This is the second post in the four-part Internal Social Media series. If you’ve enjoyed this series or others you’ve read here, consider subscribing for free!
Much like with external social media programs, some companies have consistent hangups and fears that prevent them from even getting started. Some risks are very real and necessary to consider: regulatory issues, compliance, and disclosure stuff. But most companies’ fears stem from a few key places, all of which are addressable with some patience, process, and open discussion.
Negative Comments
“But what if something says something…bad?”
For many businesses, the fear of having something say something negative about them is one of the most compelling reasons to stay far away from social media. Sometimes it’s a matter of “out of sight, out of mind” (if we didn’t see it or hear it, it didn’t happen), other times it’s more an issue of not having an idea of how to respond.
Internally, the fear is that employees will trash their bosses, badmouth the company, or even share confidential information where they shouldn’t. But employees aren’t eager to put their professional reputations (or jobs) on the line simply to write a few nasty words about their boss on the company blog, and they’ve already got all the tools they’d need (like a phone, email, and countless social sites like GlassDoor.com that they can access on their personal time) if that’s their goal.
Having a conversation up front about participation guidelines (more on this below) is a good start, as well as outlining your expectations for professional behavior on internal social tools. If you already have more private feedback mechanisms in place through HR or other avenues, pay attention to the comments and suggestions you’re getting as a company. If you have a habit of either not asking for input from your teams, or asking for it but ignoring it, that’s a problem that’s much more cultural and operational, and will be exacerbated by social media, not solved by it.
The truth: criticism is happening anyway, even if you aren’t listening for it now. Empower your employees to provide constructive feedback in a professional manner and demonstrate that you’re listening, and it becomes a constructive and progressive exercise. If the negative comments appear, learn how to deal with them in a positive fashion, and address them head on. But recognize that what your employees want is to be heard and acknowledged.
Resources
But who owns this? Who’s going to manage it? Who’s responsible for responding and engaging and participating? Can we mandate participation, or does it have to be voluntary?
Lots of questions surround how to deploy social technologies, and the answer to most of them is “it depends”. In many cases, multiple people have to be involved in owning and managing it, from:
- IT to help integrate and provide access to the technologies
- HR to help encourage and guide participation based on company goals
- Varying department management for helping provide the information that gets shared and discussed
They’ll need to work as a team, all outlining common goals for the initiatives and mapping out plans to get there. Those goals will help guide employees on participation, which you can’t mandate effectively. Just like in their personal lives, employees use technologies and social networks differently, but if you build effective tools that serve needs for information, training, feedback, and connection between employees, folks will find the pieces that are valuable to them.
Employee Productivity
At the crossroads of professional teams and social media is the concern that employees will “waste” time using these tools and that their productivity and work contributions will suffer as a result. Mashable recently reported a survey wherein 54% of companies completely block external social media sites.
One study in particular, conducted by the University of Melbourne, says that employees are actually more productive when allowed to use the internet for their leisure. And many employees today, born and raised in a digital world, are incredibly more adept at leveraging technology to do their jobs more efficiently and better while accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time. Their expectations for companies, moreso now than ever, is that their technological access and experience at work will mirror what they have at home.
If employees are interested in social networks, they’re going to find ways to use them on company time, most likely through their mobile devices. Internal social networks can have the advantage of providing a gated environment in which employees can connect and converse that still has professional purposes and usefulness in a work environment.
What employees are craving that compels them to use social media in the first place, either personally or professionally: access to information, a voice in a larger conversation, and connections with people that they relate to. All of those things can work in a business environment, and even help team members do their jobs better.
Guidelines for Participation
In many ways, creating simple and straightforward guidelines for internal social media engagement can address many of the potential fears above. Guidelines should reflect the codes of conduct that employees are expected to adhere to in their ongoing work, and discuss specifically the expectations that both team members and management has for how internal social tools should be used.
Ideally, guidelines should be drafted and made available for some feedback from team members so they feel invested in the process and the outcome. There are dozens of examples here of both external and internal social media policies to help guide your efforts and find the style that works for your business.
