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Employees Staying Away From Internal Corporate Social Networks
jfruh (300774) writes As social networks proliferated in the early '10s, so did the idea of a corporate social network — a Facebook-like community on an intranet where employees could interact. Unfortunately, corporate users are staying away in droves, perceiving the systems as one more in-box they'd have to take care of and getting their social-networking fix from Facebook and the like. From what I've seen of these internal networks, another good reason is that they're not as good as the full-time social networks are, and offer access only to a small universe of particpants anyhow. They're like a central-casting "rock band" in '80s movies — they come off as conspicuously aping the real thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You think the boss will not monitor internal corporate social network. You can place a lock in your Facebook inbox, you cannot put one in internal corporate social network.
The users come for access to the other users. That's the real draw, the social aspect. If you have an alternative with a smaller subset of the people you're trying to connect with, managed entirely by your employer with the non-zero risk of disclosure and discovery... it's kind of obvious why that doesn't appeal the same way.
Not only the internal "social network" are not as robust as the one outside of the company structure, the internal one also comes with another layer of worry --- that is, all the participants are workers of the SAME companies and that the BOSS are watching and listening and reading and RECORDING every bit of info
Not that the things they are doing in FB are not being recorded (NSA, anyone?) but at the very least workers do not want their boss to know too much about themselves
there are no games!!! What's the point of a corporate social network if users can't grow virtual crops and live stock???
who get you fired for thinks you did OUTSIDE of work *cough* Brendan Eich *cough* the idea that I'm going to WILLINGLY put another bullet in these asshole's gun is preposterous. It should come as no surprise to employers who place inclusiveness and diversity as corporate goals above profit and shareholder value that no one wants to risk inadvertently being offensive on a social intranet.
Implemented properly, ESN can be beneficial, analysts say.
Analysts say do they?
Well, if I were an analyst whose livelihood depended on implementing and supporting ESN, I would say so to.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If I 'unfriend' the guy in the next county, no big deal. If I unfriend the guy in the next cubicle, things get a bit more complicated.
Why would I want everyone in the entire corporation to know everything about me? It's just like when my company invited everyone to "like" them on FB a few years ago. Yeah, right, so they can keep tabs on everything I do outside of work. Outside of payroll, or my boss, all anyone needs to know about me at work is my name, my title, and perhaps a photograph.
Proverbs 21:19
I have very successfully managed implementations of several transformations where amount of work has been reduced by approx 90-95% by moving several processess to social networks, Yammer to be specific. There are many areas in the corporate world that would benefit greatly from broader adoption of work and communications within social networks. When I will be managing my own business enterprise, which I hope will happen soon, there will be no email for everyone. My prediction is that in the corporate world of productivity, email will take the role very similiar to the one currently taken by the fax and I predict that it will take 15 to 20 years for that. If anyone is interested I would be happy to share some of the best experiences.
An LCD privacy filter works wonders. That and my boss is short and can't really peek at my monitors without a ladder :)
Whenever you set off to do something like "setting up an internal corporate Intranet site", you should always be very clear about your answer to this question: "Why are we doing this?" As in, what problem are we solving? How do we actually imagine this being used?
Lots of people will start something like this and think, "This application looks cool. It's like Facebook, but private and we can control it." And yeah, it may be fun to set up, but why are you doing it? What problem does it solve? Does it serve a purpose in disseminating information in a way that a normal website or email mailing list would be less effective? Does it aid in collaboration somehow? Once you have a clear answer, then you have to have a plan on how to get buy-in from employees. How are you going to get them to think it's a good way of accomplishing whatever it is that you hope it'll accomplish? Why should they bother with it at all? You need to convince them and then remind them to follow through.
But none of that works if there's no purpose in the first place. Is the intention just to socialize? First, they can do that in Facebook. If they want a more professional setting, that's what LinkedIn is for. Beyond that, lots of those people are sitting in the same office building anyway, so they can meet face to face. Throw them a little cupcake party on the first Friday of every month. It'll be cheaper, and people will like it more.
Only reason no one is complaining seriously is because no one takes google + seriously.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I worked for British Telecom, we had nice simple internal Usenet newsgroups. Some specific to particular business-related areas (like programming), others hobby-based (cycling, swimming, etc.) and some just for general chit-chat. No need for any expensive social-networking websites or anything like that, just a simple Usenet server buried in a data centre. It used to be a great way to get to know colleagues all over Britain, as well as a terrific resource when you needed help getting something working.
