E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Keeping a Closer Eye on Employees’ Social Networking Will Give You More Than a Headache

Earlier on today, I bumped into one of those blog posts that you know is not going to leave you indifferent; quite the opposite, because it touches base on a growing trend that you know is going to cause plenty of trouble ahead, specially for most businesses out there who are starting to embrace social software as their next wave of collaborative and knowledge sharing tools. Even more when that trend collides, up front, with some fundamental privacy rights of knowledge workers. And maybe of employers, too! Have you read Keeping a Closer Eye on Employees’ Social Networking by Joshua Brustein? If you haven’t, you should.

It’s one of those very interesting, and thought-provoking, articles that touches base on the rather delicate issue of employers monitoring the online social software interactions of their employees during working hours. Goodness! Isn’t that something like opening Pandora’s box? And not knowing the full consequences of venturing into something that in the long run could turn out to be rather nasty? Well, I hope I am wrong. Very wrong.

Joshua develops some very interesting insights with regards to a new service released a few days back by Teneros which "makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities". And when one keeps reading the article throughout to the end, one cannot stop thinking how much longer will companies keep trying to control & monitor their knowledge workers; or, even worse, when would they realise that a command-and-control attitude in today’s knowledge economy is everything, but *the* ultimate competitive advantage. Rather the opposite!

There are lots and lots of things I could say about the subject of monitoring and controlling employees’ online interactions in social networking tools and perhaps a single blog post would not suffice. Even the latest episode of The Sweettt Podcast, where we spent over an hour and a half talking about this very same subject, was not enough! We probably needed a whole lot more time to cover all of the various different implications with initiatives like Teneros’.

Without entering the realm of European privacy laws, and whatever other privacy related issues, which, by the way, I am not an expert on the topic, but I can imagine how there would be plenty of controversial discussion on this new service (If you do have the skills & knowledge on this very important item on privacy laws and monitoring employees’ activities I would love to hear from you through the comments detailing what some of those challenges may well be, at least, in Europe…), I would like to spend a few minutes developing further on some of the main consequences that implementing such kind of service would create on *any* corporate environment: trust and employee happiness. Amongst several others that I will probably touch base on at some point in time on this blog, as I am sure this topic will be a recurring one…

Right, instead of me putting together a couple of paragraphs on those potential consequences, let’s look into it from the perspective of a couple of businesses and their interests; let’s come up with Company A, that will make use of such new service to monitor the online social networking activities from its employee workforce; and then let’s have as well Company B, which is well known for its rather open policies on using social software tools while at work as their business tools.

So, which company would you rather work for? Company A, the one that still, in 2010!, tries to monitor and control who you are, who you connect with, who you share your knowledge across with? The one that decides what your productivity should be like, because you don’t seem to know better, in the first place? The one that decides what’s best for you, and for the business, not allowing you to make conscious professional decisions, because that’s what you were hired for in the first place, right? Remember?

In short, would you want to work for Company A that doesn’t seem to trust you as a knowledge worker to behave like the professional you were hired for in the first place and make use of all of the various Web resources available out there for you to keep innovating, sharing your knowledge and collaborating across the board using social software tools with other knowledge workers? Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Or would you rather work for Company B, where ALL knowledge workers (No exceptions!) have been encouraged, throughout the years, to spend time on the Web, hanging out in various social networking tools, specially those where your customers and business partners are already spending a good amount of time!, talking and connecting with them in meaningful conversations where you can co-create your company’s next generation of great products by keeping up with the rampant innovation happening in multiple levels established by those social networks?

Would you rather work for Company B, that trusts you would get "to decide what you do each morning" as a knowledge Web worker and be the responsible professional you were hired for in the first place? That company which understands that "Happy People Produce Quality" and that having the right tools to get your job done is not only necessary, but essential? That being happy at work connecting with your social networks across the board, where your knowledge resides deeply, delivers big results time and time again? Well, maybe, maybe not.

Which of the two companies would you rather work for? The one that doesn’t trust you as a talented, responsible and professional knowledge worker who wants to have an enduring career in that company? Or the one who fully understands what major benefits there are out there by unleashing the knowledge, expertise, know-how, experiences and informal networks of the entire employee workforce? You tell me…

Then, finally, I would ask you to ponder something else that most people seem to keep forgetting, but that time and time again it’s becoming a growing pain in the corporate world, and most of us don’t even realise it. What happens to that growing corporate pressure, known as the baby boomer generation about to start retiring in the next two to three years? How do you think Company A and Company B would be able to not only retain some of that knowledge before it goes away, and, most importantly, how do you think Company A and Company B would be capable of attracting new talent (Those younger generations who live in social networks) to slowly, but steadily, replace that maturing workforce.