Guidelines tend to work better than “rules”, and discussion of social media participation and expectations in open forum at your company can go a long way to addressing the fears you or your management may have about adoption. If you cannot trust your employees to participate on an internal social network professionally, it’s likely your hiring practices that need evaluation, not your social media policy.
What Else?
What else would you add? What other reasons are employers fearful of social media inside the walls, and how can we help them address those concerns? I’d love to hear your takes and experiences.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about building a plan to roll out an internal social media program, and what to consider.
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Amber,
I’m not sure that I would necessarily add this, but I’ve often wondered in some top-down corporations if they are afraid of lower level employees coming up with great ideas and making the higher level employees look bad?
Sounds silly on the surface, I know. But in some companies, competition is fierce. If they open up social media to all, and give everyone in the company a louder voice; then (better) ideas could flow from lower level employees. Enough good ideas from the lower levels could start company executives thinking that maybe their managers shouldn’t be where they are, when the people they manage seem to be more creative, etc.
Competition, especially in a down economy like the one we are experiencing currently, can make people do wacky things.
Your thoughts?
.-= Jeremy Fischer´s last blog ..Facebook Can Keep You Out of Jail =-.
I agree with you Jeremy, often in companies, managers are afraid of the flow of information coming from down to up, can sink their position
.-= LeonardoB´s last blog ..Funny Google Chrome ADV =-.
Exactly… This doesn’t sound silly at all, in most companies I’ve worked for the lower level employees really have good thoughts and ideas on how their daily work should or could be done. The executives are usually the ones that are open to these ideas, but in my experience these ideas are blocked by middlemanagement, who indeed are afraid of being sanctioned for not having come up with these ideas themselves.
That’s where my main problem in internal social media lies, I guess. Executives embrace it, lower level employees want to, but will be ‘scared’ in to using the social media as little as possible by their direct managers. I wonder if there’s a sure-fire way to ‘convert’ middle management into social media believers 🙂
Amber,
I’m not sure that I would necessarily add this, but I’ve often wondered in some top-down corporations if they are afraid of lower level employees coming up with great ideas and making the higher level employees look bad?
Sounds silly on the surface, I know. But in some companies, competition is fierce. If they open up social media to all, and give everyone in the company a louder voice; then (better) ideas could flow from lower level employees. Enough good ideas from the lower levels could start company executives thinking that maybe their managers shouldn’t be where they are, when the people they manage seem to be more creative, etc.
Competition, especially in a down economy like the one we are experiencing currently, can make people do wacky things.
Your thoughts?
.-= Jeremy Fischer´s last blog ..Facebook Can Keep You Out of Jail =-.
I agree with you Jeremy, often in companies, managers are afraid of the flow of information coming from down to up, can sink their position
.-= LeonardoB´s last blog ..Funny Google Chrome ADV =-.
Exactly… This doesn’t sound silly at all, in most companies I’ve worked for the lower level employees really have good thoughts and ideas on how their daily work should or could be done. The executives are usually the ones that are open to these ideas, but in my experience these ideas are blocked by middlemanagement, who indeed are afraid of being sanctioned for not having come up with these ideas themselves.
That’s where my main problem in internal social media lies, I guess. Executives embrace it, lower level employees want to, but will be ‘scared’ in to using the social media as little as possible by their direct managers. I wonder if there’s a sure-fire way to ‘convert’ middle management into social media believers 🙂
Excellent post. As you suggest, I think there is power in harnessing your employees that like participating in social media and using those avenues to share information you want them to get – from industry trends to the new cafeteria menu.
It’s also a great way to make over some of those tired “Intranet” homepages and share and foster corporate culture and internal engagement. If your staff is wacky and fun and that’s something you value – post videos of the wacky stuff they do. If they’re focused on community, write posts and share photos from their latest toy drive or fundraiser. These efforts make the company more human by giving “departments” faces, names and personalities – it’s no longer “the X department” it becomes “Sally and John over in the X department.”
One final thought on this. Done right companies can tighten the bonds between team members which could encourage loyalty and foster a sense of responsibility in a team environment – making for better, more productive employees.
Excellent post. As you suggest, I think there is power in harnessing your employees that like participating in social media and using those avenues to share information you want them to get – from industry trends to the new cafeteria menu.
