Bringing Employees Together with Online Communities

Why you shouldn’t shy away from letting your employees self-organize

Companies are going social. They are taking this approach externally with their customers and are working toward becoming more social internally to connect with their employees. Work is becoming social, enabling employees to engage (or not) in a simplified manner and with fewer barriers and roadblocks. At or near the core of this transition is the use of what are deemed social or collaboration tools. This collection of tools were termed Enterprise 2.0 many years ago by Andrew McAfee, and in a recent interview he declared:

“So now it feels like, ten years later on, Enterprise 2.0 might finally be here.”

Good. It’s finally here. Yet, will all this engagement always be positive? It depends on how you look at…

The enterprise social network (ESN) gives employees a “digital water cooler” that will allow them to connect with one another whether they are all in one building or spread out across the world. Much of the time when we talk about ESNs, we are highlighting the ways they improve collaboration and as a natural byproduct — productivity. However, at their core, they have the ability for employees to interact socially. Thus allowing employees that share interests and affiliations to come together and form communities.

This isn’t inherently good or bad, but how you react to it, can be.

Some view this as a potential pitfall to avoid. Why give employees a means to gather, talk amongst themselves, form opinions, and then voice them to their coworkers? It’s not always going to be positive…and it might get downright nasty. Allowing employees to band together my enable them to “push an agenda.” An ESN may give them a platform to be heard. It might empower many small voices into one large voice that can’t be ignored.

Wait…do some leaders not want to hear what their employees have to say? Sadly, the answer is yes.

But, here is the deal: it’s 2016 and this is going to happen anyway! You can’t stop your employees from starting private Facebook groups, Slack channels, non-sanctioned Yammer networks, and the like. We have so many communication technologies available to us today, that it is foolish and foolhardy to assume that there is a way to block them all. You can establish policies, and maybe you have some teeth there to met out some punishment. But, if it is widespread, that is probably going to hurt the bottom line. You can’t fire hundreds of employees without carefully and methodically planning for it.

If the reason for not joining the growing number of companies implementing ESN type internal platforms is not wanting to allow employees to be able to push an agenda, it sounds like you have bigger problems to deal with. Not moving in the direction of providing socially enabled tools for your workforce to do better work isn’t going to solve that problem. And begrudgingly applying willful ignorance to the situation isn’t going to make employee concerns go away.

Instead, give your employees a platform. Allow them to form social communities. Let them talk, interact, and share ideas. Many times, the crowd takes care of itself. It’s like a healthy immune system, sending white blood cells to deal with infections or disease. If individuals get out of line, others step in to correct the situation.

However, sometimes corporate policy or the company’s position on a given topic might be the disease. In those situations, it is better to have the knowledge and deal with it. Don’t let it fester. Don’t ignore it until it becomes too large of a problem to easily handle.

Listen to your employees. Give them a platform to have a voice. Give them tools to connect. Allow — and even enable — them to self-form communities. Let them interact. Let them be active and perhaps even display a little activism.

How you manage online employee communities shouldn’t be about whether or not the activism happens, it’s what you do about it that matters.

If you liked this post, please hit the ♡ below so others can benefit from it as well. To see more like this, follow me or my Business as Unusual publication.