just turn it on and expect a cultural transformation,” Adam Pisoni, Microsoft’s general manager for Yammer, tells CIO.com. “It’s a journey of reinvention that requires a strategy and executive commitment and support.”
In regard to some executives’ concerns about security, we want to highlight that SharePoint 2013 offers more security than a completely external system that an organization is unable to trace in any way. SharePoint is secure within an organization because the business knows with certainty where its content is located.
With that said, here are four ingredients for successful social enterprise implementation, as outlined by the article.
- Clarity: Examine your current situation and articulate a clear vision for how social enterprise tools will improve your processes.
- Management support: Social enterprise tools cannot succeed without approval and support from executives.
- Show benefits: Find teams or projects that could quickly adopt and see real benefits from using the new tools.
- Metrics: Have concrete ways of measuring success.
These are great ingredients, but don’t forget the most important one — listen to your employees!
Source: CIO.com, May 2013