A knowledge base is one of my company's most treasured resources. I can't stand the idea that two of my employees might share good info and the rest of my company would be locked out. I encourage all questions to be asked on the forum for anyone to answer. Then the info is easily searchable by everyone later on. I pay my employees for everything they produce in the office. Whether that be an end product or an aha moment.
Now to sell this as a social network is marketing bullshit. I have no use for people sharing vacation photos or making political remarks. Keep that shit on Facebook.
Around here, being sociable is called being a team player. The CEO and other board members repeatedly tell us how valuable the friendliness of our company is. They've also mentioned in the past that because people know each-other and communicate a lot, efficiency goes up when it comes to customer care because there are questions that the standard scripts cannot answer, and that takes knowing whom to ask. A bureaucratic process is inefficient.
...Or, otherwise called, Corporate Social Networks, are loathed by many employees because they're shoved down said employees' collective throat.
It's not something attractive, but rather mandatory, and people don't like being given directions in this regard.
Some CEO thinks it's a good idea or finds this as a new toy, and then he enforces its use, his directs roll the shit downhill and all of a sudden the cubicle dweller HAS to meet a weekly/monthly activity quota. It defies the very point of a social network.
Of course, there are some hilarious effects that pop out:
- A VP posts some corporate bullshit and everyone under him comes in droves and "like" that post because they wanna look good and enter said VP's graces.
- Similarly, some douche posts some corporate BS and then begs colleagues for "likes".
- Proper collaboration tools are ditched because CSN is today's buzz and then everything happens through the social network rather than stuff be sent through the most efficient channel.
Not to mention that corporate social network software is badly designed, badly implemented, more often than not requiring a separate account to be created specifically for it, spamming inboxes with newsletters, assigned flags and daily digests, erroring out, eating drafts and posts, the UI is horrendous, the integration with other software is buggy as hell.
For example, out corporate social network has an Outlook Plugin which we were told to install. More often than not, the plugin bugs out and disables paste functionality for the entire machine. It took me hours to narrow down the culprit after finding out I can't copy/paste anything anymore. So now whenever I can't paste stuff I close and re-open my Outlook, which happens too often.
Just like Communism, it's a good idea. In theory. Only it ignores how humans work.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Works already provides emails and usually has a tech group that sets up email groups for push broadcasting. push. Generally you don't need the blog, and work actively discourages the uses of games.
Could we make a successful social network for work? Yes. All you have to do is:
1. Make it your ONLY form of email - in particular make the subgroups the only way to make email groups.
2. Use the blogging functionality extensively. Make it your wiki/source for information about how people do their job, what to do when they can't reach you, when you are on vacation, who to reach when you are unavailable, etc.
3. Let people play games on it for upto one 50 minutes a day (i.e. lunch hour.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What the hell is an "Internal Corporate Social Network"?
The internal social network where I used to work became an echo chamber of self-congratulatory announcements by management followed by efflusive and fawning ass-kissing comments by the serfs. It got so sickening that I had Outlook send the email updates (which was the primary form of communication of this particular software) directly to trash. Nothing of any use to me ever came across it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
This just reminds me of the tedious work social events designed to promote social interaction.
I guess they're tolerable if they're on work time -- I have to be around these people during work hours anyway, I guess interacting in a non-work mode on someone else's dime isn't a problem.
But when the activity is off the clock and on my time, I'd really rather not.
...(1) the only contributors are employees with time on their hands, who tend to be the drones. Those employees who actually know someting useful to you are too busy to waste time with crap like this
(2) the only employees who will tell you anything at all are ones you have actually met face to face - otherwise you are not a real person, and they don't trust you, no matter what you say.
Been there, done this with a multinational corp.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
So that's why mom stopped returning my calls...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
though it neither seems seriously pushed, nor does it divert from other, more practical modes of communication. It is mainly just there, perhaps as a pleasant, occasional distraction. My company places too high a premium on actual, focused activity to push it.
If I was tempted to experiment with a SN, it would likely be a somewhat contained one, like a CSN, because I don't believe in just "opening my (actual) self up to the world".
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Maybe that's the secret to CSNs: ramification. Somehow trick the staffers into coming up and exploring new strategies via online corporate games. Like "see what happens when you fire the marketing department", or "the teamsters have gone on strike: now what?"
