GigaOM » enterprise social media

Employees skeptical of execs touting enterprise social, survey finds

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:02:13 +0000

Among the primary selling points of enterprise social tools is their ability to prick the executive bubble and allow business leaders to get at the perhaps less than beautiful truth about what’s actually going on at lower levels of their organizations. By facilitating information sharing across organizational divides and hierarchical levels, this argument goes, social tools will help businesses forge a more cohesive and transparent culture.

It’s an argument to which employees apparently respond: Oh please! According to a surprising new survey from Deloitte, many executives have bought the party line on the effects of enterprise social media far more than frontline employees, who largely view social as more empty rhetoric out of the C-suite.

The Core Values and Beliefs survey from Deloitte asked 1,000 employees and about 300 executives for their views on social tools and the impact of these technologies on their organizations. In news that will surprise those who see social tools infiltrating organizations from the bottom up, driven by employee’s comfort with consumer social, the poll found much greater enthusiasm for social among execs that frontline team members.

45 percent of executives say social media has a positive impact on workplace culture; 27 percent of employees agree
41 percent of executives believe that social networking helps build and maintain workplace culture; 21 percent of employees agree
38 percent of executives say social media allows for increased transparency; 17 percent of employees agree
46 percent of executives say social media and online collaboration tools are critical to building and maintaining relationships with colleagues; 27 percent of employees agree

What do these numbers add up to? “Our research suggests executives are possibly using social media as a crutch in building workplace culture and appearing accessible to employees. While business leaders should recognize how people communicate today, particularly Millennials, they must keep in mind the limits of these technologies. The norms for cultivating culture have not changed, and require managers to build trust through face-to-face meetings, live phone calls and personal messages,” said Punit Renjen, chairman of the board, Deloitte.

Or in other words, implementing social technologies is all well and good, but employees will see through any claims that these tools are transparency, culture or cohesion boosting if the implementation is not backed up with an accessible, democratic approach by executives.

Do you think executives are often only paying lip service to the bureaucracy busting democratic ideals of enterprise social?

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European companies embracing enterprise social, reaping rewards, report shows

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:49:38 +0000

Pundits have been chattering about enterprise social media for a while, but previous research showed that despite the hype these technologies had a long way to go before they were fully embraced by business. Now a new report indicates that adoption of social tools and the realization of their much discussed benefits may be firmly underway, in Europe at least.

The report by branding agency Millward Brown, and sponsored by Google, is based on a poll of 2,700 professionals in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and comes to conclusions that will get enterprise social advocates excited. “The results… clearly show that not only are social tools being used widely within business today, but that those who are using them are already reaping the benefits,” declares the report’s forward written by Sebastien Marotte, VP of Google Enterprise, EMEA.

First off, it should be noted that the report includes both consumer social products like LinkedIn and Facebook used for business purposes and social tools geared specifically for organizations under the banner ‘enterprise social’. So what are the details?

Some of the most encouraging findings about enterprise social concern exactly who is using the tools. The report found that high-growth companies (defined as those with more than 10 percent growth in 2011) are making the greatest use of social tools, with 81 percent of these dynamic companies that employ enterprise social reporting these tools have significantly impacted growth and 80 percent telling pollster they saw benefits to teams’ collaboration and knowledge sharing. “Frequent users of in-house social tools are more than twice as likely to be working in high growth companies,” says the report, though professionals in Germany and Sweden seem to be less likely to utilize enterprise social.

“The better the performance of a company, the more likely they are to be using social-media tools,” Allan Hyde, senior account director at Millward Brown, told the Wall Street Journal, though the paper notes the report does not attempt to demonstrate the bottom line impact of these social tools but instead offers subjective opinions about them. Hyde concedes that, “it may well be that the sort of companies that adopt social media tools are the sort of companies that are successful anyway. We are not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea.”

Not only were those at high performing companies more likely to use social tools, but the highest performing individuals were also more likely to adopt enterprise social. Senior managers, somewhat surprisingly, were also more likely to be using social tools than more junior employees. The report finds:

86 percent of frequent users have recently been promoted, compared to 61 percent of non- users.
Frequent users are happier in their jobs with 38 percent claiming to be highly satisfied compared to 18 percent of non-users.
Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of senior managers are using social tools at least once a week, compared to 49 percent of those in more junior roles.
Senior managers who report using social tools, claim they are already improving productivity (76 percent), knowledge sharing among dispersed teams (79 percent) and the ability to quickly find information (72 percent).
76 percent of senior managers believe businesses that embrace social tools will grow faster than those who ‘ignore’ the technology, and 53 percent believe that businesses will not survive unless they embrace social.

If you’re interested in the full report, you can download it for free here.

Do you think a similar survey in the U.S. would yield similar results?

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Forrester: Enterprise social barely out of the starting gate

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:02:00 +0000

From breaking down barriers to the free flow of information within the organization to communicating with customers (particularly coveted Gen Y), enterprise social media and other social tools are often hailed as a next-generation solution for improving the business bottom line. Tech sites, including WebWorkerDaily, often boost these technologies and track business interest in them, but how many workers are actually adopting them for use on the ground?

To find out, Forrester Research recently polled 4,985 U.S. information workers about their use of enterprise social for The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011, which was released last week. The results: 28 percent of workers use social software at least monthly.

That’s not a terribly low figure for a relatively new technology, but Forrester further profiled that 28 percent and found they belong to a very narrow subset of the workforce.

