Will Employees Use Internal Social Networks?

Easier collaboration, better communication, 'community' building, these are just a few of the anticipated benefits from the deployment of Internal or Corporate Social Networks. 

Lately it seems like every vendor, consultant, and tech publication around is advocating the introduction of some kind of internal social networking capability into the enterprise, either as a stand-alone application, see examples here, and here, or from vendors that are including 'social' capability in existing HR products and processes, examples here and here.

But frequently in these recommendations and 'sales pitches' hard data is lacking to address some of the key questions that HR and business leaders will naturally have about these projects.  Key questions like:

Will my employees actually use the social network?

Will social networking be seen as just a 'Gen Y' thing?

Will the use of the social network improve productivity?

These are just some of the important questions to consider when evaluating the appropriateness of an internal social network for your organization.

In an attempt to shed some more 'real world' data on these key questions, enterprise social networking vendor Socialcast released a report of findings from a pilot enterprise project for NASA, the United States official space agency.

The purpose of the social networking pilot (dubbed NASAsphere), was to determine if NASA knowledge workers would use and apply online social networking in the NASA environment. By purposely inviting a pilot group of users from a wide range of NASA locations and disciplines, NASA was also interested in examining what if any improvements in inter-departmental collaboration would be realized. The pilot would be a two-phase project, with each phase lasting 30 days, (honestly a very short time to make conclusions on the success or failure of a internal social networking pilot).

The key findings (based on surveys of the participants and analysis of the information created on the network) from the 47 page report on the pilot program:

• Almost 90% of the invited participants activated their accounts and participated in the launch of the pilot, a total of 78 NASA staff
• As the pilot moved through to Phase II, the user community grew to 295
• Users were from all Generation groups, and comments from participants indicated that age was not a factor in someone's willingness or unwillingness to participate in the social network
• About 82% of the participants said the platform made open communication easier
• But, only 28% of participants cited improved work productivity in the form of 'saved' time
  • This finding was tempered by numerous comments that indicated the initial narrow user base of the network was a limiting factor for many participants, it can be concluded that as participation across NASA increases, more users would report productivity gains.

The report is extremely detailed and worth a read if you are interested in testing internal social networking in your organization.  In particular interest to HR and HR leaders is the following recommendation from the NASA project team:

The human resource organization in private industry is increasing their role in coordinating,
supporting, and managing tools that enable the workforce to share and transfer knowledge. It is suggested that NASA’s Human Capital organization take the lead on implementing and utilizing NASAsphere as an enabling tool for the NASA workforce, notably taking on the human element.

This is an excellent 'real-world' case study that concludes that the HR organization is in the best position to lead these kinds of internal collaboration and community deployments. 

Hopefully, we will see more and more of these projects and more opportunities for HR to lead.

Comments

[Susan Burns]

Steve - Thanks for sharing an overview of the NASA case study. To your point, with all the hype around social tools it is quite good to have some data to mull over. The data provides good insight into the potential and challenges to companies looking to leverage social networking tools internally for collaboration, learning and productivity. The conversation around HRs role is an important one and an area where the function can demonstrate considerably more value to the organization.

I'm looking forward to reading through the report and sharing it with others. I look forward to reading more from your perspective as well!

[Steve]

Thanks Susan for your perspective and comments. I think it is important for those who advocate the adoption of collaborative tools to have access to more 'real' data on the effectiveness and results of these projects. It seems that lately so many are advocating that these tools be implemented in organizations, but I think that many organization leaders are still unsure of the value of these projects. It is a credit to the folks at NASA that they were so willing to share the results of their pilot program with the community. I personally am a strong advocate of the implementation of collaborative tools in the enterprise, be they wiki, micro-sharing, or community learning, and the data from the NASA project serves as yet another reference for the potential of these projects.
Thanks again for reading and commenting.