That would be hilarious, and might even be useful.
We're using MS SharePoint and it doesn't do licensing by email, but by Active Directory account. It sources all of the account data from AD, so no duplication of accounts.
The thought is fairly simple: "Everyone" uses "social" so to facilitate communication inside the corporation... well, let's go "social"!
Yet it's wrong. The root cause is somewhere else: Ineffective communication, as evidenced that a large part of internal communication consists of laments how the communication is so poor, and if only everyone would...
Well, there's a simple fix: Start with yourself. Learn how to communicate. Learn what type of communication is appropriate, when. Yet we do none of these things. So nothing improves. So email is a burden, because even if it's free from spam, it's full of equally mindless drivel that you still have no choice but to slog through. Same with voicemail. It's required listening for no good reason. Same with most meetings. Same with plenty other crap dragging you down.
I guess people really need to learn how to use email, voicemail, fax, letters, memos, meetings, and so on. It never really takes off because everyone is terrible at it, and it only really works well if you have a critical mass of people doing it right. We lost that critical mass on the larger internet in 1993, and so the civilised way to use it is no longer fashionable. Turns out that's a drag, but with too many people unaware they're incompetent, nobody knows how to get rid of it.
Yet you can. Start with some light reading in RFC1855, pick up a(n old) book on effective writing, think really hard what you want your participants to get out of meetings and set them up just for that, organise timely agendas and minutes so as to be useful, think really hard what you want people to get out of your communique and how to get them there, and so on.
It's hard work, but if you get enough people within your group to put in that work, if you get them to be that much more effective at saying what they need to say, then the overall volume goes down, signal-to-noise goes up, and ultimately everyone wins.
Cooperation sounds pretty social to me. But for that people need to work together, and you can't just fix that by slapping on a piece of software. So sorry.
You can't access your cloud network from the Internet? WTF? How is field sales supposed to access important documents with their Droid cell phone or iPhone?
The main problem with corporate social software today is that the business dynamics are different than public social apps. With Facebook or Google+, you are a user, not a customer, and advertising is the business model. With corporations, you buy, not build the software and typically it is bloatware, trying to meet the needs of a selection committee with vague goals. So, if you can find anything good, it will be expensive (SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, etc).
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had a vibrant social network from the mid-80's to the mid 90's, based on a rewrite of the CDC Plato software. It eventually evolved into Lotus Notes and bloated into crapware. In it's day at DEC, over 400 "notes files" were active, half business related - and non-business topics to encourage use by everyone. Below the management level, the company ran on "VAXnotes". Management hated it, because it wasn't the way they were comfortable working and disrupted their authority. Did this kill the company? Perhaps. It sharpened the disconnect between management and the workers.
Today, combine bloatware social tools that basically suck when compared to public sites, with corporate rules that discourage non-business use, combined with the spyware culture that social tool reporting provide - and we see failures due to non-use. Once those that grew up with social tools grow into management positions, the popularity of corporate social tools will likely grow. Use of social business tools "CAN" be a powerful tool if the corporate culture embraces it. It "WILL" make companies more competitive if the culture can act in a more coordinated way. Just, not yet.
Almost every social network offered by companies that I have seen were stupid, so oddly enough they failed. There would be "messages from the president" or tripe from HR reminding employees not to grope each other along with other passive aggressive crap about someone not following the rules that some asshole thought they could enforce about trash can etiquette. What these sites tend to have in common is either they are ego driven or they are very complicated.
But at the same time I have seen some awesome simple sites that worked really well. One company that I visited had a site with basically 3 sections. One was the useless section from HR. The second section was a discussion group as to how to make the company better (and had reddit style up down voting). And the last section was an internal craigslist buy, sell, and trade thing. Needless to say the HR drivel was 100% ignored with zero comments except from HR. The improving the company section had animated discussions that were very detailed and I was told resulted in many changes from an ink recycling program that saved millions to moving a light pole that more than halved the time to park a truck in their loading bay. But the spectacular success was the buy and sell. Quite simply people seem to prefer to deal with people they know so the deals were almost non-stop.
On a side note one other company(very large) that I recently visited basically had their own Linkedin which was just a giant circle jerk of people posting their accomplishments "Most TPS reports filed in 1 week." And that was it. I very much doubt that the company or the employees derived any value from it making it a net loss for the company after all the time and money that would be wasted on it.
