Lose the "command and control" attitude to help build prosperous social networks

By Annie Waite, Global Editor of the Internal Comms Hub, Melcrum 

Peter Bradwell, a researcher for think tank Demos, says today’s difficult business environment tends to create an instinctive reaction from management to “batten down the hatches" and return to traditional “command and control” hierarchies - where productivity is closely monitored and measured.

But although allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counterintuitive, "it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability,” Bradwell says.

His comments, reported in a news article on the Hub this week, are drawn from the results of the Network Citizens report, commissioned by Orange (and authored by Bradwell), which developed visualizations of team networks in 6 organizations and found social networks to be at least as powerful as the formal organization, if not more so.

I spoke with David Lavenda, VP marketing & product strategy at WorkLight, a company that has helped encourage some businesses to use Facebook as a business tool. He says “It's important for communicators to provide useful tools for people to voice their concerns through a collaborative environment rather than a top-down approach."

“When deployed inside the firewall, social networking provides a secure working environment that allows employees to interact, while management concerns can be mitigated as internal discussions do not leave the confines of the organization."

But if your executive board is still in need of some persuasion about the benefits of social network, then the Network Citizens report includes some practical advice for developing responsible, prosperous networks.

1. Do not separate social and professional networking. Attempts to control employees’ use of social networking software at work may damage the organization by depleting its network capital.
2. Value networking with people outside the firm. Too often, only senior staff are encouraged to build external relationships. The power of horizontal networks across organization boundaries is clear and growing.
3. Keep in touch with ex-employees. The temptation during a difficult economic climate is to hunker down, but this risks cutting off flows of network capital. Companies should consider keeping former employees in the network.
4. Do not police networks, but consider improvements. These should be a first step towards collective conversations about the networking “rules of the game”.

Got any other tips to add? And do you agree with Lavenda that Facebook can have a positive impact at work? Have you found - or even formally measured - social networking's positive or negative effects?

Comments

[Emma]

Personally I find my own Facebook network hugely beneficial. I use the tool to keep in touch with former colleagues. I can brainstorm, ask their advice and use them as sounding boards.

[Carl Lachmann]

Hear hear - you have to let people connect and communicate for networks to form. I absolutely agree on that. I think, though, that for big companies they need to take this a step further and start thinking on HOW to supply the infrastructure for this. Easy to forget that information today may actually have a value attached to it. Under the conditions of use applied by Facebook (by no means unique) they actually have an ownership on everything posted there....