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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.
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
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
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
Nothing of any use to me ever came across it.
But how will you hear about the new cover sheets for the TPS reports, now?
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
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'
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