PART II: Employee Engagement Finds its Voice
Part two of our three part series on workplace-based social media addresses the use cases and tangible benefits of its adoption. Key to that success are the underlying trust factors. It’s this sense of belonging that enable participants to contribute in both their work roles and as members within these communities. Employee retention tops all success factors.
3. Scaling the Firewalls
Before the pandemic, the choice was simply toe the line or leave. There was no shared social history that lived outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Anyone attempting to step outside it was greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalized the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal actions.
There still is no safe public harbor for the trading of these untold white collar war stories. A half-century of employment laws and workforce reductions are not to reverse course in deference to the opening of our local chapter of corporate Facebook. In fact, management’s legal stranglehold on corporate labor is one of the galvanizing forces for instilling civility and cooperation in ways completely alien and largely absent from advertiser-driven social media.
In fact enterprise social networking is a valuable opportunity to reimagine the social media conversation. Shedding the conflict-seeking grandstanding of the agitator is both good for bonding and the bottom-line. Realizing the limitations of social media for resolving disputes is another part of that rethinking. Locking horns on screen is another reason to close potentially explosive and incendiary posts so that cooler heads intervene, arriving at an “offline” resolution.
Finally, the toxic mingling of obsessive behavior and competitive bargaining is another regrettable piece of recent social media experience. Its removal is supported by the need for greater cross-enterprise cooperation. No vanity-induced campaigns for the most winks or fewest unsubscribes.
Promoting a healthy participation rate includes generous helpings of member counts and feed interactions specific to the full potential of each group. No need to pit them against one another or in side-by-side comparisons. Remember, social metrics that support cooperation are not those sports league betting formulas used to measure external success.
4. Where Is the Conversation Headed?
What happens when the voice of the employee gets a seat at the table?
Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned. What you hear later is a stilted reconstruction of rationales used to justify the impact of events no one saw coming.
So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to weigh transparency against a fair return on shareholder capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?
So, who is our expert witness here? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning.
They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems go unaddressed when your firsthand witness decides to jump ship.
Maybe in a pre-jaundiced view of social media, there would be a pooling of internal webs. This is a rally cry for collective action to scale the firewalls not high enough to hold us in.
Here are three such expressions of this initiative:
a) War Stories:
Develop success cases told around a communal fire through open discourse and courageous debate.
b) Knowledge Metrics:
Use enterprise social networking analytics to quantify the involvement of network communities in opportunity gains and cost containment, i.e. employee self service.
c) Process Guidance:
Provide support to energized and often less-seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage guidelines and sequential learning in the practicing and mastery of new skills.
5. We’re Waiting for the Desks to Settle
The long sidelined promise of social media is when it’s conducted within the decorum of what used to pass as polite society: Keep your politics, religion, and money separate from your daily discourse with others. From a First Amendment perspective, we’re treading into ulcer-inducing territory. It’s a form of personal discretion best left to AI-guided robots.
The argument goes like this.
In an age where visceral anger meets instant gratification, the noise of the mind has replaced the din of the public square. Therefore we humans are too authentic to suck it in a reserve of uncomplaining stoicism. In fact, emotional repression has never fallen out of favor inside the corporate realm. What’s more, a shared belief in a reliable pay check inspires the self-regulation missing from the toxic undersides of Facebook and Twitter. This politeness factor breeds big trust under a big tent, consisting of tens of thousands of employees. All with access to their colleagues’ posts, likes, and follows.
Perhaps the ultimate business value of a trusting social network is that the benefit of the doubt is extended to people we’re meeting on social media for the first time. These are no longer complete strangers. They’re former teammates of a current colleague. They’re newly hired to plug a hole we’re tired of fixing. They overheard that we’re onto something and it sounds a lot like the missing piece in their pursuit of what comes after the problem we’re resolving:
Degree of separation meets self-organizing teams.
This was always the promise of a network effects. Now it’s landing squarely in the post-pandemic wheelhouse of the distributed workforce. It’s a workforce that could just as easily move to some other enterprise should they not feel included in this one.
Next week: The Reckoning