Internal Communications: The Real Place for Social Media in Business?
In her recent Flip the Media post, Social Media for Business one of my MCDM cohorts Jay Al Hashal gives a nice overview of Charlene Li’s book Open Leadership, the role of social media in business. I wanted to give my own perspective on this question as well.
Over the course of nearly twenty years in the corporate world, I find that often times organizational health boils down to how empowered do employees feel to have influence over their work lives. Interestingly, this perception of empowerment often manifests itself as a result of the quality (or lack thereof) of communication and transparency around key issues facing the company and executive decision making.
I’ve seen a handful of examples over the years of managers who make the effort to share the key issues they’re grappling with, and ask for employee input having stronger than average organizational health metrics, greater appreciation for and acceptance of the decisions they make, and high levels of loyalty from their employees.
Its human nature. The more information people have, the more they tend to feel confident, secure, committed to, or at least prepared for what lies ahead. We want this in our everyday personal lives, so why wouldn’t we also want this in our work lives as well? In our personal lives we can often go out “get” this information on our own, but in our work lives, we often need management to share this information with us.
Of course this is easier said than done. Truly interactive exchanges between executive managers and employees are difficult to facilitate. One option often employed is the company-wide email update from the CEO with the possibility of responding to a monitored alias where a business manager would filter out all but a handful of mails that the CEO would respond to and post on some internal website. For more critical issues, the company-wide, or perhaps division-wide meeting might be employed, where the executive will get on stage, provide an update to the employees, and follow it up with 30 – 60 minutes of Q&A. In either case the two way interaction never feels entirely satisfying.
For this reason, I found Charlene Li’s call for the use of social media in creating authentic and transparent business culture in her book Open Leadership to be an extremely compelling example of how social media can gain ground as a critical tool in business that every manager and employee can appreciate. Of course each organization must, as Li suggests, evaluate what is realistic for them to implement and support in terms of creating true two way engagement, but the notion of asking organizations to assess their transparency and how they can utilize social media tools to create/improve that transparency and two-way dialogue is right on.
I suspect that companies that can effectively implement and support these richer types of two way interaction systems internally, will ultimately experience reductions in turn-over, improved employee morale and loyalty. The by-product of these benefits – reduced operational expenses, reduced effort to facilitate buy-in for big change, and perhaps even more employee consumption of company products and/or services.
So, what do you think? Is the real opportunity to drive wide spread use of social media in business not in marketing, but perhaps in internal communications?