Do you think that monitoring employees’ social networking activities out there is surely going to guarantee you that next wave of talented, amazingly interconnected, rather innovative knowledge workers that will pick up the baton of the maturing employee workforce on their way out and retain successfully part of that knowledge and keep your business thriving?

Right! I didn’t think so, either! Thus be careful with that headache. It’s coming…!

Tags: Monitoring, Monitor, Control, Controlling, Employees, Employers, Knowledge Workers, Workforce, Knowledge Web Workers, Trust, Employee Happiness, Teneros, Sweettt Podcast, Openness, Command and Control, Knowledge Economy, Social Capital, Knowledge Capital, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity

The Sweettt Podcast – Episode 12 – Sources of Quality

Over the course of the last few months a bunch of folks have been asking us why The Sweettt Podcast, that weekly podcasting tertulia I used to co-host with my good friend, and fellow colleague, Matt Simpson, went into a dormant status and whether we would be picking things up again any time soon. So in the last few months we have been revisiting the opportunity to re-vive the podcast and after a few conversations here and there, we are very pleased to announce that The Sweettt Podcast is back!

Yes, that’s right! It’s been nearly a year ago since we published the last episode and during that period of absence both Matt and myself have been getting together on and off to check whether we would be ready to come back to it or not. And after a few conversations we have been having, we decided that we are just benefiting far too much from that dialogue, so we decided to re-vamp the show and get back to it, after the rather long hiatus, on a weekly basis, although perhaps with a few changes we hope folks would appreciate as well.

I am sure, at this point in time, if you were a regular listener of the podcast, you may be wondering what were the topics we discussed on our welcome back, right? Well, not going to reveal much of it for now, since you can start listening to (Or downloading) the podcast right away from here, but I will certainly share with you some of the highlights of what we tried to cover over the course of 1 hour 48 minutes:

1. Flaming excuses for not posting our discussions for the past year (bonus – clean the inside of your computer screen!)
2. The iPad experience, and what it takes to achieve quality (bonus – a cartoon!)
3. Web Filtering – pros, cons, goods, and evils
4. Employee happiness as a source of quality and productivity
5. And then… Luis turns into a Robot

As you may have noticed, we touched base on a whole bunch of topics going from some flaming excuses as to why it took us so long to come back, along with explaining a little bit the new format of the podcasting series; then we talked about some of the various different reasons as to why I can’t wait to get my hands on an 3G iPad to, finally, be able to ditch both my 3G iPhone and iPod Touch (Diving into what user experiences with mobile gadgets should be like, or would be like very very soon! </stop drooling>).

From there onwards we touched base on some pretty interesting topics we keep hearing, or reading about, out there on the Internet around Social Computing and how some businesses are starting (If not fully on board by now!) to introduce Web Filtering. We covered the pros, the cons, the good, the bad and the ugly of filtering or blocking content for knowledge Web workers and, eventually, we started off a conversation on what employee happiness means and whether the motto "Happy People Produce Quality" (From the first project team I was part of when I started working for my current employer IBM over 13 years ago) would still stand in today’s corporate reality or whether we should be focusing on something else.

Some pretty interesting conversations that would take most of the actual podcasting episode, till the very last few minutes, when my Skype connection decided to play funny and make me become an automaton, a robot, which is funny, because that’s the main conclusion I have reached over the years on the main dangers behind Web Filtering. Oh the irony of technology some times … !!

So we stopped recording at that point and I am sure we would be covering that very important topic, once again, in the near future. For now though we thought it was a good welcome back! and we are surely looking forward to the next one! Like I said, you would be able to listen to the episode directly from this link, or download it for later playback with this other link. Alternatively, if you are using an .MP3 mobile device you would be able to subscribe to our iTunes podcasting series link and grab that and other future podcasting episodes.

We hope you will enjoy The Sweettt Podcast, just as much as we do when we record the episode(s) live! And, remember, if you would want to participate in any of these episodes feel free to reach out and get in touch with Matt or with yours truly. We do certainly treasure having guests in our tertulias and we hope to see you soon again!

