Sharlyn Lauby
HR Bartender
A key component to developing a high-performing workplace is sharing. Being able to share information in an effortless way builds strong teams and enhances the team performance. Social media creates opportunities for people to use a medium that is very natural and comfortable to communicate.
But over the relatively short period in time corporations
have been using social media, something has happened. We’ve created silos.
There are networks for social goals and social projects. Even more for social
tracking. The key to breaking down these silos is integration.
Ultimate Software
and Yammer, an enterprise social network,
have recently announced a partnership to create that integration. The vision is to use Yammer’s
collaborative tools to connect employees with the organization in a social way,
for the benefit of everyone involved.
Here’s an example: let’s say the company’s sales team is
working on a presentation for a major prospective client. In preparing for the
meeting, they’ve run into a challenge. Sitting around the conference room
table, someone says “Gosh, we can’t be the only team who has faced this
challenge before. It would be great to know what other teams have done.”
Instead of calling around hoping to find an answer,
organizations can now use social collaboration tools to pose their questions
and get answers. Maria Ogneva, director of community for
Yammer, explains how social collaboration benefits the business. “The
possibilities are endless, and the most important thing is to understand what
business problem you are trying to solve. As today’s rapid pace of change
increases, companies must adapt faster and faster just to remain in the same
place, let alone get ahead of the competition. Adapting to the speed with which
you need to move to stay ahead of the competition is simply not possible when
the people who need to execute on the vision aren’t on the same page and are
hindered by archaic processes. Besides, you often don’t know where the best
answer lives; you may be surprised.”
Not only do social collaboration tools help solve business
problems, but they contribute to employee satisfaction and engagement. Ogneva says sharing information
leads to less frustration and allows employees to easily get their work
done. “Social collaboration helps
employees feel like they are part of a larger goal, like everyone is marching
to the beat of the same drum. It also reduces the barriers created by
hierarchies and flattens the organization, providing insight into what other
teams (and management) are doing and thinking. When the leadership team is able
to be more open and honest not simply about what’s happening, but why –
employees are more compelled to support the overarching business problems and
execute on the vision.”
Implementing a social collaboration tool reaps many benefits. Before introducing social tools within an organization, here
are some points to consider.
- Understand your corporate culture.
- Look at current processes: how information is obtained and shared within the organization.
- Define what success will look like using social collaboration tools.
- Get support from senior leadership and key stakeholders.
- Create an implementation and communication strategy for the roll-out. Be sure to include employee training on the social collaboration tools!
- Establish a schedule to evaluate and monitor progress.
Social collaboration tools can bring a tremendous amount of
information and knowledge to an organization. The key is harnessing it to solve
business issues. Ogneva reminds us to focus on the success metric. “For any business social effort to be successful, it has to
tie to a business objective. You know it’s bringing positive results when you
are getting closer to meeting these objectives.
What do you want to enable with this collaboration? If your goal is to
increase customer satisfaction, perhaps the business impact metric you are
looking for is the increase of speed of a response to a customer, and how
collaboration helps you do that.”
To
learn more about social collaboration tools and how they can benefit your
company, check out the Yammer blog
and talk with your Ultimate Software representative.