The single best corporate social network that I have recently heard of is an app where you can rate your co-workers. I presume that it is going to be an eye opener for some ego-maniacal bosses who find out that they are reviled. But more importantly it will allow companies to identify their most controversial employees who need further investigation. "Doug in accounting smells really foul and leers at all the women. Bert in the warehouse lives way to well on his tiny salary, does that explain the stuff that is always missing? Susan thinks she is sexy but isn't and needs to stop hitting on the interns. Ralph is a hidden gem, I wonder if the higher ups know his boss takes credit for all his work? I wonder if Ralph knows that his boss assigns him all the blame for his own screw ups?"
The truth is, "Management" has a job which is largely "be an employee" eg. Their job is to organize and think about and fine tune the company and team.
non-management has a job which is "Make, sell, process, or manufacture widgets." eg. write code, process loans, sell tires, whatever.
There is always an imbalance. Management naturally gravitates toward more and more of an employee's job entailing "being an employee" whereas non-management seem to universally prefer that as little as possible of their working hours be consumed with non-occupational "being an employee" tasks.
We used email so much that email is now so high-volume and meaningless... I know "High priority" flags will solve all of our problems.
Ok now 500 "high priority" emails a day are received and unanswered for each employee.
Corporate Instant messenger! Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator, Lync... Our problems are solved! Now we can side-step email, since it always goes unanswered.
I know! people love checking facebook, lets set up a corporate newsfeed that is totally the same!
The one they set up at my work had a 'what are you doing?' question, but it wasn't searchable... so if you wanted to try to find people who might be working or have expertise in a given field ... you got nothing.
It likely doesn't matter anyway -- due to how tasks are broken down, it's not like everyone wanted to advertise their skills. I've got a lot of experience that I don't list on my CV, as then I get people asking me about how to fix things all the time. As I'm a contractor, that puts me into awkward positions where if I help people from other projects, I can't charge time to their tasks ... but the company I work for requires me to track & bill every hour. The prime on our contract had suggested the it / sysadmin have a mentoring system, but to the best of my knowledge, they've never worked out how we'd change our time for it as we're divided up across 200+ tasks.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
At the time I was trying Yammer out it did not have support for animated GIFs. If it did I'd probably be able to get 99% of my job done by reducing email server's load of animated deliciousness.
I've been around many of these, implemented by various companies.
The people who own it champion it, everybody else more or less gets told that all the useful stuff will be in there and you'll need to do it.
So, you get the company cheerleaders (some appointed, some voluntary) who say how wonderful it is, and you get a few curious people who may or may not keep up with it, and you get a slew of people who are actively saying "in what way does this actually help me do my job?".
And the reality is, they almost never do help you to do your job. It's just another thing you're supposed to act like is useful and say how honored you are to bask in the glow of the CEOs wise choices.
Increasingly companies don't give a shit about you, have no loyalty or investment in you ... and expect you to to drink the Kool Aid and be on board with every stupid thing they do to a level of drooling zeal.
To me, at-work "social" networking is, and always has been, a pathetic joke. It doesn't improve my productivity (in fact, it's an impediment), and it's one more thing I'm expected to check regularly and act like it's cool.
But, like every other fad ... everybody says "ZOMG, we have to have teh social networking". And cynical old coders like me go "blah blah blah" and don't use it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's just a vehicle for brown-nosers to suck up to their bosses. It's the online version of the office Christmas party. You can't express what you truly feel on these corporate websites for fear of offending someone. And trust me - you will offend someone. This is the world we now live in.
And God help you if you get on the wrong side of the HR drones. HR is is full of girls that couldn't get a date for the prom and guys that got stuffed into gym lockers. They live for this shit. It doesn't matter if you are the most productive employee on the team. If you get anywhere near that gender/ethnic/sexual preference/political affiliation line you will immediately be branded as a sexist/homophobic/xenophobic malcontent and tossed out on your ass with astonishing speed and compunction. Within the blink of an eye you will be left standing in the employee parking lot with a cardboard box containing your personal effects and your letter of dismissal pondering your next move.
Or, you could just avoid the company social network. Your choice.
Only for work stuff. Also, they are useful and I don't socialize a lot in person due to my impediments and disabilities. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
At my last job there was a big push to promote the new internal social network solution to all employees. There were even competitions with prizes involved to induce people into completing their profile and subscribing to groups and posting regular updates.
