Chapter 18
Onboarding in a Social Media Workplace
Contributed By: Matt Paddock, Director of Recruiting and Management Development, Dominion Enterprises
About the Author: Matt has led talent acquisition and development programs for Dominion Enterprises since 2002, including initiatives aimed at developing management bench strength across the company and transferring organizational knowledge. Matt is an avid user of social media, both on behalf of his company and personally, including the leadership of several active online communities serving thousands of members.
Matt’s Contact Information:
www.linkedin.com/in/
mattpaddock
[email protected]
757-255-8255
150 Granby
Norfolk, Virginia 23510
Matt earned his undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio, and received a master’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
WHAT IS A SOCIAL MEDIA WORKPLACE?
It’s fun to imagine coming to work as a new hire in what we’ll call the “social mediated” workplace:
As you enter the building, you see that every employee has a name tag with lots of info about their interests and professional experience … plus a list of friends you have in common.
Instead of bland background music, your cube or office comes supplied with a customized soundtrack that only plays the music you like.
Orientation involves creating a professional profile on the Company’s intranet … with links to your blog and your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter profile.
During enrollment for company benefits, you notice many reviews written by your fellow employees about health plans and primary care physicians.
At lunchtime you are approached by a group of employees who invite you to join them … based on your all having several favorite restaurants in common.
At the end of the day you find an email invitation to complete an online survey regarding all aspects of your first day at work … including lunch.
If you are thinking about adding a social media component to your Onboarding program, this article provides information about the ideas and issues to discuss and to plan for success. You will not find step-by-step instructions here for setting up a new social media group or site. Why is this? At the rapid pace of change associated with online tools, these instructions would be out-of-date before this book is even published. What this article will do is provide some resources and considerations needed to form a social media strategy.
Although the list above is intended to induce a chuckle, a recent survey from Robert Half Technology found that at least half of the companies polled understand that new employees don’t want to check their social networking at the door.1 It’s no surprise that this is a front-burner issue; social media have matured to become a broad space that attracts over one third of adult Internet users, across about 20 main sites.2 Additional sites and related services seem to spring up almost daily.
The Robert Half study also shows that social networks and other social online services—usually referred to as “social media”—are still thought of by many organizations as an extracurricular activity. Some managers see browsing Face-book or chatting via AOL Instant Messenger as equivalent to making a personal phone call on company time, but others realize they need to embrace the social media and focus on managing the message. We all recognize the difference between an employee’s using the phone as a business tool and making excessive personal phone calls, so why not apply this same discretion with social media?
One business consideration is that the power and potential of social media are matched by their ability to disrupt established systems for communication and workplace decorum. The other problem is how to define policies and procedures when the social media landscape is in a constant state of flux. Before tackling these issues, let’s consider how to harness the power of social media for onboarding employees.
YOUR NETWORK OR THEIRS?
Social media address one concern companies have during the onboarding process, which is effective communication with new employees. When companies communicate well during the onboarding process, employees feel welcomed, informed, and in tune with corporate culture.
When companies communicate poorly, new hires feel isolated, out of sync with their coworkers, and unaware of expectations. Beyond meetings, training, and other activities, social media have unique qualities that help employers interact efficiently and effectively with new employees. The benefit for companies is that employees aligned with organizational culture will perform more quickly and more confidently in their new roles.
Social media thrive in a networked environment. Just look at LinkedIn, a site that made the drab utility of a Rolodex enticing by allowing people to share contact information in real time. LinkedIn built on that foundation to include features like messaging, embedded applications, and user groups. Grouping is fundamental to most social media tools, whether we consider new applications like LinkedIn or older media like blogging.
In the workplace we sometimes hear negative references to groups as cliques, or associate them with political factions. Try to think of groups in social media as being more like teams in the workplace. We understand the value of cooperation in the workplace, and we see that teams are generally more productive and effective in solving difficult problems.
Apply this same notion of corporate teamwork to social media and you’ll get some idea of what author James Surowiecki3 referred to as “wisdom of the crowds.” Rather than try to anticipate every shred of information your new hires will need, plug them into an existing network of knowledgeable employees. Assuming that you hire people with at least average levels of curiosity and critical thinking, you should expect them to use networking to fill in knowledge and skill gaps during their early days of employment.
If this vision of new hires acting as social media detectives to ferret out important information sounds unrealistic to you, consider this: Pew Research reported4 in 2009 that 46 percent of Americans over the age of 18 are established users of social media, and the percentage rises to 65 percent if we consider the next wave of working adults. This means your new hires will very likely come to the workplace already highly networked.
When dealing with change (such as the first few weeks in a new job!), people have an especially strong need for the support of others. Employers can either take control of social media tools by embedding new hires in a powerful company network filled with new people who are willing and able to support the onboarding process, or leave things to chance and expect new hires to rely only on their previous personal contacts.
CORPORATE CULTURE CLUB
The utility of networking in the workplace is a developing science, and many employers feel they already have reliable methods for teaching people how to do their jobs. When those same companies tackle the challenge of cultural transmission, the picture becomes less clear. One ancillary benefit of adding more social media to your onboarding toolkit is developing what has been referred to as “ambient intimacy.” Lisa Reichelt coined the phrase5 on her blog in 2007:
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.
