Employees are a key element in social business. As a company starts to activate and officially sanction its employees to publish social media and use social technology, the details of managing the participation of a diverse workforce get tricky quickly.
At a high level, designing roles for employees in social business requires particular thought around ecosystem (i.e. how they connect with others), hivemind (i.e. their level of social calibration), and dynamic signaling (i.e. content creation and distribution).
At a tactical level, I’m starting to see an old question come up more often, which doesn’t have a clear answer. Management almost never wants non-exempt (e.g. hourly) workers to get paid overtime for participating in social media – say an internal community or answering support issues on Twitter while representing the brand. Most companies address this issue by requiring participating employees to agree to terms & conditions before participating, whether this is the best solution remains unclear, given a lack of legal challenges to date.
Most of the people I know who are involved in social media are of the white-collar salaried variety. Many of them participate in order to gain a competitive edge in their work. But what happens when the rest of the company gets involved? In particular, when the participation happens for corporate benefit and being social becomes part of the job…how should employers reward this value creation?
When an entire business ecosystem becomes socially active – and our corporate labor policies and 9-to-5 mentalities have not yet evolved – should employees be paid for participating in social media? What happens if the hourly employees participating in Twelpforce and similar initiatives stop for a second and think – “hey, I’m not on the clock…why am I not being paid for this?”
- Some people might stop participating.
- Others might still do it for “extra credit.”
- It’s not inconceivable that in some environments the workforce might sue. In fact, it’s already happening in some closely-related cases.
The propensity of people to contribute value on a volunteer basis is all around us. Individual editors on Wikipedia, participation in site improvement surveys, or retweeting information for a good cause. But volunteerism is only going to take us a limited distance, the first step or two on the journey of a thousand miles to social business.
So how is your company going to handle the journey? Are you prepared to potentially pay for it every step of the way?
Hi Peter. The journey, as you describe it, may start with using Social Media for Marketing purposes. Volunteerism will only attract so many people and then only for so long unless recognition for ‘social working’ becomes a part of the employee assessment process. Then you will have a mechanism for long term employee participation.
However, for it to really qualify as ‘Social Business’, it should permeate the organization and the way the business works, ie. its culture. Customer interactions from Marketing can then be fed through to Customer Services and to Product Development, Research and Innovation.
The means by which to leverage culture change is through the use of internal social platforms optimized to enable collaborative working throughout the various areas of a business. This results in knowledge sharing, social learning, expert finding/reputation-building, and networking across teams, regions and even businesses.
The likelihood is that people are taking their enthusiasm and expertise to the consumer space on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other consumer social sites. The collaborative workplace allows a Social Business to harness that enthusiasm which becomes loyalty. Anyone in HR should appreciate the value of employee loyalty and what it means to the long term success or an organization.
The recognition of collaborative working naturally falls under the remit of HR. Social businesses which value their ‘human capital’ also find that HR becomes core rather than a peripheral hiring and firing function.
All of the above is what I have gleaned as an internal community manager, and by following the great speakers from the Dachis Social Business Summits of the last few months in Austin, London, Sydney and Singapore. (BTW, if there is any businesses out there looking for an experienced internal community manager, I’m available from the middle of May – @mijori23 on Twitter. Sorry for the shameless plug : )
Hey Pete,
Solid post, and certainly poignant for brands and businesses of all sizes. One thing to note is that Best Buy has been very intentional about their reward structure for employee support performed “off the clock” via the Twelpforce program. They are asked to connect their Twitter handle to a tracking system that presumably allows them to be compensated somehow. See here: https://bbyconnect.appspot.com/connect/signup/
Knowing the BBY team’s transparent culture they’d probably show you the whole system if you asked.
Another variable in this equation is the effect of empowerment on culture. If teams feel a part of something that has clear purpose and understand how their role contributes, there seems to be a normalizing affect that, beside improving productivity, might also deter litigation. Hourly workers contribute their skills outside of their on the clock lives regularly without bringing lawsuits. I’d suggest that it’s the job of employers in socially calibrated organizations to think differently about reward systems in a way that moves from the current punch in/punch out to empowered collaboration and service (Hivemind), and eventually – hopefully – to greater value creation (Dynamic Signal?) that benefits all involved – not least the customer.