(Gosh, it’s *good* to be back! It’s been far too long …)

Tags: The Sweettt Podcast, Sweettt, Matthew Simpson, Matt Simpson, The Sweettt Tertulia, Modern Salon, Tertulia 2.0, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes, Series, New Media, IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Tertulia, Conversations, Dialogue, Communities, Learning, Productivity, Flaming Excuses, Apple, iPad, User Experiences, Web Filtering, Filtering, Blocking Social Media, Blocking, Employee Happiness, Happy People Produce Quality, Automatons, Robots

Manifesto by Dave Pollard

You know, there are times in one’s life when you bump into one of those articles written by someone who you have followed, and admired, for a long while already that really gets you to no end, giving you shivers up your spine, provoking some of the most delightfully disturbing feelings inside you that you know are going to linger around for a long while, making you question, very profoundly, your work, your life, your very self in this world. To no end. Well, earlier on this week I bumped, once again, into one of such articles: Manifesto.

It’s actually a blog post put together by, like I just said above, someone who I have admired and followed for a long while now and who I consider one of the main guilty parties as to why I entered the world of Knowledge Management almost a decade ago. Indeed, he is one of those essential KM blogers who has been attempting to save the world for a while and who never ceases to amaze me how innovative he has been all along in such arduous task. Of course, I am talking about my good friend Dave Pollard.

Now, I am sure, as we are coming closer to the end of another rather long, and perhaps exhausting, week at work, that you folks would all have lots of great plans and activities piled up for this coming weekend we are just about to start. Well done for you, if that is the case; allow me to suggest though one other activity to go for this weekend: look up for a time where peace and quiet will reign in your household, go and grab a cup of coffee, or tea!, and start reading "Manifesto".

It’s one of those essential readings one has got to go through every so often to really remind us all what we are here for. There is very little that I could add to his wonderfully crafted blog post, yet, there’s just *so* much that I could talk about in relation to it that it would take me ages (And pages!) to put it all through a single blog entry! It’s, on its own, a Manifesto. A manifesto I never thought would be *that* accurate to describe how I have been feeling myself personally about things for a great deal of time (6 years to be more precise!!).

A manifesto that will surely not leave you indifferent. Quite the opposite. Rather disturbed, if you ask me, but in the right sense of the word. A manifesto that clearly describes who we are as human beings and perhaps what our true role should be in this world. Yes, that profound! I’m sure that plenty of people will have a good bunch of arguments against it, but I am also certain that it has hit the nail in its head with some of the major points Dave covered quite nicely. All of them reflected very well in this quote:

"[...] That’s who I am. Not a consumer, a user, a debtor, an employee, a resource, an owner, a leader, a believer, an -ist. So stop calling me these names. Understand who I am, and you may start to understand who you are as well. And then you will be free of all the names that imprison you, make you everybody-else, make you who you are not [...]"

And that’s just a little taster! I know plenty of folks out there who may consider such Manifesto as a rather utopian, happy read and perhaps a waste of time altogether. That’s fine. I’m sure Dave would be fine with that as well. The interesting thing, and the most mind-boggling one, is that, if you read it carefully, he brings up so many good arguments on where we have gone wrong as a society that it will make you question and ponder about things twice big time. And for a long while, whether you like to admit it or not.

It surely has had that effect on me, even more, when most of his thinking permeating throughout the article matches very closely my very own perspective on things, specially in the last few years, after one has gotten through one of those lifetime changes of rebooting yourself, start again from scratch, making you question a thing or two about your own role in this world and move on with your life with a new purpose. "Where did we go wrong?" is the question that keeps lingering around in the back of my mind for a good number of things that he details, very extensively, in his article. We have been given a chance to enjoy life as what it should have been all along: an interconnected, responsible, sustainable, enjoyable one… Where did we go wrong?

I am pretty certain Dave is on a mission to provoke such conversations to take place. He is very much one of those trust agents who *will* change the world as we know it. With such readings as Manifesto he has already provoked that effect to some extent. I do think though the challenge is now on each and everyone of us and see whether we are up to take on the baton and eventually get to see him, as he states towards the end of the article. One thing for sure, I am not certain about you, is that I just can’t wait to see him (Read through the entire entry itself and you will see what I mean …).

And then, how about you?

Tags: Manifestos, Culture, Society, Dave Pollard, Self, Life, Work, Essence of Life, Things That Matter, Smallest Things, Responsibility, Sustainability, Nature, Science, Technology, Interconnected, Smarter Planet, Smart Planet, SmarterPlanet, Trust Agents, Enjoying Life