The Reckoning
The closing section addresses the transition of the corporate workplace from a security to a social model. Will the discretionary controls of a need-to-know policy be replaced by a more transparent one? Open access is required in the sharing and distribution of enterprise social networks. Do business and pleasure need further introductions? Can they shake hands on open networks within their own enterprises?
6. Left to Our Own Devices, Literally
There are many wrinkles in the emerging social formulas. It’s true that some of that lies in the gray zone between first-hand experience and the conformist pressures of affiliation. Some of it is flat-out trolling. All of it is distracting from the work priorities that support the operational and business success of the enterprise host.
What happens when the engagement becomes so pervasive, so ongoing, that it removes the employer as the cornerstone of employee experience? That doesn’t mean people confuse posting on the network with their real jobs. It means they expect the crowd sourcing to produce the resolutions they seek whenever novelties are introduced into their problem-solving.
Will they complain about the answers they’re getting only to condemn the system that offers them? That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. How many of our new hires are sold through the onboarding screen a set of expectations for how to handle all the social tools, information sources, and data resources they’ve been provided? In most enterprises, that’s not an HR-brokered conversation.
In a prepandemic world we were told to show-up. Whether our appearances added value or sparked discussion was not the trigger here. The focus was reserved for our absences not escaping the notice of supervisors. The doghouse as limelight. In a social-mediated workplace we now have the news menus of staff meetings with the option of using this same medium to engage with our peers.
Implicit in this dialog is the intimacy and trust required for active listening and inclusive participation. We’re seeing these trust factors play out in groups that can’t be easily defined as communities of interest or practice. They are both. They’re professional in their approach to problem-solving and information sourcing. They also pride themselves in personable contributions of their welcoming and approachable members.
Ultimately there is a golden rule of social media that doesn’t just bear repeating. It embodies any communication or failure to communicate across a screen conferred by mutual acceptance of network membership. If you are personally offended or upset by a post to your feed, respond to the flawed process, the underlying conditions … the issue at-hand. NOT to the character of the person sending it.
7. Permission Statements
Nothing tests the boundaries of a distributed workforce more transparently than enterprise social networking, a.k.a. Corporate Facebook. Turns out the protection of an employer-based firewall is not just a safe zone for selfies but a sanctuary for discourse. Turns out that working for the same outfit remotely transcends the traditional barriers posed by office politics, territorial skirmishes, and most importantly, network security — that Achilles heel of all organizational networks.
Permissions management is the key chain of network security. It is the access controls behind every server, application, and file folder, (land and cloud). However, in their zeal to protect, the network security folks took their eyes off one basic consideration. It’s one thing to tackle internet-launched security threats. It’s another thing to keep them so guarded that they’re not put to actual use.
For instance, in the case of enterprise networking, it turns out that the opportunity for personal branding exceeds the risk of identity theft. Oh wait. That’s not on me. That’s our firewall which handles malicious attacks. How is it then that a sometime knowledge worker has evolved into a full-time knowledge in-mate? Today’s intranet contains a virtual prison yard of electronic directories, lists, and libraries in perpetual lock-down. These are the underlying conditions that contribute to large-scale organizational IT stumbles such as…
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- Knowledge Gaps: Not knowing what we know,
- Information Silos: Losing track of who would know,
- And back by popular demand,
- Flustered Users: Wondering of it’s just me (or did a decade of IT changes land on my screen before arrival of the next Covid variant)?
8. Promises Kept
Outside of work, our consumer selves were never given the chance to opt-out of one-way social networks that surveil every step in our digital lives. The culprit turns out to be network security protocols; specifically, the notion that the employee relationship to corporate information exists on a need-to-know basis. If it’s not essential to the job, it’s not available to the user.
This policy runs counter to most of employees in pursuit of most information. We’ll call this the like-to-find-out policy. Those are the conditions knowledge workers find themselves. This is true in making informed decisions and on finding authoritative answers. It’s evident in the service of our most soaring aspirations and most routine of tasks.
We’ve all heard the familiar denunciations:
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- Hide: That’s hoarding!
- Go seek: That’s one crap load of search results!
- Still seeking: That person’s no longer here to let me in!
This time lost chasing access-resistant corporate assets pales in relation to the larger loss of trust that happens when you don’t see what I see. How can you and I be on the same page when clearly we’re not accessing the same app, function, image, or file on our screens.
There simply is no justification for need-to-know access in a post-pandemic world espousing transparency, equity, and the full participation of co-located, remote, and hybrid teams. Enterprise social networking platforms like Yammer, Slack, and Zimbra channel news feeds on an intended want-to-find-out basis. When governed and managed effectively, they enable self-organizing groups to collaborate across the familiar silos of departments, lines of business, and regions.
More importantly, their openness and vibrancy parade an undeniable affirmation that this is a welcoming workplace. Not with its basis in one big unified corporate family but an unforced reflection of a workplace containing the voices of its workers, managers, and executives. This is a new chapter with an established roadmap: A return to the pre-firewall promise of social media.
Corporate enterprises are served well to put as much thought into building their communities as they spend dollars on buttressing their fortresses. It’s that kind of thinking which will retain and attract the best talent in the post pandemic culture to come.
