Think back to your first few weeks on the job. What were your challenges? Did you find it difficult to define the company culture?

Companies typically onboard in one of two ways: either they have a very formalized, rigid structure or it’s the exact opposite with no real process at all. When there is no formal onboarding program, new employees must find the information and resources they need on their own. They have little support to transition into their new roles which leaves them feeling lost, increasing the time it takes to reach productivity. Not to mention, you don’t want your employees to feel alone and unsure of their roles, or those new hires might start looking for new jobs. You don’t want a new employee having second thoughts after the first week, especially when it could have easily been prevented with better onboarding.

The formal onboarding process provides a lot of policy, but not a lot of job specific knowledge. You’ve probably been through this type of onboarding before: you sit through orientation sessions with dozens of other new hires, try not to fall asleep during the lengthy PowerPoint presentations, and worst of all, any relevant information is lost because the sessions aren’t documented. The free lunch you get is nice, but it really won’t help you understand the company or your role better.

Onboarding should be much more than just orientation. The goal is to introduce new employees to the company, culture, and their specific jobs so they can start contributing as soon as possible. A great way to onboard new employees is with social. Research shows that 80% of learning happens in an unstructured environment, like conversations with coworkers. If you want your employees to learn about their roles, the company, and the organization’s culture, who better to learn from than their new colleagues? Using social makes this learning possible and makes onboarding a natural and simple process.

A good onboarding process does more than just welcome employees. Research by the Aberdeen Group shows that businesses with a standard onboarding practice had 54% greater new hire productivity and 50% greater retention of new employees. Not only is employee retention important for company culture, but a study by the Center for American Progress shows that it saves companies thousands of dollars. On average, for an employee earning under $50,000 a year, the cost of finding a replacement is about 20% of that employee’s salary, and that percentage increases for more senior level hires. Now, those are just the results for having a standard onboarding practice…imagine what the results would be for a great onboarding process. Social is a smart way to facilitate onboarding and save money for your business.

From the first day on the job, new employees can use social to get to know their coworkers and the company culture, find answers to questions, and access necessary resources. Their onboarding tasks can be automated and streamlined so they don’t feel overwhelmed by paperwork. New employees easily become actively involved in the organization and understand company specific business processes. These social features give new employees the boost needed to achieve faster time to productivity and increase the likelihood of retention.

Social onboarding is a win-win situation for companies and employees. New hires feel instantly connected to their colleagues and organization and have easy access to important documents. In return, businesses have more productive workers who are likely to stay with the company for a long time. So lose your traditional thoughts about onboarding and look for a social solution.

If you’d like to learn more about how a social solution can improve onboarding, contact one of our experts.

For many people, the idea of going a day without social interaction is unimaginable. You greet the mailman as you head off to work, catch up with friends later in the day, and share your stories from the day with your family when you return home. These daily communications are not just habit; we need this human interaction to live.

Now, in between greeting the mailman and catching up with friends, you go to work. Just because you’re going to work doesn’t mean you should cut off all social interactions. Not only is it unnatural to limit communication, it hinders your employees’ ability to get work done if they’re in departmental silos, with no visibility into what other teams are doing.

A social solution is a simple and effective way to help employees work together, but getting employees to jump on the bandwagon can be challenging. For users to consider a technology solution as a must have item, it has to easily integrate into business processes and help them work better. Social interaction is such a central part of people’s lives that having a secure social platform within the workplace is becoming a necessity. Employees want to communicate with their coworkers, be able to find experts within the organization, and work with their colleagues to get projects done faster and better.

While communication and collaboration can enrich people’s personal lives, these functions are crucial in the workplace. The sales, marketing, and product teams must communicate easily and work together consistently in order to deliver a great product to customers. If employees are siloed off into their own departments, they can’t share necessary information and the product and company suffer. Social helps employees knock down those barriers between departments so they can work together easily and efficiently. Using social to work with coworkers is also more engaging than discussing projects via email. They aren’t simply passing ideas and updates back and forth; they’re collaborating and learning from one another in real-time, which drives engagement. Employees who are engaged in their work will not only be more satisfied with their jobs, but more productive, leading to more productivity company-wide.

When a technology solution, like social, can drive engagement and productivity in an organization, and easily integrates into the current business processes, it becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

Whether it’s your first day at a new job, or you’re a ten year company veteran, you’re bound to run into a question you don’t know how to answer. Maybe you’re a new employee inquiring about the best lunch spots. Or maybe you’d like to know the status of a project in another department. You have a question, but can’t see through the cubicles to find the best person to answer. Rather than raising your hand and hoping someone notices, knock down those cubicles, and use social to find the answer.

According to a 2012 study by the McKinsey Global Institute, today’s knowledge worker spends 28% of work time on email management and 19% finding the information required to complete work tasks. If you have a question and don’t know who to ask, emailing that question to a group of people might seem logical. However, each person who asks questions this way contributes to this email increase across the organization. Use social to reduce your search time and prevent your coworkers’ inboxes from overflowing.

With social, you leverage your coworkers’ experience and knowledge. Here’s how you ask a question and receive answers with social: You signal your question to a group of employees or the whole company, and the relevant experts offer their best answers and different perspectives. The whole company can see the question and answer process, but only the knowledge holders will come forward and assist. You can also take advantage of workspaces and groups related to a specific team or product. Search tags within those workspaces and find relevant documents to increase your speed to information.

