Internal Social Media: Addressing The Fears

This is the second post in the four-part Internal Social Media series. If you’ve enjoyed this series or others you’ve read here, consider subscribing for free!

Much like with external social media programs, some companies have consistent hangups and fears that prevent them from even getting started. Some risks are very real and necessary to consider: regulatory issues, compliance, and disclosure stuff. But most companies’ fears stem from a few key places, all of which are addressable with some patience, process, and open discussion.

Negative Comments

“But what if something says something…bad?”

For many businesses, the fear of having something say something negative about them is one of the most compelling reasons to stay far away from social media. Sometimes it’s a matter of “out of sight, out of mind” (if we didn’t see it or hear it, it didn’t happen), other times it’s more an issue of not having an idea of how to respond.

Internally, the fear is that employees will trash their bosses, badmouth the company, or even share confidential information where they shouldn’t. But employees aren’t eager to put their professional reputations (or jobs) on the line simply to write a few nasty words about their boss on the company blog, and they’ve already got all the tools they’d need (like a phone, email, and countless social sites like GlassDoor.com that they can access on their personal time) if that’s their goal.

Having a conversation up front about participation guidelines (more on this below) is a good start, as well as outlining your expectations for professional behavior on internal social tools. If you already have more private feedback mechanisms in place through HR or other avenues, pay attention to the comments and suggestions you’re getting as a company. If you have a habit of either not asking for input from your teams, or asking for it but ignoring it, that’s a problem that’s much more cultural and operational, and will be exacerbated by social media, not solved by it.

The truth: criticism is happening anyway, even if you aren’t listening for it now. Empower your employees to provide constructive feedback in a professional manner and demonstrate that you’re listening, and it becomes a constructive and progressive exercise. If the negative comments appear, learn how to deal with them in a positive fashion, and address them head on. But recognize that what your employees want is to be heard and acknowledged.

Resources

But who owns this? Who’s going to manage it? Who’s responsible for responding and engaging and participating? Can we mandate participation, or does it have to be voluntary?

Lots of questions surround how to deploy social technologies, and the answer to most of them is “it depends”. In many cases, multiple people have to be involved in owning and managing it, from:

• IT to help integrate and provide access to the technologies
• HR to help encourage and guide participation based on company goals
• Varying department management for helping provide the information that gets shared and discussed

They’ll need to work as a team, all outlining common goals for the initiatives and mapping out plans to get there. Those goals will help guide employees on participation, which you can’t mandate effectively. Just like in their personal lives, employees use technologies and social networks differently, but if you build effective tools that serve needs for information, training, feedback, and connection between employees, folks will find the pieces that are valuable to them.

Employee Productivity

At the crossroads of professional teams and social media is the concern that employees will “waste” time using these tools and that their productivity and work contributions will suffer as a result. Mashable recently reported a survey wherein 54% of companies completely block external social media sites.

One study in particular, conducted by the University of Melbourne, says that employees are actually more productive when allowed to use the internet for their leisure. And many employees today, born and raised in a digital world, are incredibly more adept at leveraging technology to do their jobs more efficiently and better while accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time. Their expectations for companies, moreso now than ever, is that their technological access and experience at work will mirror what they have at home.

If employees are interested in social networks, they’re going to find ways to use them on company time, most likely through their mobile devices. Internal social networks can have the advantage of providing a gated environment in which employees can connect and converse that still has professional purposes and usefulness in a work environment.

What employees are craving that compels them to use social media in the first place, either personally or professionally: access to information, a voice in a larger conversation, and connections with people that they relate to. All of those things can work in a business environment, and even help team members do their jobs better.

Guidelines for Participation

In many ways, creating simple and straightforward guidelines for internal social media engagement can address many of the potential fears above. Guidelines should reflect the codes of conduct that employees are expected to adhere to in their ongoing work, and discuss specifically the expectations that both team members and management has for how internal social tools should be used.

Ideally, guidelines should be drafted and made available for some feedback from team members so they feel invested in the process and the outcome. There are dozens of examples here of both external and internal social media policies to help guide your efforts and find the style that works for your business.

Guidelines tend to work better than “rules”, and discussion of social media participation and expectations in open forum at your company can go a long way to addressing the fears you or your management may have about adoption. If you cannot trust your employees to participate on an internal social network professionally, it’s likely your hiring practices that need evaluation, not your social media policy.

What Else?

What else would you add? What other reasons are employers fearful of social media inside the walls, and how can we help them address those concerns? I’d love to hear your takes and experiences.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about building a plan to roll out an internal social media program, and what to consider.

Find more like this: Culture, Internal Social Media , Business, Culture, Human resources, Internal Social Media, Social media, Social network