Polite Media Part I: The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

Introduction

The notion of polite society has been pilloried in all directions. Since time immemorial, it summons an elegance and privilege shielded from the commoners and working classes. These refined rules of etiquette faded with our regard for elites and institutions. They fell in a heap, ringing down the privacy curtain that separates first-class passengers from coach.

Now, add social media to the mix. The language of the street became the vernacular of the screen. We gain gratification and followers. We sacrifice the temperance, discretion, and decorum of pen to paper, and spoken word as the primary expression of interpersonal communication.

Skip ahead a generation. Within the sanctuary of corporate networks, employees are now told that their companies reflect the virtues of a benevolent gatekeeper. Business success is no longer measured by profit alone but by private sector contributions to the greater society.

Re-enter social media. This time it’s not a destination app but a two-way communications channel:

• • The assignment? Pry open a dialog. Keep it civil in tone. Who’s involved? Everyone who wants to be.
  • What’s at stake? Shared perspectives across office, remote, and hybrid workplaces.
  • What’s being shared? Best practices, common interests, event launches, shout-outs, and no shortage of selfies.
  • How do we know they work? Look at cooperation levels between office, departments, and business lines.

PART I: The Case for Enterprise Social Media

The opening argument in Part I addresses the crossing paths of social media with the virtual workplace and the unprecedented return to office of a largely homebound workforce. The social media factor turns on this key question. Can the same medium that bred widespread misinformation and distrust be used to build community and cohesion in post pandemic work environments?

1. The Socializing of the Remote Worker

I’ve met an unexpected and rewarding twist in my career as an adapter/survivor to the ways of keeping both feet in the gainful camp of the salaried corporate middle manager. The twisting is not the endless contortions made to remain employed in professions with insatiable appetites for awards, honors, certifications, and credentialing I’ve never possessed.

This world has been tone deaf to the many skills accrued in the weathering of the hire/fire rhythms that shadow its more famous boom/bust cycles. What does it mean to attain the title of Certified Cloud Practitioner? For some, it’s the beginning a rewarding corporate IT career inside an Amazon-centric ecosystem. For others, it’s the cost of staying employed. The exam answers are as perishable as last year’s jargon will be to your next passing score.

It’s a curious thing. Before the pandemic we listened in our commutes to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. What did we learn from our drive-time audio excursions? That once you go beyond the news, sports, and weather, you get a contest of wills. Not just who wins but who gets to define what victory even means. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception.

It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.

In a tightened labor market those same management controls that breed conformity and reticence are keeping a lower profile. Open debate with superiors? Whoa! No one said the open floor plan extends to a hybrid workforce of mostly full-time remote middle managers and operations staff. Speaking truth to power? Yep, still the same career-limiting move we never left.

2. On the Clock and Off the Cuff

But the rise of the social media feed is a new form of employee expression that diverges from the top-down command-control of corporate communications. No, this isn’t an infomercial or even scripted. Neither, as the social marketers would pitch you, is it an all cast production number. True, it is a dialog across departments, regions, and subject domains.

But it’s not yet anything as tangible as a territory, or a job family, or a set of performance review and promotion-worthy metrics and achievements. It is however a warm medium that permeates cold dollar calculations. It also holds the balance between a simple cost benefit analysis of remaining with one employee or taking the promotion in pay from the higher bidder next door.

Simply put, corporate newsfeeds, a.k.a. enterprise social networking, is the glue that holds those intangibles together. It’s not just about puppies, kittens, and paranormal geeks. Channeling our personal side into teams and projects is not about bloviating. Quite the opposite. It’s involving the moving inter-dependencies of groups unified by common interests.

The result isn’t self-promotion. It’s a shared outcome of working together, regardless of rank, location, or reporting structure. With increased engagement comes a stronger sense of community. This is cohesion that gives recognition, bonding, and personality to the often faceless calculus of complying with guidelines, engineering solutions, billing, purchasing, packaging, and keeping our heads down doing these things.

It’s interesting. I serve on a panel that approves, declines, or redirects requests for new communities. At the outset, we expected two things: (1) lots of pent-up demand for groups, and (2) lots of on-the-fly learning about what constitutes a new group and what doesn’t.

Six months later both assertions are both correct and misguided. (1) The demand has yet to recede. (2) We’re still learning. In fact, it’s gotten harder to negotiate when a proposed community is unique and universal, or, when it’s too focused on a group or issue best addressed as a topic or theme.

Next week: Employee Engagement finds its voice.