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09.07.07
More Back-Of-the-Envelope “Productivity” Calculations
By Shel Holtz
Upon returning to Apple in 1997 after years of exile (or so the story goes), Steve Jobs observed that employees were hunkering down in their offices. Wanting a more free-flowing exchange of knowledge, Jobs ordered urns of coffee and boxes of donuts delivered to Apple's buildings on Fridays. Employees emerged from their offices to enjoy the caffeine and sugar but, while there, they began talking to other employees with whom they normally wouldn't exchange a word.
The notion is similar to what one CEO told me a few years back: "If you want to know what's going on in this company, step outside and hang out with the smokers."
No matter how many organizations struggle to resist it, work is social. (The very definition of the word organization is "a group of people who work together" or "a group of people with one or more shared goals." Note the emphasis on "a group of people." In an organization (as anywhere else) knowledge transfers from person to person, not machine to person. Computer networks are most valuable when they facilitate that exchange. And social networks have emerged as the best set of tools for facilitating the person-to-person exchange of knowledge. Why wouldn't a company want to take advantage of that?
Admitting that he is a "wet blanket," Roger D'Aprix has written one of his "Inside Out" columns for the Ragan Report offering employee productivity as a key reason for companies to be wary of enterprise social media. D'Aprix is one of the sharpest minds in the internal communications business; in fact, his early thinking on employee communications in the 1960s and 70s has shaped many of the principles employed today. His book, "Communicating for Change," should be required reading for business leaders and communicators.
His take on internal social media, however, deserves some scrutiny. D'Aprix begins by reminding us that workers already face an ever-worsening information overload problem:
To get some idea of the overload problem's severity, consider that The Henley College in England has just conducted a study which shows European managers are spending two hours a day dealing with e-mails. The study's authors calculate that that adds up to a staggering 10 years of a worker's life! Of that number three and a half years are seen as a complete waste of time since 32 percent of the messages are deemed irrelevant. The cause (which to be fair is obviously out of our control as communication professionals) is that each e-mail message typically spawns four to six additional ones in the user's inbox.
The problem with lumping social media into the message meltdown issue is that the messages contributing to the overload are pushed at employees. Employees don't ask for most email they get. But employees will not read blogs, listen to podcasts, or participate in social networks they don't find valuable; these are all channels that employees pull based on interest and need.
Consider this. In a company of 15,000 employees if just 1 percent of the work force succumbs to the invitation to begin a personal blog, the productivity and cost consequences are huge.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
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