Why No One Uses the Enterprise Social Networks
(And, how to build a feed at work that everyone cares about)
Charlene Li of Altimeter Group wrote recently in Harvard Business Review a scathing article on Why No One Uses the Corporate Social Networks [CSN] , or so called enterprise social networks [ESN].
The data she presents, gathered from a survey of 55 companies, shows abysmal usage of these collaboration platforms within organizations that have rolled out these software in one form or another. Looking at the graph below, in less than 25% of cases, many employees actively use the ESNs and in less than 20% many employees actively use community forums.
She concludes the primary problem is that the leaders of these organizations fail to see the point of these platforms and don’t view collaboration and engagement as their top priority.
I see the problem differently.
The very fact that these leaders have spent time and money to roll out such software across their organizations shows their desire to have better communication and collaboration that flattens information flow. But, somehow after the rollout nobody was there to kick-start the conversation, or so-called collaboration.
Way before any of these software were developed, and before these heady ideas of enterprise wide seamless collaboration was peddled by sales folks, conversations at work existed. In fact, conversations at work form the basic fabric of any collaboration. These conversations are in response to a change. Change to what you might have been working on, change on a progress of a project your team has been hard at work, or change to something someone else is working on.
“Conversations at work are in response to a change”
These conversations take place in email, in meeting rooms, and increasingly in chat tools such as Hipchat and Slack. Irrespective of the tools used, the flow of these conversations hit a bend in the river, create a silo of knowledge and never reach the decision makers, or worse others who might be affected by it.
The primary issue here is the push mechanism of communication. Not only I am tasked with the arduous job of describing a change succinctly, I have to determine the right distribution list for it. I can’t bring too many people into that distribution list, because then most will start ignoring me.
What if we switched the push of conversations into a pull ?
What if we switched the push of conversations into a pull? What if we capture the change as it happens, get it in front of the right folks and use that to seed these conversations? Not only we would have solved the problem of describing the change, but we would fix the issue of figuring out the right audience for that conversation.
The problem of the feed
The lifeblood of Corporate Social Networks is the information feed. It thrives on the richness of the content of that feed, and so does the community that looks to consume from that feed. Imagine your Facebook feed where everyone is there, but nobody was posting anything. Because, everyone thought someone else will post something.
Now imagine that same Facebook feed which had great apps like Instagram, Vine creating content and seeding your feed. Not only you have fixed the empty feed problem, but you have actually managed to bring content that the community wants to engage with.
For your feed at work to be meaningful, engaging, and collaborative it needs to capture your everyday conversations with teams that you work with about what’s changing at work, occasionally interspersed with messages, blog posts, and shares from the leadership. The same way that your Facebook or Twitter feed is made up of pictures and shares from your friends, and occasionally contains pictures of escapades of celebrities that you follow.
Thanks @prashca and @sriyansad for helping review early drafts. First published on the Trackmemo Blog.