It’s also a great way to make over some of those tired “Intranet” homepages and share and foster corporate culture and internal engagement. If your staff is wacky and fun and that’s something you value – post videos of the wacky stuff they do. If they’re focused on community, write posts and share photos from their latest toy drive or fundraiser. These efforts make the company more human by giving “departments” faces, names and personalities – it’s no longer “the X department” it becomes “Sally and John over in the X department.”
One final thought on this. Done right companies can tighten the bonds between team members which could encourage loyalty and foster a sense of responsibility in a team environment – making for better, more productive employees.
The comment made by Jeremy Fischer is valid and I really believe that could be the case at many large companies. In my last job at a major corporation, I noticed that when I found articles or information about social media that would benefit others, I was stonewalled many times by management. I was told it was not part of my job and to leave that type of sharing to upper management. Bogus in my mind.
Also, on that note, have you ever read the challenges that “Fortune 500 Bob” faced at a corporation as written by Chris Brogan? Very similar attempts by upper management to crush what Bob was trying to do. Both stories generated comments from both sides of the fence on how Bob should have handled what he did.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/shut-up-youre-helping-the-customer/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/bob-the-next-chapter/
.-= Mark Van Baale´s last blog ..Inspiration quote on pursuing your passion =-.
The comment made by Jeremy Fischer is valid and I really believe that could be the case at many large companies. In my last job at a major corporation, I noticed that when I found articles or information about social media that would benefit others, I was stonewalled many times by management. I was told it was not part of my job and to leave that type of sharing to upper management. Bogus in my mind.
Also, on that note, have you ever read the challenges that “Fortune 500 Bob” faced at a corporation as written by Chris Brogan? Very similar attempts by upper management to crush what Bob was trying to do. Both stories generated comments from both sides of the fence on how Bob should have handled what he did.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/shut-up-youre-helping-the-customer/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/bob-the-next-chapter/
.-= Mark Van Baale´s last blog ..Inspiration quote on pursuing your passion =-.
The comment made by Jeremy Fischer is valid and I really believe that could be the case at many large companies. In my last job at a major corporation, I noticed that when I found articles or information about social media that would benefit others, I was stonewalled many times by management. I was told it was not part of my job and to leave that type of sharing to upper management. Bogus in my mind.
Also, on that note, have you ever read the challenges that “Fortune 500 Bob” faced at a corporation as written by Chris Brogan? Very similar attempts by upper management to crush what Bob was trying to do. Both stories generated comments from both sides of the fence on how Bob should have handled what he did.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/shut-up-youre-helping-the-customer/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/bob-the-next-chapter/
The comment made by Jeremy Fischer is valid and I really believe that could be the case at many large companies. In my last job at a major corporation, I noticed that when I found articles or information about social media that would benefit others, I was stonewalled many times by management. I was told it was not part of my job and to leave that type of sharing to upper management. Bogus in my mind.
Also, on that note, have you ever read the challenges that “Fortune 500 Bob” faced at a corporation as written by Chris Brogan? Very similar attempts by upper management to crush what Bob was trying to do. Both stories generated comments from both sides of the fence on how Bob should have handled what he did.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/shut-up-youre-helping-the-customer/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/bob-the-next-chapter/
Great post. I just implemented the first baby steps towards internal social media within in the company I work for. Another aspect of this that made it easier to push for was presenting it as an organized, timed, collective initiative that will improve communication and productivity within the company. Some execs are afraid of social media because they view it as an uncontrollable, ad hoc system. If you can present a case for it in an standardized and organized way they are much more likely to accept its benefits.
.-= Eric´s last blog ..Check your Ubarometer. =-.
Great post. I just implemented the first baby steps towards internal social media within in the company I work for. Another aspect of this that made it easier to push for was presenting it as an organized, timed, collective initiative that will improve communication and productivity within the company. Some execs are afraid of social media because they view it as an uncontrollable, ad hoc system. If you can present a case for it in an standardized and organized way they are much more likely to accept its benefits.
.-= Eric´s last blog ..Check your Ubarometer. =-.