Bringing these two ideas together — engagement and control — we can envisage four scenarios that describe modes of communications and collaboration in organisations (see Figure 1). These scenarios might help us think about the challenges which HR faces and possible strategic choices over communications and collaboration.
Scenario 1: — Traditional Face-to-Face Communications and Collaboration
This scenario represents the typical, existing face-to-face system of collaboration and communications, the latter of which is typically conducted through the formal collective bargaining system. Union representation provides the main medium for employee voice, and knowledge management and collaboration continues to be viewed as a 'contested terrain'. Knowledge and skills are seen as issues to be bargained over since knowledge is power and not something to be readily given up by employees, who seek to capitalise on their often tacit knowledge and skills.
In this scenario, the challenges to both managers and union representatives are that:
- New generations of employees begin to use Web 2.0 technologies as a means of expressing their own, often negative, voice, as unions are seen by an increasing number of workers to be less relevant in expressing their interests
- Employees do not engage in much formal or informal collaboration and knowledge sharing with one another since their tacit knowledge and skills are their main source of power to enhance their careers at work.
Managers view employees' use of these technologies in a largely negative light, often attempting to proscribe their use at work, or else ignore them as a means of finding out what employees think and want to discuss.
Such a scenario may be typical of many organisations in traditional manufacturing and service industries, and in certain parts of the public sector with high levels of manual and basic administrative grades.
Scenario 2: — Modern Face-to-Face Communications and Collaboration
This represents a modern, consultative system in which communications take place through working parties, joint consultation and regular attempts to tap into employee voice through attitude surveys and the like. Collaboration and knowledge management are typically based on face-to-face team working, project teams and traditional employer-centred knowledge management systems, which attempt to capture knowledge, store it and disseminate it in a top-down fashion.
Such a scenario is probably typical of most organisations in the UK in many of the knowledge-intensive and creative sectors of the economy, including 'professional bureaucracies' such as healthcare, education and professional services, in defence, the prison and police services, and in industries such as financial services. It is often the case that data protection in these organisations is a sensitive issue, as are concerns over protecting brand identities and the desire to exercise a duty of care.
HR's role in this scenario remains focused on policing, rather than encouraging, the innovative and experimental use of Web 2.0 social media. Thus, it is no surprise that the majority of his blogger respondents coming from these sectors.
Scenario 3: — Laissez Faire Web 2.0
This represents a relatively anarchic situation in which some organisations may find themselves in the not-too-distant future. Organisations may begin in scenarios 1 and 2 but come to resemble a more decentralised system of informal bottom-up communications and knowledge sharing as more and more people, especially members of the V-generation, become employees. Much communication becomes virtual, in which knowledge sharing and employees voice their concerns outside of formal employer-controlled media, especially in locations geographically and functionally distant from head office among remote workers and among higher educated and paid networked workers.
It is this scenario that seems to worry a number of HR professionals in those organisations represented by scenario 2. As we have noted it is the lack of organisational control over Web 2.0 and the ease with which employees can engage with various applications which causes many organisations and HR professionals to worry about these social media, with some organisations placing outright bans on their use at work or substantially restricting the ability of employees to access them at work. Time-wasting at work and the potential for organisational misbehaviour by disenchanted employees has dominated the HR agenda over Web 2.0.
The Government Communications Network's (2007) review of social media is particularly relevant here. Drawing on questionnaires to government departments and interviews with specialists in the field, it found a number of barriers to a more widespread adoption of Web 2.0 among various departments, even though as we have noted, government ministers have begun using these techniques to communicate and engage users in dialogue. These barriers were:
- a lack of understanding and expertise among civil servants, especially higher level ones;
- following on from this lack of understanding, a lack of high level support for wider use;
- lack of data and uncertainties about the costs and benefits of various media;
- the risk of public exposure, damage to customer and employer brands and general loss of control;
- the limitations placed on Web 2.0 by IT departments that did not want to damage the integrity of their systems.
Underlying such concerns were the very features that make Web 2.0 attractive to organisations and employees. These were its openness, the ease of use for employees and users to engage with Web 2.0 technologies (spontaneity, conversational and democratic), its new rules of engagement and the different behaviours required by civil servants and its newness and experimental nature.
Scenario 4: Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is recognition that social media technologies are fast becoming a fact of life among the higher educated and paid networked workers and new generations of employees — see Box 1. This scenario is one where organisations are driven by the V-generation or by the need to secure the collaboration and voice of increasingly geographically dispersed workers, often in other countries, working from home or who rarely visit head office locations. Organisations attempt to regain control by developing the technologies of Web 2.0 inside of their firewalls and encouraging or facilitating employees to make use of these technologies.
Box 1: Defining enterprise 2.0
McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 'as the use of emergent social software platforms within companies and their partners or customers'. He uses the term 'social software' to describe how 'people meet, connect and collaborate through computer mediated communication and form online communities'. Platforms are defined as 'digital environments in which contributions and interactions are widely visible and persistent over time'. Emergent means the software is freeform, in the sense that people can choose to use it or not, is egalitarian and can accept different forms of data. He rules out (a) open Web-based platforms, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, because they are widely available to individuals, (b) corporate Internets because they are not emergent and (c) traditional email and SMS because they are not persistent.
According to Andrew McAfee from Harvard University, who is usually credited with coining the term 'Enterprise 2.0' in 2006, this route is probably the most promising way forward for organisations seeking the benefits of Web 2.0 but wishing to minimise the downside.
Figure 1 shows a potential trend away from the very open Web 2.0 towards Enterprise 2.0. The diagram also hints at the potential trend away from traditional media used to give employees a say in decisions, such as face-to-face representation in consultative committees, focus groups and online surveys towards Enterprise 2.0 read—write media. Just as the Web has allowed the so-called power law to operate in firms such as Amazon by allowing them to cater to the long tail of profitable customers comprising only 20% of its total sales, so organisations can now reach out to the long tail employees. These comprise previously marginalised or disengaged groups who were not economically possible to reach or who rejected the normal consultation process through union representation and organisationally determined (and often meaningless to them) questionnaires.
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