Social media is an incredible power navigating through society and forcing organizations to adopt new policies and procedures to have social media work positively. The ubiquity nature of social media is revolutionizing organizational communication and culture. Organizations are strategizing diligently to have social media have positive effects on the internal human capital asset; or employees. Increasing productivity, reducing costs, stimulating innovation, and growing profits are primary factors for having employees and social media work in a harmonious relationship to harness additional resources and expertise to complement and bolster their internal development capabilities. Social media is positively affecting employees’ performance, and organizations are working to synchronize social media’s positive effects to have internal organizational benefits. Organizations with open, instead of restrictive, social media strategies correctly are learning that employees are improving their work performance. In a study exploring the influence of social media on an employee’s work performance, the researchers collected data from 379 Chinese working professionals and found that social media can promote the formation of employees’ social capital indicated by network ties, shared vision, and trust, which, in turn, can facilitate knowledge transfer. Shared vision and knowledge transfer positively influence work performance. Although network ties and trust do not have a direct impact on work performance, the influence is partially mediated by knowledge transfer. Social media is helping organizations realize the rich potential of an employee’s knowledge database and how the organization can benefit from a rich source of internal ideas generated through an open social media strategy. The widespread explosive growth of social media networks created a paradigm shift of employees instilling more trust between each other to collaborate on and exchange information and support organizational objectives. Microsoft adopted social network sites because they promoted the work-related advantages focus on strengthening professional and personal ties, promoting knowledge sharing, and resource locating. Employee collaboration is allowing organizations to become agile and proactively target consumers with more communication and marketing opportunities. By promoting employee collaboration in an efficient open social media strategy, with a project management viewpoint, organizations are vastly increasing the lessons learned database and creating a database of intellectual works to enhance the overall knowledge database of the organization. There lies the creation of more value to an organization when employees share organizational intelligence and openly communicate information with other employees, they have common bonds with or just have a more direct, virtual communication channel to increase productivity.
Social media is an incredible power navigating through society and forcing organizations to adopt new policies and procedures to have social media work positively. The ubiquity nature of social media is revolutionizing organizational communication and culture. Organizations are strategizing diligently to have social media have positive effects on the internal human capital asset; or employees. Increasing productivity, reducing costs, stimulating innovation, and growing profits are primary factors for having employees and social media work in a harmonious relationship to harness additional resources and expertise to complement and bolster their internal development capabilities. Social media is positively affecting employees’ performance, and organizations are working to synchronize social media’s positive effects to have internal organizational benefits. Organizations with open, instead of restrictive, social media strategies correctly are learning that employees are improving their work performance. In a study exploring the influence of social media on an employee’s work performance, the researchers collected data from 379 Chinese working professionals and found that social media can promote the formation of employees’ social capital indicated by network ties, shared vision, and trust, which, in turn, can facilitate knowledge transfer. Shared vision and knowledge transfer positively influence work performance. Although network ties and trust do not have a direct impact on work performance, the influence is partially mediated by knowledge transfer. Social media is helping organizations realize the rich potential of an employee’s knowledge database and how the organization can benefit from a rich source of internal ideas generated through an open social media strategy. The widespread explosive growth of social media networks created a paradigm shift of employees instilling more trust between each other to collaborate on and exchange information and support organizational objectives. Microsoft adopted social network sites because they promoted the work-related advantages focus on strengthening professional and personal ties, promoting knowledge sharing, and resource locating. Employee collaboration is allowing organizations to become agile and proactively target consumers with more communication and marketing opportunities. By promoting employee collaboration in an efficient open social media strategy, with a project management viewpoint, organizations are vastly increasing the lessons learned database and creating a database of intellectual works to enhance the overall knowledge database of the organization. There lies the creation of more value to an organization when employees share organizational intelligence and openly communicate information with other employees, they have common bonds with or just have a more direct, virtual communication channel to increase productivity.
The mitigating factors for improving employee engagement involve an employee having workplace enthusiasm, feeling empowered and inspired in the workplace, and having confidence in performing individual job functions. Employee workplace trust is essential to employees in any organization because trust psychologically transforms into safety; safety increases energy, boosts well-being, and produces a sustainable high performance. A workplace without employee trust causes a spread of fear, and that fear leads to withdrawal, distress, ill-health absenteeism, and reduced performance. Organizations not only get the results they desire; employees’ behaviors will gravitate towards more commitment and creativity so that organizations can gain substantial advantages and more significant rewards. The autonomy that open leadership and less restrictive social media strategies give helps employees achieve a degree of control and the ability to make choices to help them balance work and home lives more efficiently; thus, helping them improve their work performance. Employees tend to gain more purpose and have a clear sense of awareness of individual contributions that work towards an organization’s objectives and goals; creating more engagement and productive work performance.
When it comes to measuring an organization’s increased business value, John Hayes, the Chief Marketing Officer of American Express said it best by stating, that we tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot. There are substantial difficulties with measuring the value an open leadership methodology or a less restrictive social media strategy might have on improving employee productivity or gaining more workplace trust, but organizations invest large amounts of revenue in building public relations relationships to build better employee morale relationships. Organizations understand investing in building positive; collaborative relationships create and improve internal value.
Operating in a technological society, social network analysis (SNA) emerged as a powerful new way for managers to see the patterns of interaction—information sharing, problem-solving, and mentorship as well as collaboration—that make up the less visible, often informal side of an organization. SNAs gather information by asking simple online survey questions while identifying various interaction networks. Over a period, the repeated surveys detect underlying or parallel networks and reveal collaboration patterns within an organization. SNAs make it possible to assess whether interventions such as the reorganization or targeted efforts to improve collaboration (for example, offsite events, new software/communications tools, or incentive programs) have their desired impact.
Employee collaboration and value creation are essential to organizations today because of market complexity and volatility. Open social media strategies are creating more vibrant collaborative employee networks that are gathering interests, skills, and experiences spaced across an organization and adding them to organizational systems that are encouraging initiative and engagement. Collaboration is most powerful when focused on the creation of intangible assets, such as the ability to innovate, talent and human capital development, leadership development, reputation, and brand. Open social media strategies and leadership are benefiting organizations by removing friction, scaling efforts, enabling faster responses, and gaining more employee commitment. Open leaders using less restrictive social media strategies are improving the efficiency, decision-making, and communication among employees within organizations to bring more value; which is enhancing productivity and bottom-line profits.