?We lost the XYZ deal, for which my team had worked very hard??this is the perfect example of a status message?which your organisation would not want you to post on Facebook or Twitter or any social networking site. But, smart organisations have a professional way to handle the social media addiction of their employees. From small and medium businesses (SMBs) to large organisations, that too across sectors, are now emphasising on internal communication tools comprising chats, social networking sites and much more. Indian organisations may be a bit late in this race, but are not far behind from MNCs. Here is a look.
While some companies believe in building social networking sites inhouse, others believe in simply buying a platform and installing it. Take the case of Sumeet Vaid, founder and CEO of fFreedom Financial Planners, an SMB with 24 employees. He believes in using ?Chatter?, a private social networking platform provided by salesforce.com . ?The average age of employees in my company is 27-30 years. Today, youngsters are social. Chatter is our version of Facebook at work. Whatever is there in my business, Chatter highlights it,? he says.
Chatter is an enterprise collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularised by Facebook and Twitter?such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds. Chatter lets employees ?follow? documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organisational barriers.
Peter Coffee, head of platform research at salesforce.com comments, ?Chatter helps in reducing email interactions upto 40% in an organisation.
Interestingly, there is no sector which has not used Chatter as a tool to enhance its sales and marketing performance. Financial services, entertainment, media , education sector?all are looking at it in a big way. We have 60,000 companies as Chatters users across the globe in less than five months.? Saleforce counts diverse companies like Dell, Caesars Entertainment, Kelly Services, and Pandora as its clients in Chatter.
In human resources, take the example of Kelly Services, a workforce solutions company with 8,000 employees. Joe Drouin, CIO, Kelly Services has a view, ?Chatter has transformed the way our 1,500 sales and service reps work, creating visibility into activities and enabling an unprecedented level of engagement within these groups. We want to do this now across the entire company; with Chatter Free, we?re able to include the rest of our workforce, including our globally dispersed employees in operations and in functions such as IT, finance and legal into the conversation. This will greatly accelerate productivity across our global operations.?
Coming to companies who use inhouse social networking sites, there are big names like IBM India and WNS Global services, the country?s second largest BPO company.
S Chandrasekhar, vice-president and head (HR), India and South Asia, IBM India describes the inside networking scenario of the company : SocialBlue is an opt-in social networking site for IBMers. You can customise your profile page with information about yourself, upload and share photos, ideas, thoughts, and opinions You can also organise events with other IBMers.
In the company, BlueTwit is an internal micro blogging environment similar to Twitter. It allows all employees to register at no cost to their department and experiment with microblogging within the safety of IBM?s firewall.
Chandrashekhar is also very enthusiastic about the concept of ?JAMS? at IBM. ?Jam? was IBM?s term for a ?massively parallel conference? online.
IBM had developed its first in 2001 as a way to unite the organisation.The idea was that a Jam?a group of interlinked bulletin boards and related webpages on IBM?s intranet, with systems for centrally managing everything and seeking substantive answers to important questions in three days or so?would give people a sense of participation and of being listened to, as well as generate valuable new ideas. From the beginning, the Jam process showed it could engage tens of thousands of people at a time. There were 52,000 posts in the 2001 Jam, addressing questions like ?How do you work in an increasingly mobile organisation??
The BPO industry tries everything to keep its employees happy, and so did WNS Global Services. Keshav Murugesh, CEO at the company makes a forthcoming statement ?We are also in the process of launching a new E2E (employee to employee) section?with a Facebook kind of a functionality where all employees can create their own pages with profiles and connect with one another in real-time in the manner that they wish and restrict access to their ?personal? information to a limited users if necessary. Employees could create communities; and engage with one another ?informally? to help build greater engagement with one another and with the company. The site also has a classifieds section much like eBay where employees can sell, buy, rent, or avail multiple services.?
With 21,000 employees at WNS , it becomes essential to have smooth flow of messages/communication irrespective of geographies and distances to bring coherence to the workplace allowing better coordination. ?Apart from the traditional form of interaction via emails, video conferences and telephones we have multiple in-house networking like MS Office communicator, which is on the lines of Google talk,? says Murugesh. Going back when social media was a new concept in India, he recalls, ?WNS Intranet chatting / blogging started in 2007 and was an extremely popular and successful tool among WNS employees where the average age was between 22-23 years. We received around 300-400 posts/comments every day. It was an simple format with not so long posts/comments, hence easy to moderate. It gained rapid popularity amongst the employees and also proved to be one of the biggest stress-buster at WNS.?
The dark side of the networking story, outside or inside an organisation is having respectable interactions. Questioned on the regulations which companies should adopt in internal social networking, Murugesh notes that the site being on a LAN (for closed user group), thus there is no special need for regulation. But from the content perspective a major mode of regulation is moderation. All sections within the intranet where employees connect with one another are moderated. The posts/comments are published once edited and approved or rejected with reason given for the rejection. ?The moderation is important to ensure that terms and conditions are met, and that employees do not indulge in profanity and respect the ethical code of conduct of WNS,? he stresses.
Coming back to the SME example of fFreedom Financial Planners, Vaid says, ?Emails have chances of much more misuse than social networking, as conversations are not public.?