Decision 3D

Top 6 Reasons for Social Connections in Organizations

Value | 1 comment | April 27th, 2009 

To help articulate why building a social infrastructure within organizations yields benefits, Decision 3D has developed a list of six reasons, that we call “REWIRE”.

• Recruitment
• Engagement
• Workforce Management
• Innovation
• Risk Management
• Education

In every organization, most, if not all of these issues are key to success. A concerted effort by organizations to enhance social connectivity will have the benefit of improving outcomes related to these issues. Let’s see how:

Recruitment

As individuals gain more control over their own information and have a growing ability to communicate globally, they will avoid organizations where these abilities are limited. Organizations that embody the principles of transparency, openness and sharing will have the advantage in hiring tomorrow’s best and brightest.

Engagement

Engagement means getting and keeping people’s attention. It means generating passion around a topic, issue or product. It means getting people to invest their discretionary resources in the organization’s behalf. If we are talking about employees, that discretionary resource is effort/time/focus. If we are talking about customers, that discretionary resource is money and/or time spent telling others about the brand.

Workforce Management

Retaining your best talent, knowing who knows what, and identifying competency weaknesses are all critical for workforce management. In an open, social environment where transparency is a core value, getting the right people to the right job becomes significantly easier. If someone is particularly skilled or has unique knowledge of a certain topic, that person is easily identifiable in a social environment. It is also easier to identify workforce shortcomings and find ways to overcome them.

Innovation

The key to innovation is combining disparate information to generate new insight. The process of social connection reduces the friction of information flow between disparate sources. This is essential if people are to get information that they traditionally do not have access to. Opening information channels across boundaries allows innovative ideas to emerge.

Risk Management

Projects, product development, organizational change efforts, all have elements of risk associated with them. The reduction of risk should yield improved results. An open, social environment that exposes all phases of a project, development effort or change initiative, will uncover problems sooner than traditional approaches. The sooner problems are identified and resolved the lower the risk of time-line extensions and cost over runs.

Education

It has been said that the only true competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than the competition. There are few ways better for learning than sharing your knowledge and experience with others. A social infrastructure that facilitates the easy sharing and finding of information will improve an organization’s learning capability.

REWIRE the Organization

The process of REWIRE’ing an organization is primarily a culture change. Technology can support the effort, but the key element is the willingness for decision makers and opinion leaders to move to an open, transparent mindset. The way an organization choses to approach information and how it flows through an organization is critical. To achieve the full impact of REWIREing an organization, access to information must be based on the assumption that all information, by default, is public. From that initial state a justification must be made to limit access to information. This approach is contrary to most organizations, but the opportunities are huge for those that can master this paradigm shift..

Tags: education, engagement, innovation, recruitment, REWIRE, risk management, workforce management