May 31st, 2012
The folks over at MIT teamed up with Deloitte to produce quite an interesting report around Social Business which included responses from almost 3,500 people around the world. The goal of the report was to shed some more light around what is happening in the world of social business; which includes both customers and employees. Personally, I thought the report was a bit muddled as it intertwined social business, social software, and social media together which made it a bit hard to discern when they were talking about enterprise collaboration and when they were talking about engaging customers. Still, the report did have some interesting insights and findings.
The image below shows how organizations today are measuring their collaboration initiatives. Not surprisingly, most companies are not doing any type of measurement and those that are focus on “busy” metrics such as employees signed up, how many employees are posting, and the total number of posts. As I’ve stated many times, this in now way shows engagement, it simply looks at busy metrics or activity.
As far as why employees participate in social media, the top reasons were:
I found it interesting that collaboration and communication were not mentioned anywhere in this survey question which in my opinion are two of the cornerstones for what much of enterprise collaboration is about. They put together a great Slideshare presentation which shares some key findings
COMMENT
TAGS: deloitte report, mit report, social business in companies
May 29th, 2012
I don’t think anyone can really say when collaboration starts but I think we can all agree that it starts well before we enter the workforce. Most discussions around collaboration today have pertained to the enterprise, but we start to work with and communicate with people far earlier than that. Why don’t we talk about collaboration and teamwork more in high schools, colleges, and universities? Heck, we can even start before that can’t we? Our backgrounds, where we came from, and how we were brought up dramatically affect our collaborative abilities and desires. Those who come from families of sharing and went to schools that encouraged teamwork and collaboration are more likely to bring these concepts with them into the workforce. The opposite is true as well. If sharing and collaborating was not something instilled in us through families and educational institutions then it’s probably not something we will immediately gravitate to in the enterprise.
Of course when we throw in the corporate dynamics of money, power, internal politics and the general economy then we have a very different situation. I just wonder how our backgrounds and environments affect how we collaborate and if this might be something we will start to teach more formerly. It’s interesting how people have the ability to adapt, learn, and change based on their environments isn’t it? How do you think we can encourage workplace collaboration BEFORE employees enter the workforce? Can we predict collaborative behaviors?
COMMENT
TAGS: collaboration before the workforce, early collaboration, predict collaborative behaviors
