Designing the Social Workplace #e20s

This track (nr 3) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about ‘Designing the Social Workplace’ with Miguel Membrado (Kimind), Marie Khayet (Essec Business school), Frederic Williquet (SD Worx) and Jane McConnell (NetStrategy/JMC). This breakout was prepared before the Summit in Meet-ups. The insights from the meet-ups are shared first.

What is a social workplace? What is the digital workplace and how is it becoming social? There are four enablers of the digital workplace, according to Marie?
  1. Flexible work hours
  2. Technology
  3. Social media platform
  4. Cloud-based services 
How can this be integrated in the corporate tools? The social workplace is not an IT system but an ecosystem with work in context.

Miguel goes into the company cultural issues with respect to Social Business. Not in all cultures openly sharing insights is normal. In companies like Google and IBM this is mainstream, but not in all companies.

They also looked at objectives and metrics. How do you measure adoption and metrics? Good tools have the potential to easily provide analytic information.

Finally they also talked about rewards. If you have the data, how do you reward employees? Do you reward employees or should their motivation come from within? In France explicit rewards is stranger than in the US, for instance.

The breakout speakers see most of the adoption problems coming from (middle) management, not employees. The most-heard reason to thwart adoption is information security. Adoption is most efficient when top-management is on board. It is important to give management good reasons and objectives to move in this space.

On the other hand, Jane thinks it’s more complex. It’s not just management and/or employees. It’s also legislation (for instance in the pharmaceutical industry). There, management would like to move, but also has to reckon with rules and laws in countries.

Frederic wonders: Is it really middle managers? Don’t they have to fill in the same processes? Is it middle management or is it the processes that should be reengineered? For this reason he thinks change has to come from the CEO.

As an intermezzo Jane gives a short presentation about her findings from the Digital Workplace Survey she conducts yearly (high recommended, by the way!). The leadership class of the Digital Workplace have: 
  1. A digital board: strategic decision-making body for all digital channels: internal and external (17% have this). Interesting fact: business is involved more in leading organization.
  2. Internal social collaboration: well-established in all or parts of the organization (all in 5% and 17% in parts)
  3. Intranet or digital workplace: the way of working for the organization (10%) 
The key challenges for organizations can easily be derived from them.

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