Social media novitiates often come away from their first few hours on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn unsure of what to do with these sites. We instantly recognize the utility of a pencil, a stapler, or a calculator but we struggle to understand why sending 140 characters of text on Twitter adds any value to the world.
Reichelt and others have proposed that the greatest value in social media may be the ease with which we can stay informed about things happening in other people’s lives. This heightened sense of goings-on with fellow employees is valuable to new hires who are still trying to find their way to the restroom. Knowing more than name, rank, and serial number makes for easier interactions with colleagues, or at least provides a conversation starter.
Employees also benefit from knowing about connections they share with other people in the organization, such as having attended the same college or having worked previously at the same company. The wonderful thing about social media is that they allow for ambient rather than active intimacy. Most new hires aren’t ready to jump in and participate in every workplace conversation, but they all benefit from dipping their toes into the cultural pool. Eventually, listeners find the right conversations and become active participants, which is the ultimate payoff for companies invested in converting new employees from outsiders to insiders, and for companies that truly want the ideas and opinions of their employees to “bubble up” to the surface.
WHO’S KEEPING SCORE?
Searching the World Wide Web for the phrase “social media ROI” pulls up many pages of results, but very little to instruct us on how to measure the value of a social media strategy. In the onboarding realm, we can always ask our new hires how they felt about using social media in the workplace, and we can do technical analysis on how often particular links were clicked or intranet pages were accessed by employees. These are nice metrics for HR or OD practitioners, but they might not be as compelling for senior leaders.
Considering the time required to set up and maintain a presence on even a few sites, social media strategies can be a hard sell in the corner office. Even though it is possible to show that all your new hires are members of the company’s page on Facebook, you’ll need to go further to demonstrate how the time these employees spend on social media sites translates to good things for your organization. Site analytics, or tools showing detailed statistics on use of a site or service, are developing at a rapid rate. Services like bit.ly6 allow you to send out shortened links to information online and see detailed reports on how many people clicked through, including timestamps and the location of your readers.
As one example of measuring activity and the results of social media tools in the workplace, Facebook now offers a free resource7 called Page Insights that allows you to view activity associated with any Facebook page you create. These hard numbers are good, but the best ROI you’ll have for using social media during onboarding will be testimonials from new hires.
Be sure to set clear expectations with your senior leaders so they aren’t expecting to read the results of a social media campaign as they would a balance sheet. Ask employees through surveys and narratives to rate their satisfaction with the company’s use of social media, and load in questions about how social media helped them become more productive sooner, solve problems, sell more, or expand their corporate network to accomplish a specific task. Also ask managers to compare the productivity of their new employees with previous groups that ramped up without the benefit of an internal social media campaign, and ask these managers to particularly hone in on productivity gains.
WHAT ABOUT PRIVACY AND DECORUM?
Corporate social media certainly won’t work without executive support, but you may find obstacles at a much lower level. Another survey8 from Pew Research showed that adults using social media value their privacy. A majority of users restrict access to their profiles and limit what content is visible to their friends. Couple this with statistics from the same study that personal use of social media far outpaces professional use, and it is clear that expecting all employees to opt into a social media strategy at work may be unrealistic.
The concern for privacy online is understandable considering that identity theft affects millions of U.S. adults each year9 and that online scams have been on the rise10 in recent years. Companies with plans to formalize social media must be sensitive to perceived privacy issues, educate employees on online privacy best practices, provide policies concerning their appropriate use in the workplace, and be extremely vigilant against real scams or misuse of official sites.
A final word of caution around social media has to do with decorum. Wikipedia defines decorum as “prescribed limits of appropriate social behavior within set situations,” and the real message here is that companies can only expect appropriate use of social media by employees after some rules have been clearly communicated. The benchmark for this type of communication tends to be IBM, one of the first companies to publish11 what it refers to as its “Social Computing Guidelines.” Help new employees avoid social media landmines by spelling out clearly what they can and cannot do using company sites.
Since use of social media bridges personal and professional worlds, be sure to explain what constitutes inappropriate use of social media outside of work, such as mentioning certain information about an employer on a public site, blog, or as a Twitter status update. Helping new employees understand social media decorum will ensure that senior managers, legal departments, and fellow employees perceive your social onboarding initiative in a positive light.
REFERENCES
1. “Whistle — But Don’t Tweet While You Work,” October 6, 2009, RHT Survey http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/PressRoom?id=2531
2. Andy Kazeniace, “Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs,” February 2, 2009 by http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/
3. J. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than the Few, and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004)
4. Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart’s presentation, “The Democratization of Online Social Networks: A look at the change in demographics of social network users over time,” given at AoIR 10.0 in Milwaukee, Wis., on October 8, 2009.
5. L. Reichelt, “Ambient Intimacy,” March 1, 2007 http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
7. Facebook Pages FAQ: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=175
8. A. Lenhart, “Adults and Social Network Sites,” January 14, 2009 http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Adults-and-Social-Network-Websites
9. 8.3 million in the U.S., according to a 2005 Synovate report commissioned by the Federal Trade Commission Synovate, “Federal Trade Commission - 2006 Identity Theft Survey Report,” November 2007 http://ftc.gov/os/2007/11/SynovateFinalReportIDTheft2006.pdf
10. “Gartner Survey Shows Phishing Attacks Escalated in 2007,” December 17, 2007 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=565125
11. IBM Social Computing Guidelines http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html