Social Computing as an Engagement Tool: The Enterprise 2.0 Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle

As I mentioned in my previous post, last Thursday I participated on a panel at the Interop New York conference entitled "The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise". Moderator Steve Wylie asked all the panelists to speak to the value of social messaging within an enterprise - what is its purpose? What benefit can it deliver?

Our first responses to those questions centered on social messaging as a new tool for knowledge management. Tony Byrne of CMS Watch spoke, for example, of the value of being able to find within an organization the person with the answer you need and being able to go directly to that person rather than having to broadcast your need in the hopes that someone somewhere in the organization will happen upon your question.

Social messaging, because it allows you to build around you a network of people you have identified as having relevant expertise, and because it allows you to easily filter activity streams and online exchanges for relevant information can dramatically increase the speed with which an employee can access the expertise they need and also increase the depth of expertise and experience they have easily at their fingertips.

So, no doubt about it, social messaging can be a solution accelerator in an organization.

But there is another intriguing benefit to social computing - messaging, networking, blogs, wikis, the whole gamut - that intrigues me: social computing as an employee engagement tool.


Social Computing as an Employee Engagement Tool

So many discussions about social computing in the enterprise turn on the question of return on investment (ROI). In the context of this discussion I want to advocate for a different idea of which investment it is on which social computing can help you achieve a good return. I think when it comes to social computing in the enterprise, employees are the "I" in ROI.

We all understand that there are significant costs to recruiting, onboarding, equipping, training and providing benefits for employees. I have employees and I don't begrudge them that investment - it's critical - but the reality is that for the health of the organization I have to be wise about how I make those investments and that includes making sure that employees in whom I've invested want to (and do) stick around for a long time.

This diagram illustrates an idea I've been formulating that I call the "Enterprise 2.0 Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle".

It's really a simple concept that draws on four ideas:

1. That employee retention is more likely when employees are engaged.
2. That employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel appreciated.
3. That employees are more like to feel appreciated in organizations in which they have opportunities to contribute ideas and demonstrate their expertise, and
4. That employees are more likely to take advantage of opportunities to contribute where there is established trust that makes them feel safe doing so

The last two points bring us around to enterprise social computing. Social computing gives employees opportunities to create content for the organization through blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, link sharing and other activities. It gives employees opportunities to reveal their expertise in the process. That content they produce becomes a resource to the rest of the organization and as their ideas are picked up and used by others around them, employees get to see a direct connection between their activities and the success of the company - which, I should add, is one of the most critical elements to employee satisfaction: knowing how what they do matters.

But if you build your social computing tools just around a goal of collaboration and knowledge management, while those are noble goals, I contend they will fail unless collaboration and knowledge sharing are seen as a by-product of achieving a more fundamental goal: creating relationships. Because the critical element in enterprise social computing success is not the presence of the tools, the critical element is your employees feeling comfortable and safe to use the tools for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

And that is the meta idea that the Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle attempts to illustrate. You must create activity in the tools before you'll get engagement, but without a level of comfort you won't get the activity you need. Here's how it works:

If employee participation and engagement are your goals...

• You need to build your social computing tools to facilitate connections between people. Make it possible for people to find others with similar interests and similar experiences and connect with each other. Give them the means to start building relationships within the tools (some of you may argue that relationship building is frivolous, when you're focusing on relationships you're not producing. I'll just ask you to think about your own experience getting things done at work. Idea work gets done by talking and people don't talk to strangers in the workplace very much or very well. We have to dismantle the society of strangers).
• Where relationships exist, trust begins to grow over time.
• Where trust exists, employees are more likely to collaborate on projects, innovation and idea sharing. This is critical: sharing an idea can be a scary thing for an employee. If they don't feel safe or don't trust those around them they may feel like a "wrong" idea will be damaging to them and so not contribute at all. But where there are good relationships, there are safe zones of trust and employees are more likely to collaborate with each othe. And where employees are comfortable collaborating and, therefore, do so, the opportunities increase for them to see their ideas picked up by the organization.
• And where that happens, the employee's satisfaction increases and their engagement deepens as a result.

Relationships lead to trust, trust leads to collaboration, collaboration leads to engagement.

Knowledge exchange runs on relationships and social computing facilitates those relationships within the enterprise.

That's how I see it. What are your thoughts?