Corporate social networks: why not encourage your employees to play?
In this article, originally published in Harvard Business Review France, Mohamed Hédi Charki, Professor at EDHEC, analyses the gap between the growing adoption of internal social networks by companies and the observed engagement of employees. How can this be done? The gamification approach is, according to the author, an interesting avenue to explore.
Let's go back several years and remember the emergence of public social networks such as Facebook in our lives. At the time, managers did not take a favourable view of these new digital environments, which were accused of having potentially harmful effects on the productivity and performance of employees in the workplace (‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media’, by Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, Business Horizons, 2010).
Since then, things have changed. Companies have made massive use of social networks thanks to collaborative platforms intended exclusively for the use of their employees. Similar to public social networks, these corporate social networks are digital platforms that enable each employee to create, disseminate, share and exchange information in a variety of formats and with multiple communities (‘Social media and their affordances for organising: A review and agenda for research’, by Paul M. Leonardi and Emmanuelle Vaast, Academy of Management Annals, 2017).
Widespread adoption but mixed benefits
As a result, several enterprise social networks have emerged, such as Slack, Teams, Salesforce Chatter and Jive. Usage statistics are impressive, with records reaching 42.7 million users for Slack and 300 million for Microsoft Teams.
However, the use of the enterprise social network does not necessarily go hand in hand with all the ‘jargon’ words that are nice to hear, such as knowledge sharing, collaboration between geographically dispersed employees or the breaking down of hierarchical, occupational and functional barriers. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute in 2012 predicted that the use of enterprise social networks within large companies could contribute up to 1.3 trillion dollars a year to the US economy alone, and highlighted that most of this potential comes from collaboration within the organisation through users sharing their business knowledge with their colleagues.
However, this is far from being the case for many companies, whose corporate social networks are deserted, rarely used or do not generate the expected benefits (‘The social media revolution: Sharing and learning in the age of leaky knowledge’, by Paul M. Leonardi, Information and Organization, 2017).
Employee engagement on corporate social networks, a managerial challenge
Managers are faced with the question of employee engagement on enterprise social networks. The idea would be to make the enterprise social network an environment where employees share their knowledge and experiences on topics that they are personally passionate about, independently of their work ("Bridging the gap between work- and nonwork-related knowledge contributions on enterprise social media: The role of the employee–employer relationship, by Nabila Boukef, Mohamed-Hédi Charki and Myriam Cheikh-Ammar, Information Systems Journal, 2024).
For example, the corporate social network would become a playground where employees would share advice on recovery after a half-marathon, the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet or physical and mental preparation for a triathlon...
To read this article in full (in French), visit hbrfrance.org
