You can’t change corporate culture using social tools
Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0
It’s been a busy couple of days for enterprise social tools. IBF24, just finished, had a big focus on the social tools that are being rolled out in organisations of every size, from Yammer to team sites, from status updates to rich staff directories.
There was also palpable enthusiasm for social tools amongst participants at the Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) conference in Stockholm today. This is feeling like the “topic of the moment” for intranet and comms teams.
There’s no doubt that social tools provide a powerful new way of connecting people with people in organisations. These tools are increasingly effective, easy to use, cheap and transformative. But there’s some serious over-enthusiasm and naïvety about the impact of these tools.
When asked about why social tools are such a focus, comms and intranet teams say:
“We want to help people connect with other people.”
“We want to break through silos to connect the organisation together.”
“We want to enable two-way communication with staff.”
“We want to create a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture.”
“We want to reshape the way the organisation works together, from the bottom up.”
These are all interesting goals, but in response I have to say:
You can’t change corporate culture using social tools.
Simply rolling out new tools, particularly as part of a pilot, will not magically change the organisation and its culture. There are also growing concerns that collaboration tools will simply reinforce existing silos, rather than break through them.
While there is a clear need and opportunity for social tools, we must:
- set clear, business-focused, objectives for social tools
- recognise where social tools will, and won’t, work
- use tools to support, rather than drive, culture change
- focus on gaining adoption
- be realistic about the cultural impact of social tools
If you have an organisation where business areas don’t work with each other, don’t think that this will be solved by deploying social tools. If there is a business goal of transforming the organisation, by all means support this with the deployment (and adoption) of social tools.
But let’s never forget that connecting people is about people, not the tools we deploy.
Tags: culture, social media, social tools
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
11 Comments:
James – I agree – companies do get the intranet they deserve and any attempt to paste over organisational cracks with any kind of technology will fail.
You also can’t have bottom-up social activity without top-down support (even if that support is only tacit). However, I do think that if you have top-down support then there is a symbiotic relationship between social tools and culture change … they can make a difference to the culture of an organisation and open the eyes of key stakeholders to a different way of doing things.
Richard
Exactly! Tools are tools. They may entice new behavior, but can also be used to persist in old behavior (us against them, exclusion and inclusion).
Tools belong to one direction of culture change: Outside in. Things outside ourselves that enhance the desired thinking and behavior.( Like social media that connect people.)
The other, quite important direction of change is: Inside out. First change your mental model, the way you think, your convictions about co-workers, other departments and connecting to them, and then change the way you act… This is the invisible part of (culture) change that makes the biggest difference. And that requires dialogue, reflection, openness, willingness, workshops and leadership.
Combine the 2 directions of change and you will eventually see the desired behavior that will found the new culture, if repeated over and over (“the way we do things around here”).
James i completely agree with you on the subject, as Marcella stated “Tools are tools” and that is what they are designed to do, Server us.
As i have noticed, during the long hours of IBF24, we have a will to push the organisation forward using the intranet but have forgot to experiment.
The culture today is build build build and the expectation of most of the organisations is to get results by what they envision will be the correct tool.
I disagree, pushing tools as experiments rather then de-facto new standard is a missing link in the chain. some organisations will generate value out a tool like yammer and some not. some need a good set of wikie’s and some can do like IKEA and only use it for the internal company jargon.
But how can you tell if a new technology will solve a problem that might not even exist?
I Like Richards idea of bottom-up social activity without top-down, if you give the people the ability to put social tools and let them push it a bit to see the traction they get, when they are adopted widely you need to integrate them to the fabric. this approach will be similar to the natural approach you have in business, from many startups only a few mature to big businesses.
Spot-on mate!
Please read ‘the social life of information’ from 1999, it is still very true. How we IS/IT-advocates to e2.0 or in those days ‘.com’ forget people perspective to things, and why we act predictable irrational
http://flandqvist.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/information-tidbits-in-the-social-fabric/
I agree that “Simply rolling out new tools, particularly as part of a pilot, will not magically change the organisation and its culture.”. But I disagree that “You can’t change corporate culture using social tools”
Sun Microsystems went through a huge change in culture driven to a large degree by Blogs.Sun.Com. It was certainly NOT JUST blogging, but it would not have happened without blogging and that, plus Wikis and Open Source, changed many things. I’ll leave to a different discussion which of those changes were good and which were not…
@Eduardo, I agree that social and collaborative tools can act as a “catalyst” for change. But it’s interesting to see that many of the most well-known examples come from technology companies (Sun, IBM, etc) or from companies that are already innovative. What works for a technology or professional-services firm isn’t an automatic fit for a bank for government agency…
@Richard, definitely agree that much can be done with top-down support, and bottom-up tools. I’ve seen a number of examples where senior managers “modelling the right behaviour” have enabled a big shift in how people communicate and collaborate. If only more of the social media projects did more to engage with the organisation to get these types of outcomes!
@Yuval, truth be told, I get frustrated by constant “pilots” of tools like Yammer, blogs and wikis. There’s a difference between true experimentation, and deployments that little-or-no chance of success. Harsh words I know! But there’s plenty of experience to draw on now about how to be successful at these things, so I’m saddened by organisations repeating the same mistakes over and over again…
Hi James,
I am not mentoioning constant pilots, they are not even an option…
read more in my blog
Thanks James,
I now understand your frustration and the response tone. as i exclaimed in my blog it is not my intention for lengthy and unending trial periods but a change in the driving seat.
Education and Support are a must and the value is to be proven.
Thanks for this great post James! I agree that pilot do not make sense, either you do it or not. But sometimes pilots is a way to “sell” these tools internally, to soften the reaction of septics. I would slightly temper the fact that tools do not influence cultural change depending on the types of workforce. In companies where digital natives are arriving, social tools will speed up the process of cultural change. Jane (@netjmc) recently refered to these tools as the spring of intranets. Spring implies changes. Trees become green, birds sing, the environment in which we live change, and our mood changes. If we push further I think that we can somehow assimilate this to cultural change. The consumer world has brought us new ways of interacting and people have embraced these. We can forsee the same changes to happen in the work place. New ways of working, tools that socialize the business, that comes on top of all systems to allow people to engage, interact, express themselves. I wonder when we will experience for the first time the same type of revolution that we saw in North Africa, but internally to companies?
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