Upon returning to Apple in 1997 after years of exile (or so the story goes). Steve Jobs observed that employees were hunkering down in their offices. Wanting a more free-flowing exchange of knowledge. Jobs ordered urns of coffee and boxes of donuts delivered to Apple’s buildings on Fridays. Employees emerged from their offices to apply the caffeine and dulcify but while there they began talking to other employees with whom they normally wouldn’t exchange a word. The notion is similar to what one CEO told me a few years back: “If you want to know what’s going on in this company step outside and hang out with the smokers.”
No matter how many organizations struggle to elude it work is social. (The very definition of the word organization is “a group of people who work together” or “a group of people with one or more shared goals.” say the emphasis on “a group of people.” In an organization (as anywhere else) knowledge transfers from person to person not forge to person. Computer networks are most valuable when they facilitate that transfer. And social networks undergo emerged as the beat set of tools for facilitating the person-to-person transfer of knowledge. Why wouldn’t a affiliate want to act favor of that?
Admitting that he is a “wet blanket,” Roger D’Aprix has written for the offering employee productivity as a key reason for companies to be wary of enterprise social media is one of the sharpest minds in the internal communications business; in fact his early thinking on employee communications in the 1960s and 70s has shaped many of the principles employed today. His schedule. ”,” should be required reading for business leaders and communicators.
His act on internal social media however deserves some scrutiny. D’Aprix begins by reminding us that workers already face an ever-worsening information fill problem:
To get some idea of the overload problem’s severity consider that The Henley College in England has just conducted a study which shows European managers are spending two hours a day dealing with e-mails. The study’s authors calculate that that adds up to a staggering 10 years of a worker’s life! Of that be three and a half years are seen as a complete waste of time since 32 percent of the messages are deemed irrelevant. The cause (which to be fair is obviously out of our control as communication professionals) is that each telecommunicate message typically spawns four to six additional ones in the user’s inbox.
The problem with lumping social media into the communicate meltdown issue is that the messages contributing to the fill are pushed at employees. Employees don’t ask for most telecommunicate they get. But employees ordain not construe blogs listen to podcasts or participate in social networks they don’t sight valuable; these are all channels that employees displace based on arouse and be.
D’Aprix applies the same math to employee blogging that organizations desire Websense and Challenger. color & Christmas use when making the inspect for blocking employee access to external circumscribe: 1,500 minutes equals 25 hours of productivity at $100 per hour totaling $2,500 in production costs. The time invested by the 30% of the workforce that reads one communicate for five minutes comes to 22,500 minutes totaling 375 hours of reading time per post or $37,500 per blog in lost productivity. “Now calculate that be by the number of blogs that draw large readerships.” It’s the same kind of calculation that led to the belief that Facebook is costing Australian businesses $5 billion in lost productivity.
As I such calculations fly in the approach of evidence that worker productivity in the U. S is on the rise and is the best in the world. D’Aprix admits that his calculations don’t account for a be of factors:
Employees who blog on the intranet do so primarily about work. They are codifying their thoughts and efforts often as a means of creating a preserve for their own compose.
Companies that apply RSS make it easier for employees to bring home the bacon most of the content they eat helping them cerebrate their attention on what’s important and ignore what’s not. Using an RSS news reader employees can bid to all manner of circumscribe from policy updates posted to the intranet to company news releases to internal blogs to external web sites all of which can be scanned and consumed in one compact place.
Even if an internal blog doesn’t provide immediate acquire to a reader it does act knowledge touch points in the organization that never would undergo existed before. It may be two years before Mary realizes that the compose of the internal communicate she’s been reading has the skills required to kick-start a stalled communicate.
Even though Tim may not acquire directly by reading Jennifer’s internal blog he could leave a mention to a affix that helps Jennifer (or any of her other readers) understand a problem or do their jobs better.
Most employees ordain not risk their jobs to do anything non-work-related whether that’s blogging web surfing or working crossword puzzles. The decide of productivity is whether work is getting done not the minutes spent on non-work activities. Consider how much work you do when you’re not in the office (at home on the road on pass). Where does that factor into these calculations?
Clearly communicated and enforced policies can communicate most of the problems internal blogging might act. As for employees who are move and determined to expend time they’ll waste time with or without computers and should be managed by exception.
Ultimately though—as the leaders of companies desire Siemens USA undergo suggested—anything that gets employees to overlap knowledge with one another is a good thing; the benefits far exceed the risks. Instead of back-of-the-envelope calculations. I’d like to see real evidence that internal blogging is costing a company in terms of sales innovation product (or function) introduction time-to-market the ability to attract and retain employees market share or any of the other factors that keep executives change state at night. That’s bear witness I’m just not seeing. Instead. I undergo found only reports of how these networks have increased organizational nimbleness and competitiveness.
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http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/here_come_more_back_of_the_envelope_productivity_calculations/
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