Challenges of Social Business in the Workplace

8 thoughts on “Challenges of Social Business in the Workplace”

  1. Very cool Luis. You stated that there was no email exchange at all, but IF you were paid at all for your time, was there any contract for signing exchanged through email or more generally speaking, how do you handle such confidential matters that one may not want to be in the open social media stream?

    1. Hi Matt, many thanks for dropping by and for the feedback comments! Yes, I know what you mean and that’s one of the questions I keep getting all the time in terms of how I make things work for private, confidential matters. In most cases it pretty much depends on the context, which then leaves out plenty of the major social networking tools out there like FB, LI, Twitter or G+. The thing is that vast majority of client paid work I am currently doing happens on the ESN platform of the client, which means the content can be hosted public, or private, depending on that context and confidentiality of the information shared.

      What I do is to essentially fragment my interactions in such a way that instead of challenging them all through a single tool, like most people tend to do with email I diversify it often enough depending on the client, the context, and the tasks at hand. An example, last time I exchange private, sensitive files with a client happened through IBM Connections, on the SmartCloud for Social Business :-))

      Not everything is just the public social networking tools. There are lots of choices out there. It’s just a matter of picking up the one that matches the closest to your client’s needs and your own 😀

        1. Thanks, Matt, for the kind feedback. That’s my goal to, at least, keep adding my ¢2 hoping other folks would benefit from it and as I am starting to re-surface more and more into the external social streams I am hoping to write along how things are going in this whole brave new life of an independent trusted advisor who still doesn’t use email to collaborate and share knowledge across.

          Social Networking FTW!!

          Thank you again for being there and hope we will have a chance to meet up F2F some time soon! Whether in the US or over here in Europe! Take care.

  2. Hi Luis,
    Nice to see stuff boiled down to its essence. (Plus the usual Luis flourishes, of course.)
    It would be interesting to know how many of the ‘resisters’ of a top-down mindset are in fear of losing their power?
    Perhaps they’ve acquired it through inheritance, accident, shareholding – anything except merit.
    Or maybe they consider that their unique perspective wouldn’t be understood by the ‘lower orders’, even if they were to share it.
    When email first came in, analysis revealed that many middle managers were just ‘message passers’. People just started leaving them out of conversations and they were exposed and, presumably, moved out of the way.
    It’s a bit different at the higher echelons of the company. I guess the answer is to find those senior management willing to engage socially and show the non-participants the value (e.g. better understanding of what’s going on – in both directions) and see if participation spreads. If it doesn’t then ‘engagement’ should perhaps be raised as an agenda item at board meetings.

    1. Hi David, many thanks for dropping by and for leaving such wonderful set of comments. Greatly appreciated. I think you are on to something with that feedback. I am not too sure about the numbers of those “resisters”, but I agree with you that if there is anything that social networking tools would do is expose those very same people and confirm whether they are there for merit or by “accident”, whichever the latter may well be. What I think would be interesting is that those who are there due to merit are the ones who would be more than willing to dive into the world of social networking, because it would be an opportunity for them to showcase and demonstrate their expertise and (thought) leadership and essentially help everyone understand why and how they got there and how they can help enable the rest of their networks to excel at what they already do. The networks, that is.

      It’s fascinating the item you comment on around email and how middle managers were perceived back in the day. Looks like a decade has gone and middle managers are still there, as ever. I suspect the very same thing may well happen with those middle managers while embarking on social networks. Like I wrote on another blog post they are the social bridges between different groups, senior leadership and people in the trenches and their ability to adapt to the new reality where they are just not the passers of messages is going to be key. They are just as much bearers of conversations flowing in both directions, something that perhaps through email it wasn’t happening that fluidly.

      And 100% on board with your idea about finding those senior managers willing to engage socially and nurture them. They will probably be the ones setting up the stage and agenda to help progress companies into the 21st century and become socially integrated enterprises, which is the main challenge by most of them at the moment. Lots of work to be done. Just like in the good old times with other technologies 🙂

      Thanks again for the wonderful feedback and for dropping by! Greatly appreciated.

      1. You’re welcome. Agree with you. Including your point on the restrictiveness (ie non-social) aspects of email.
        I think that ‘effective working’ should always be the goal. I worry a bit when the goal is expressed as ‘social’ anything. Social is the mechanism, not the destination. It’s something a lot of ‘evangelists’ (not you, of course) seem to miss.

        1. Many thanks for the follow-up! Love your commentary about “effective working”, which I think is spot on! I, too, make a differentiation between efficiency and effectiveness and give me the latter any day and “social”, like you said, to me, is nothing more than just an enabler that allows me to get my work done in an effective manner, i.e. achieving certain results while also providing me with the opportunity to build personal business relationships that may, or may not, transcend work boundaries. Wish other folks (and I would include evangelists on that group as well!) would realise how technology, whether social or not!, has only got that role of being an enabler and never the final destination as some people think. Once we would make that switch I can tell you we would all be much better off, because, finally, we would be able to shake off that tech fetish that has been dragging us down for decades already!

          Time to level up the game, get work done more effectively using the (social) tools at our disposal in context to achieve the results we need. And help build those relationships accordingly. To me, it’s that simple 😉 hehe

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