Social Media In The Workplace
Posted on | December 1, 2009 | Comments Off
I’ve recently been engaged on the redesign of an Intranet for a non-profit healthcare organization. One of the stakeholders asked how could social media work for their staff. Intranets were started to help with internal collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing. They also facilitate the dissemination of company policy, guidelines and business values. There is a definite home for social media applications with this kind of cross-pollination of information and conversation within a corporation. So I thought to compile the following list of how social media technologies could help with team collaboration, communication and sharing. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Blogging: Having worked in a number of organizations the common problem amongst all of them is the distance created between the CEO or president and the staff. A CEO blog would be a great way to close the gap. A blog would enlighten staff of where the organization is going, solicit feedback and add credibility with the leadership. It would also be great that everyone could own their own internal blogs to foster idea generation and knowledge sharing. It’s a great way to showcase expertise and other personal interests that could be used on the job.
Micro-Blogging: Micro-blogging, made popular with Twitter, is a great way to broadcast news and other information quickly without having to create long descriptive and often useless pages of content that will get lost in the archives of most Intranets. HR could use Twitter to post policy changes, training events, announce new hires and staff holidays.
Wikis: Wikis are a way to foster collaboration and sharing of knowledge. Internal wikis could help in the development of internal processes and policies without the need of frequent and long team meetings.
Commenting: By allowing commenting on documents, blog postings or articles you can get a sense of internal opinions of what is being shared. You may find that some of the opinions posted may trigger new innovations or changes not considered before.
Employee profiles: Imagine what you could learn from each employee if they could manage their own online profile. It could be shocking 
Status updates: Could be a great way to alert people what it is you’re working on (or not).
Video or audio podcasting: Videos or podcasts from recent events and presentations can demonstrate your thought leadership in the business community.
Reviews and ratings: Often staff opinions are stifled because of fear of internal politics. By creating opportunities for dialogue and opinion can only create a space where invention, creativity and respect can grow. Same with commenting staff can add their own reviews or ratings to favorite documents or resources on the site.
Bookmarking: Bookmarking on an Intranet is a way to collect information that is relevant to your business. Within an Intranet these bookmarks could be shared as common resources to your team, department or across the organization.
This is just the beginning for social media. Depending on your business there could many applications for these technologies within your organization. Have fun with it.