It didn't work very well (from a technical standpoint) which was probably one reason it wasn't widely adopted, but in my particular case I had no interest in it because it was a closed system. Once out of that company (as I find myself now), I have lost access to any links or articles I might have written, as opposed to if I had posted the same content on a public social network.
While I didn't get the internal attention by maintaining my own technical blog elsewhere (although sometimes I would post links to my blog on the internal site), I've arguably had a wider audience by posting to the public Internet and I retain access to the knowledge I shared there. Why would I bother with a closed internal system?
IBMPC / IBM Forums no longer exists in its old VM form. They've now been moved to the w3 version of connections. The internal IBM connections community gets quite a lot of content, contrary to what this article says. It's pretty much the standard way to set up any kind of shared content team room now.
I work for a very large multinational company. A corporate social network makes sense for us. There is all sorts of expertise possessed by our employees that isn't normally utilized in their job. This gives us a chance to cross-pollinate, to allow our skills to be more broadly used within the company. Or so that was the intent.
Instead, it's mostly degenerated into a bunch of questions by Bangalore computer programmers that would be more appropriately asked on Stack Overflow, if the subjects they asked about weren't so simple and embarrassing. They're hardly worthy of an American middle-school child. I can't believe we actually hired these people, or that these are the sorts of programmers that take American programming jobs.
The most ridiculous question I've seen was about how to fix a computer in a remote village. Apparently it was completely broken, not coming up at all, but the questioner wanted to know if it could be fixed over the Internet. "Could I maybe use the IP address?" The amount of basic, fundamental misunderstanding that it takes to ask such a question just drives me to tears. And we employ this person. And I've probably lost several potential employment opportunities to people like this.
So after trying to use our corporate social network for its intended purpose...at this point, I've just given up.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
At $DAYJOB, we've had a variety of work collaboration tools over the years similar to the then-current* social networking tools. The most useful ones are instant messaging and wikis (or wiki-equivalents), and internal Usenet groups back in the day. Apparently having little badges next to your name is something that some current social networks do, so ours has that also (I haven't used it; I suspect there's some sort of "VMware User - Achievement Unlocked!" sort of thing.)
And we do have games, like "Guess which Wiki pages are current or abandoned!" and "Guess which User Stories in Rally are current vs. long-irrelevant!" (If you win the latter one, you get to submit your own user stories under the ones the Scrum Master is going to reject for this sprint, instead of under the ones he's not even going to look at.)
I will post a less-cynical note elsewhere in this discussion :-)
* ok, actually similar to the then-slightly-out-of-date social networking fads, rather than the actually current ones...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I work for a very big, bureaucratic company. Communication tool needs are really different for different scales of companies.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have a lab across the bay with a couple of coworkers that I generally go to once or twice a week. My current supervisor is in Atlanta; I've never met him in person. I worked for my previous supervisor for a year before I met him. I've worked for my director for about 5 years (he's in Indianapolis, and I've never met him in person.) We work with a bunch of developers and operations folks around the US and some in Eurasia. We use all those tools, and they've got different purposes. For maintaining documentation that sticks around, sometimes it's useful to have wikis and similar web sites that users can edit; for shorter-term documentation, we use tools that are designed for faster communication, and haven't really figured out how to handle the problem of obsolete chunks of information, which is harder on less-aggressively-managed systems.
Social networks are another point in the communications spectrum. For dealing with bug reports or feature suggestions from users, they're less formal than ticket tracking systems, but sometimes that's useful. If some developer wants to steal my ideas or listen to my rants\\\\ insightful comments, that's just fine. We've been starting to do a lot more with social networks, and we'll see how well it handles the problems of disposing of conversations that don't need to be kept around or are no longer current, or keeping information accessible that is current.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
is all you need
I see no value in the Facebooks of the world and a company internal social network is no different. There are several people that I work and communicate with on a regular basis either directly or through email and instant messaging. Aside from that I would have no idea what I would post on a social network. Bore everyone with what I am currently working on? Getting bored by the garbage everyone else is posting? Go all out about my hobbies that I already know nobody shares an interest in? And even if Mary or Joe do at the other end of the country, will they stop over on the weekend? I doubt it. There is no value in these social networks and there never was except for those who have a dire case of egomania.