Will Employees ever Be Excited about Using Social Media in the Workplace?

I have mixed feelings about using social media in the workplace. Partly, because I haven’t seen it successfully implemented in our learning programs at work. Most recently, I attempted to use our internal enterprise social networking site, Chatter to engage senior female leaders. We have quarterly leadership events and we thought Chatter would be a great vehicle to reinforce the learning concepts from the event. To engage the leaders, I posted materials from the event, questions and polls but, in hindsight, I really didn’t have an overarching strategy. And, I received low to no responses from my target audience. Unfortunately, at our company, the senior leaders are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive and respond to, and Chatter is seen as just another task to add to their To Do list.

As Dennen’s article, “Social Media and Instructional Design” describes, I need to find a way to minimize the technostress associated with using the tool and integrate it into their workflow. I enjoyed reading about how social media can be incorporated into three types of learning events that we would do at work: lectures, guest lectures and readings to increase the interaction between learners. I could use Chatter as a backchannel during the live leadership event and share stories and resources with other leaders who could not attend. It’s a great vehicle for engaging with others and hearing other opinions outside of the classroom. I believe having the participants use Chatter during the training event will get them more acclimated to using it so that post-event, they will be more likely to use it. But, as the article purports, it’s important to have the tool support specific learning objectives, which means we will need to decide the purpose of Chatter when designing the learning events. This is still a work in progress.

I believe it will depend on a company’s employees and how familiar they are with social media outside of the workplace. Will employees who use social media in their personal lives be more drawn to using social media in the workplace? I believe that our younger employees may find it easier to use our enterprise tools, but our older leaders may be hesitant. And, if they aren’t using it in their personal lives, how do we entice them to use it in a corporate setting. I’m still grappling with these questions and will attempt to use a more structured approach in the future. And, hopefully, I’ll get to experience a working example soon. Have you used Chatter in the workplace or other social media tools?

Learn more about Chatter here: https://www.salesforce.com/products/chatter/overview/

Reference:

Dennen, V. P. (in press). Social media and instructional design. In R. A. Reiser & J.

     V. Dempsey (Eds.) Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Pearson.