They’re earlier adopters. “They have positive attitudes about the role of technology in their lives — more than two-thirds are technology optimists,” says the Forrester report.
They’re well paid. More than half make $60,000 a year or more.
They’re highly educated. “23 percent hold advanced degrees, and 49 percent are in management,” reports Forrester.
They’re pressed for time. “Software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”
They’re not all Gen Y. While a slightly more than a quarter (26 percent) are supposedly social-mad Gen Y, a larger percentage (35 percent) of users are from Gen X.

While there’s nothing shocking in this profile of the average enterprise social software user (in fact it sounds a lot like the average telecommuter), this stereotypical portrait of the connected, elite professional reveals that these technologies have a long way to go before they’re accepted more broadly in the workplace. This confirms earlier Forrester research showing just one in six Gen Yers use social tools.

The numbers also show that while the high-powered and over-scheduled really like their enterprise social tools, they don’t view them as essential. “Just 22 percent of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs,” according to Forrester, who says these tools “remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.”

Will enterprise social tools ever be an everyday component of work for a wide swath of the workforce?

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No more lists: The robotics approach to idea management

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:01:18 +0000

Social media is great for sharing and promoting ideas within communities. But what sort of ideas usually get the most attention and move to the top of the list or news stream? If you’re honest, the answer is often the very dumb (don’t get me wrong, I love a cute kitten as much as the next girl) or the very controversial.

That’s great if you’re looking for something on Facebook to distract you from a boring Friday afternoon, but when it comes to sifting through and amplifying innovations in more serious settings, this aspect of list-based social media platforms isn’t ideal. So what might work better? A new company that emerged out of research from UC Berkeley thinks the answer may come from an unexpected source – robotics.

This week Hybrid Wisdom Labs is announcing a system called The Collaborative Discovery Engine at the Web 2.0 Summit Conference in San Francisco. The system takes a new approach to idea management via social media by doing away with the list format entirely.

Instead of some sort of ticker or stream, the system employs colored blooms (aka circles) of various sizes and colors that are slightly reminiscent of word clouds in the sense that they present a visual representation of ideas under discussion. The blooms are dynamic, however, and their positioning and color indicate similar ideas and highlight which are gaining the most positive feedback. This approach has two benefits over existing social innovation tools, according to David Wong, CEO of Hybrid Wisdom: scale and speed.

“It scales to support thousands of participants without sacrificing speed in finding the best solutions,” says Wong.

What does this have to do with robotics? The technology necessary to make the blooms of color work was born in that discipline. According to Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley professor and CTO of Hybrid Wisdom: “Robots have to be aware of space and geometry, and to rapidly filter vast amounts of complex data.”

So will this new robotics-infused flavor of idea management find favor among users? General Motors, Unilever, Humana, and the US Department of State have all tried out the technology. It was also tested by an unnamed Fortune 500 company to solicit and evaluate ideas from customers, and the public can currently test out the tech on the company’s website. But it’s still early days yet.

What do you think, will dynamic blooms beat lists when it comes to idea management?

Image courtesy of Hybrid Wisdom Labs.

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Social technologies at work? What social technologies?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:04:23 +0000

As my colleague Kevin C. Tofel has pointed out, new research from Forrester reveals that consumer phones are invading the enterprise, but that’s not the only area of collaboration the study probes. Like the phone findings, some takeaways confirm realities we already see under way at offices every day, but others undercut so-called trends often mentioned by media cheerleaders (including GigaOM).

So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

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Enterprise Is “Winning” Social in 2011

Cortney Fielding — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:05:18 +0000

This year will be the year that the enterprise really gets wise to the value of social media, which means deals among companies in the collaboration space should speed up according to a report issued on Monday by investment bank Stifel Nicolaus. The authors of “#Winning!// A White Paper on the Rise of Social Media Software,” perhaps the first report to use a Charlie Sheen meme in its title, argue that social media has become so ubiquitous in consumer culture that it will finally make its way into corporate IT departments.

In the words of one industry executive interviewed in the report, “2011 is expected to be the year that the C-level executive embraces the real importance of social integration within the enterprise.” New tools meld traditional modes of collaborative — such as instant messaging, videoconferencing, document management/collaboration and co-browsing — with more modern social principles, such as user threads, profiles, wall posts, and roles to create a visual, group-centric layout for classic collaboration.

One of the most heavily marketed new entrants into this arena has been Salesforce.com’s private social networking service, Chatter. Launched in mid-2010, the service was being used by 80,000 of the company’s 92,000 paying customers by the end of that year. With its recent acquisition of Dimdim, Salesforce plans to add real-time communication, indicating that it plans to follow “the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service” with Chatter.

The report said that as businesses seek ways to shape, control and capitalize on the endless streams of online chatter by customers and employees, they are also trying to amass and analyze every possible bit of useful information. Jive Software, which builds social-business tools, recently acquired data-mining software company Proximal Labs, showing how important the data analysis component is to this space. Increasingly, executives want to see data about employee behavior and engagement added to their management dashboard so they can spot top performing individuals and teams, increase productivity and gain insight into customer relationships.

Looking forward, the Stifel team predicts the best areas of opportunity will be for companies like Jive and Salesforce, which incorporates both internal collaboration platforms and external feedback systems. As larger software companies try to straddle both sides of this line, they’ll look to acquire smaller companies that can help round out their features, making startups who can do a few things really well highly desirable targets.

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