Nowadays there is a growing trend within organizations to talk, understand and then adopt some form of Web 2.0, Social collaboration technologies. Typically these may consist of internal blogs, wikis, collaboration tools, profiles etc. Although this is a good & positive trend, but sometime one wonders if organizations are really ready to internally deploy & reap the fruits of the Social tech tools.
Some factors that readily come to mind
Is the organization truly open? - Many Indian firms are extremely risk averse as well as criticism sensitive. Once you deploy social technologies, you are essentially giving employees the freedom to display/voice their opinions. Can you swallow negative opinions as well? One Indian firm discovered this last year when employees gave vent to the flaws in the new performance management system through their company blogs. The company responded by bringing down the servers. Only if you are sure of taking in both the bouquets & brickbats should you consider deploying this technology
Rewarding the collaborators - Organizations need to answer the question - what is the need for employee to contribute to the social networks? The power of social networks is that they are open, have their social hierarchies & their own rules. Employees will contribute to get themselves noticed, get "followed" & "liked". So there is no real incentive for rewarding collaborators, apart from ensuring there is no bureaucracy or artificial rules. Can the organization ensure this?
Hierarchy hurdles - are managers willing to propagate the benefits & use these tools. Hierarchy is usually a great motivator or demotivator for usage of social tools. If employee sees that his manager is actively using these tools, he knows & understands that it will be a good idea to use it. If the opposite happens, then tool usage will typically lag & fall into dis-use.
Linkage to pay/performance - once employees start using these social tools for collaboration, knowledge management, profile updation, etc, this will become the default location to turn to for understanding the skills, competencies etc of the employee. Can organizations/managers start using the information from social tools to help in the pay or performance decisions.
How this will be done is something that HR needs to come to an agreement, but eventually this will be a great driver to influence the employees to be users of internal social tools.
What are the other hurdles you foresee for adoption of these tools?
No comments:
Post a Comment