The Next Generation of Social Media in the Office
Bottom Line: Email is still the king of office
communications, but company-hosted social networking platforms are gaining in
popularity, especially among younger workers.
When
you need to get a message to a colleague, what’s your preferred mode of
communication? Do you dash off an email, pick up the phone, or maybe send an
instant message via the company’s intranet? A lot has changed since the era of
interoffice memos, and how you choose to communicate could well be a
generational choice. According to a new study from Peter W. Cardon at the University of Southern
California and Bryan Marshall at Georgia College, age differences increasingly
result in sharp divergences in how employees connect and correspond with one
another. And these differences present a challenge for businesses seeking to
implement advances in communication methods while still extracting value from
the knowledge-sharing activities of employees from all age groups and with
varying levels of technical proficiency.
Email
still reigns supreme in the workplace, the authors found, but social media
networks are poised to take over. Thus, companies should start thinking about
integrating new technological platforms, indoctrinating older workers into
newer communication streams, and establishing guidelines for how employees
interact with one another. Although social networking sites were first embraced
solely by the younger generation in the early 2000s, they’ve since become
mainstream. As of 2014, 74 percent of adults in the U.S. — and half of those
older than 65 — use public social networking platforms such as Facebook
and LinkedIn.
As the use of public social networking sites
has grown, so, too, have company-designed platforms, hosted on the corporate
intranet and designed for better workplace communication. Several major
software vendors — including Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — produce social
network platforms for companies, which include instant messaging programs,
file-sharing sites, Facebook-esque interfaces, and RSS feeds. But what does it
mean for the office if discussions around the watercooler have been supplanted
by in-house blogs, message boards, and wikis?
A wealth of analysis exists about the
technical challenges of implementing social networks, but researchers have yet
to compare the value of these new communication platforms with that of
traditional channels. Aiming to fill the gap, the researchers surveyed a wide
cross-section of business professionals about the frequency with which they use
traditional channels versus Web 2.0 platforms, the effectiveness of various
communication formats, and their attitudes about using social media for team
interaction.
The authors grouped participants into three
generations: gen Y (21- to 30-year-olds), gen X (31- to 50-year-olds), and baby
boomers (51- to 65-year-olds). Employees at companies that host dedicated
social networks are much more likely to use nontraditional modes of
communication, the authors found, and tend to share documents through wikis,
send instant messages, and post to in-house message boards far more frequently
than their colleagues at firms without a social networking infrastructure. This
is especially true of the gen Y group: About 71 percent reported using wikis or
document-sharing sites regularly, and 57 percent communicated with colleagues
via instant messaging daily.
But workplace social media platforms still
face an uphill climb. Although exposure to corporate social networking
engenders optimism about its future, most employees remain wary of it. Even
among the most enthusiastic demographics — gen X and gen Y employees with
access to company-wide social networks — only half expected it to become the
prevailing form of communication, and most didn’t think it improved their work
or interaction with colleagues.
In fact, the authors conclude, even if firms
implement new communication platforms, that doesn’t mean they can close down
the conference room or eliminate landlines. Overall, the study found, employees
and managers of all ages still regard traditional methods — such as
face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and email — as the most effective
means of communication, regardless of whether they had company-wide social
networks available to them.
And for the next few years at least, email in
the workplace will remain king. More than 85 percent of employees with access
to social networks still used email hourly, and 83 percent considered it
effective. Even 90 percent of gen X and gen Y professionals said they preferred
email, whereas only 42 percent considered texting or instant messaging to be
effective for communicating with team members.
That said, it won’t take much to push
workplace social media platforms further into the mainstream. The technology is
still nascent — only 26 percent of the survey participants worked at firms with
social networking infrastructure — but the number of employees who express
enthusiasm about the benefits of team communication could herald a major shift.
The authors speculate that Web 2.0 channels could overtake email within the
next decade.
As the number of younger professionals in the
workforce swells, using instant messaging or posting to a message board could
be as commonplace as sending an email or drafting a memo. The challenge for
companies is to keep their employees on the same (wiki) page and ensure that
all sections of the workforce can communicate in effective, efficient ways — no
matter what the technological platform.
Source: “The Hype and
Reality of Social Media Use for Work Collaboration and Team Communication,” by Peter W. Cardon (University of Southern California)
and Bryan Marshall (Georgia College), International Journal of Business
Communication, July 2015, vol. 52, no. 3
Matt Palmquist
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Next-Generation-of-Social-Media-in-the-Office?gko=bb000&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160616&utm_campaign=resp
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