First there are cases studies of Heinz and Bayer where Social Media meets the Employee Handbook
For Bayer Corp, social media has become one more way for employees to share ideas within the organization or for the company to communicate with customers.
However, the company — like many others in the social media space — also recognize the need for formal policies or guidelines governing these online activities.
“It’s not as if there are brand new guides or instructions to employees, but this is another vehicle that, if they are representing the company, they need to be mindful of what proper behavior is,” said Bryan Iams, head of strategic and external communications for Bayer.
But before you take Bayer's road here's a insightful post which will cause you to think - Is your company ready for social media?
Social media has the power to democratize information and provide real-time, meaningful feedback on products and services. Are these the kinds of features that would increase your speed-to-market, improve innovation and engage your employees? Or do you worry more about threats to management structure, the security of your information and hierarchical protocol?
And this great post, 6 questions to ask to build a collaborative organization reminds me of my own post
The collaborative movement is not new – think Margaret Wheatley, think Peter Senge, think Chris Argyris and the organisational learning movement. What’s changed is the technology, particularly anything 2.0 is now simple enough, and accessible enough for people to get it. Before, people needed to have a really high interpersonal competence to achieve this goal of collective dialogue. Now, the norms of social communities online have introduced sharing and providing content as a given.
Bit as evidenced by the increase in blogs, and discussion groups on the topic of why is it so hard to introduce a collaborative culture, why introducing enterprise software is fraught with challenge, why internal comms teams are struggling with uptake on collaborative tools, it can be argued that this really is just a pretty standard culture change challenge.
And why CIOs should encourage collaboration
A survey by analyst Pierre Audoin Consultants and the IT Service Management Association in September last year suggested that 68% of IT buyers now turn to their peers as their preferred source of advice on potential IT systems. That is almost double the second most popular route of searching for information on the web.
As US technology blogger and former Gartner analyst Vinnie Mirchandani recently wrote on his Deal Architect blog, "In the 1970s CIOs turned to IBM for advice; in the 1980s to Accenture (Andersen); in the 1990s to Gartner. In this decade they rely on each other - unbiased peer input."
As S Sivakumar CEO of ITC IBD tweeted what is needed is Communication 1.0 to enable Web 2.0 in the workplace :-)
What do you think?
