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so what i study is to understand how enterprise social media affect various type of work outcomes
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the way the reason i'm studying enterprise social media is that there's actually been uptick in adoption
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in recent years i think in 2009 mckinsey report came out only 28 percent of firms
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has used some type of social networking tools but by 2012 that has gone up to 53 percent so we are
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familiar with consumer-facing social media such as twitter facebook there are lots of
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studies lots of startups or industry activities around this consumer-facing social media
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but how enterprise social media affects performance affect firms affected employees effect collaborations
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hasn't been examined and that's what i'm trying to do to understand how enterprise social media
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enables network formation enables information acquisition and how these intermediate benefits
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ultimately affect various work outcomes such as your billable revenue or your probability being laid off next
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cycle so information diversity and social communication are two factors i'm looking at in this research
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and i found that both have an impact on your work outcomes just affect them differently for example
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information diversity measures how much information or how or how diverse your information is and i'm measuring
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this through in machine learning techniques looking at your email chats and calendar
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events basically all your electronic communications and we found that information diversity
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is strongly correlated with your billable revenue and the more information you have the
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more likely you're you're you're able to build it makes sense in a sense like the more
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influence you have you're a better worker and you're better able to solve your client's problem
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interestingly we found that a particular topic called social communication does not have a direct impact on your
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billable revenue but has a tremendous impact on whether you get whether you got laid off
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in the 2009 recession when you have social commission have the words such as coffee lunch dinner football baseball
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these social words the more words you have in your communication the less likely
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they are to be laid off and in fact that's the most significant predictor above and beyond your objective
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performance measures in predicting whether you're laid off i think the social communication one is
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surprising because i thought i i deliberately picked industry where you can measure
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your value to the firm very clearly like in the end you know how much you bring how much money you bring to the firm
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should be the ultimate value i would thought all the other stuff should have maybe have a bit of
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predictive power but in fact that what i found is that social communication has bigger power than your objective
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performance in predicting what they got laid off in the 2009 recession i think that's that was really
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surprising to me but i'm not saying that people should necessarily just stop working and show
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their community should communicate all the time but i'm surprised i'm thinking that
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there's a perhaps there's some kind of intention intended value that people should
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communicate can provide that we don't see perhaps this person is a really good team player i just really
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enjoy working with this person maybe that makes him maybe he did not build directly
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but he enabled his co-workers or his colleagues to do better job perhaps that's one reason or you can
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think of the traditional and old boys club where you know people who are tend to
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schmooze a lot get better but you know i don't know which one's which but uh you know but that's really
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surprising to me i guess importantly well obviously you want to do a good job you know getting lots of information on
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time is very important and your social network plays a really key role in helping you get the
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information and the stuff by social networks also helps you to you know i guess smooth the relationship around
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you perhaps you shouldn't just you know be the dilbert in the office always just work and code and do what do
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we need to do it actually pays perhaps to you know get to know your co-workers to understand
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what's going on at workforce and those kind of intangible benefits through social
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communication can be very valuable to workers and for managers you know again maybe you maybe as i think whether
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social communication is a positive negative in your workforce i think manager has a
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particularly uh better ins a particular better insight than anyone else maybe social communication is really a
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lubricant makes the team collaboration better then you should you should foster that but if social communication really
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is about political backstabbing or boys club maybe you should you know try to stem that from
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happening i think it's becoming aware that social media in particular enterprise social media
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can have productivity effect is very important and in particular what was important as firms started
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adopting enterprise social media at that workplace i think before you before anyone is
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starting to do that i think it's really important to understand potential implications
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for our workforce what is the mechanisms going on what enables your workers or employees to do
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better job and before knowing that's what's happening you may actually experience
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some unexpected consequences of adopting center by social media so although i'm studying consultants but
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i think this type of work can generally applicable to all kinds of information workers
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including lawyers consultants scientists any kind of information related worker would be you know
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we find this research very valuable but i think as enterprise social media is becoming more prominent
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any firms are trying to adopt this type of technology will find this very interesting as well
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i think the closest one perhaps marissa meyer's decision to ask all the workers to show up instead
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of working remotely i think a lot of people there's a lot of backlash against that particular
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policy especially for working moms i'm actually i'm working on myself and but i actually
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think there's some merits in that as well but for the workers if you think social
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communication is really going to be such an important predictor in your career outcomes or
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career trajectories perhaps it pays to show up and to lubricate this social communication around you and to
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understand each other to understand your colleagues who know what's going on
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because a lot of information or especially intangible information are passed down
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through water cooler conversations and with that but if you're working at home
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all the time without having that access perhaps you actually you're actually
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doing your own you know you're actually worse off as a result if you're kept
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doing that so i think marissa has a point but whether we should enforce 100 percent i think it
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depends on the setting depends on the firm was it was what was needed and uh perhaps marisa made it the right
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decision i don't know it means actually yahoo well i guess it depends on the person
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again right this perception again depends on who you're talking to perhaps for a consultant this may be may
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not be as surprising i don't know but for someone you know for like me or anybody who's in the
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in the industry at least in america we think of meritocracy right we think that meritocracy is
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ultimately what gets us you know promoted we got we were rewarded for you know for doing our job well but the fact that
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we the fact this is this research i've shown that social communication matters it's interesting
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takeaway in the sense that not only should you do your job well but you also have you also should worry
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about some other intangible communication or other stuff you have to do at work it makes us more
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likely that you will be do you'll be you know keeping your job getting promoted or
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improve your career outcomes i think enterprise social media in general hasn't been studied much
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we see a lot of again facebook and twitter social media that's consumer facing
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and what's unique about this research is that i have the real social network of employees
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because if you think about your communication electronic communication channels including your
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calendar events that capture some of the meetings facebook facebook basically encounters these are all real
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communication that your real network at work and to capture that precisely to understand the intermediate outcome
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that networks can produce is something that hasn't been done before so i'm actually in the process of
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finishing another project related to this and where we found a emergence of a network biased technical change
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in instance as a social media is being adopted at work we actually see a you know digital
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divide among workers so you think that perhaps social media enable people to find
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each other more easily and may therefore we raise some of the barriers that we have in
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connecting to other people at work and perhaps the dilbert of the world would be better off
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because now he has to use social media to find the people he needs to find but in fact what i found is actually a
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little disco disconcerting the sense that dilbert are becoming worse off as social
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media becomes more available if you think about it if you were making connection you need to find a person you
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wanted to connect but you also need to persuade that person to become connected to you
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so as a search cost have become erased because of social media this conversion cost of
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you know making the person become your friends is even becoming more prominent as a result if you have a lot of
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political i mean social capital before you are even better off because you have the power to make that person
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be connected to you whereas if you don't have that power even you found the person you defined
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they may not choose to connect with you and then you're actually worse off so in a sense we actually do see a rich
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get richer and poorer get poorer phenomenon with enterprise social media and i think that's again some unexpected
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consequences that firms should should try to understand before they adopt these type
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of technologies you