I'm in to the second week of data gathering for my MSc dissertation researching the effectiveness of Social Computing for Workplace Learning.
As the number of respondents starts to grow to a statistically meaningful magnitude I have noted a few facts that I find interesting, including:
1) Almost 80% of respondents are over 40 years of age, dispelling the myth that social computing use in the workplace is the fad of the bright twenty somethings joining the workplace as the early progeny of the facebook generation.
2) Nearly 40% of respondents find that their employer does not link an individuals performance to the use of social computing, this despite numerous studies from IBM (and others) in the past 3 years that identify the need to embrace the connected and collaborative world of social computing as a key business challenge. Perhaps it's easy for CEOs to identify the challenge, but less easy for line managers to link that to an employees performance.
3) Just over 30% of respondents claim that their employer has no guidelines (or none they know of) on the appropriate use of social computing. This I find very surprising, taking a browse through the email addresses of the respondents I see none who work for organisations that lack social computing guidelines.
My own view on appropriate use of social computing is that the golden rule applies here as elsewhere in life 'tweet about others as you would have them tweet about you'.
My research continues and if you'd like to be in with a chance of winning a £50 (UKP) Amazon or iTunes voucher, I would appreciate your help in completing this questionnaire www.surveymonkey.com/s/3HD7JQW
The questionnaire will be available until 20th July 2012 and it takes about 10 mins to complete. Every participant who leaves an email address will receive a 'thank you' in the form of a $10 (USD) store credit to spend with National Geographic's partner www.novica.com - a great way to support artisans in developing nations.
Participation is anonymous (unless you wish to leave your email address), and all my findings, conclusions and recommendations will be published in October, and sent to those who wish to receive a copy.
2 Responses
Results are rewarded not the means of reaching them
Quote "Nearly 40% of respondents find that their employer does not link an individuals performance to the use of social computing,"
I don’t find this strange at all, in organizations we reward people for results achieved, not for whether they achieved the results using an abacus or yammer. Clearly there are exceptions regarding codes of conduct and acceptable behaviors etc but not as to whether you use morse code or a phone – the question is did you get the result (to the standard, within the time etc etc)?
The use of social learning tools/social media/web 2 may be a part of an individuals development plan (to become competent) or may even be a performance goal (to deploy a particular tool for a particular purpose) but once the tool is established it is merely a part of the organizations infrastructure – like teletex was, faxes are still occasionally, SMS is and twitter is increasingly.
Mark
Linking reward to effective use of social computing
Mark,
You make an interesting point about linking reward to results. Whilst it’s certainly true to say that results are an important (possibly the most important) measure of performance, they are by no means the only measure in my experience.
My employer operates a balanced score card in the performance review cycle, with both quantitative hard measures (signings, revenue, gross profit) and less tangible ‘softter’ measure (personal eminence, professional giveback, developing others) incorporated in the benchmarking and evaluation process.
One particular area of focus at present is that of ‘digital eminence’, raising one’s professional profile in the web 2.0 world, both within and without the business. One significant and very direct way in which I (and others) can raise their digital eminence and demonstrate evidence of having done so is to actively contribute to social learning, sharing knowledge and ideas via social computing, and being willing to be identified (and socially ranked) by one’s peers as a go-to person in a particular field of knowledge.
Contributing to, and making effective use of social computing tools for learning delivers some very real benefits. It increases the speed at which I can respond to the needs of my clients, it gives me a competitive edge as a force multiplier – bringing the knowledge of my peers to my fingertips, it allows me to connect with specialists around the globe that I would otherwise not know of, or find it very difficult to identify, it reduces the amount of time I spend on formalised learning, potentially absorbing concepts, terminology and theory that might one day be useful to be (if I recall it), it reduces travel time and cost associated with face-to-face learning (although there is still a place for that), and it allows my knowledge, understanding and to some extent my skills to be peer reviewed, validated or challenged by my colleagues in a rapid and organic fashion – without the intervention of a costly top-down, HR driven Learning Management System (which was always more about the Management than the Learning). The bottom line is it allows me to be far more agile. When you scale those benefits up across the corporation – the case for encouraging, recognising and rewarding use of social computing becomes compelling.
To rehash your earlier analogy, if my business was using Morse Code for internal and external communications, and I wanted my employees to rapidly and effectively move to using the telephone – thereby achieving a competitive advantage over other organisations still using Morse Code – I would definitely encourage doing so through reward.
Eventually social computing will become just another part of our daily work experience, but for those organisations that want to drive up adoption and engagement, and accelerate the benefits realisation of using social computing – one way to do that is through reward. Of course there are many other ways of motivating, recognising and incentivising desirable behavioural change, but if the business believes that reward impacts results, then why would you not want to link reward to evidence of desirable behavioural change through the use of social computing?
I believe that in the knowledge economy, the ONLY sustainable competitive advantage (in a truly open market), is the ability of an organisation to continuously learn, and then apply that learning effectively. This is why I believe that linking reward to the effective use of social computing for workplace learning has a role to play in a balanced performance appraisal.
— Paul D Jagger PgDMS CITP FBCS twitter, skype and linkedin: pauldjagger