Social makes it easy to find answers, while saving search time and without needing to identify who can answer the question. Also, if your coworkers have the same question, they can follow the discussion and receive the answer. So the next time you have a question, whether it’s where the new café is located, or what the status of a project is, leverage your bright colleagues and let them share their expertise.

To find out more about how social can help find answers to questions, contact one of our experts.

Imagine this scenario: an executive at your company has decided to roll out a new technology to the entire organization; say, an expense reporting system. As a business leader, you’re responsible for implementing this change in your department and helping your employees adjust. The decision may be out of your hands, but it’s your responsibility to ensure your team’s adoption of this technology, and you’ve been given a hard date that it’ll be launched. Your team is wondering how this will impact their work and they’re looking to you for answers. It’s a difficult position to be in, and while it’s natural to be a little worried or scared, you have to lead your employees to overcome their fear of change to embrace the new system. So, how do you do this?

When you have planned adjustments to enhance your business processes, you can minimize your employees’ fear with some proactive steps. Researchers have found that the most common fears about workplace change are caused by a fear of the unknown and a lack of information. These both point back to the idea of not understanding the situation and what the future holds for the company and employee roles.

Communication is one of the keys to effectively introducing something new into the workplace. If your company is implementing a new technology solution, you want to understand why they’re making that choice. Change just for the sake of change is pointless. You have an established work flow and don’t want something that will disrupt that process. The technology should enhance your business process, not make it more difficult. You want to understand how this solution will help you and your employees work better. You want to understand the impact it will have so you can plan ahead and not have to be reactive. Talk to the decision-makers about the technology solution and determine exactly what will change so you can prepare your employees.

When Jamie Roush, Crime Analysis Unit Manager at the Jacksonville Florida Sheriff’s Office, decided she wanted to implement a social solution that would eventually be available agency-wide, she strayed away from the top down method of change management that often happens within law enforcement agencies. When Roush decided to implement a social solution, she made the officers and detectives an integral part of the change. She showed officers the technology, highlighted the benefits it offered them, and provided full access. Once some of the officers started using social, Roush made Socialtext their central knowledge portal and its use became a part of the officers’ daily work flow. By explaining the reasons and benefits of the technology, and then allowing employees to play a critical role in making the change, the Sherriff’s Office was able to make a necessary switch to social, which achieved the desired result of increased communication and collaboration.

If the mere mention of the word change makes your employees break a sweat, don’t worry; it’s a very common fear and you can help them get past it. Figure out why your employees are scared and then make strides toward calming those nerves. If they’re worried about how their roles will be altered or their business processes will shift, talk with the decision-makers. Be proactive so you have time to prepare your employees for these changes and can show them how the new technology will augment their existing work flow.

Meet Michael Larsen, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at Socialtext. For Michael, software testing isn’t just his job, it’s a lifelong passion. So, when he was asked to contribute a chapter to a book entitled, How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testers, along with other passionate software testers, he readily agreed. He then faced the question: how do you write a book when you have authors from all over the world,who need to collaborate in real-time?                                                                                                                            

The authors knew that they needed a space where they could write, edit, and review the chapters, as well as keep track of their progress, so they decided to use Socialtext. Authors didn’t need any formal training to participate; they were encouraged to join the wiki and learn as they went. What ended up happening was that the entire book, from the initial author contract agreements, to the final review by the publisher, was completed on Socialtext.

Getting the authors to jump in and start contributing to the wiki was fairly easy. “Software testers rely on social media, like Twitter, to communicate with testers all over the world, almost like a 24/7 peer conference,” said Michael. The contributors were already familiar with the concept of using social media tools for business purposes, so they were eager to work with Socialtext.

Each author was tasked to write one chapter, and then review two other chapters. Using the wiki enabled this process to happen easily, as authors could post their chapter, review, edit, and offer suggestions on others’ work, and then review their own work based on feedback from fellow authors. Despite geographical distance and time zone differences, this process happened seamlessly and in real-time. The entire project was managed on Socialtext as well, with a frequently updated schedule, list of milestones to reach, and tasks still to be completed.

So, when Michael first interviewed at Socialtext, he was asked what he knew about Socialtext. “I’ve actually been using it for years, and even helped write a book by using Socialtext.” Now he adds his long-term Socialtext experience, and passion for software testing to help improve the Socialtext platform.

If you’d like to read more about Michael and his experience with Socialtext, click here to read his new employee blog post and here to see his software testing blog.

When a project requires more agility and more expertise than usual, the manager often builds a cross-functional team. However, because of the corporate environment setup, managers tend to know only their direct reports, and fellow managers. So, when it’s time to build a cross-functional team, how does the project’s manager know which other employees will be most useful in the specific project? Simple answer: they don’t.

The typical team creation process looks like this: the project’s manager will ask fellow managers which of their team members are available to assist on the project, and then the fellow managers will offer a certain percentage of the available employees’ time. Not only can this take a couple of weeks to put together, but it leads to a more significant problem: you have a team built around availability rather than expertise.

This problem has been rolling around in my head. Sometimes, you just want a quick conversation between a few subject matter experts, and you don’t want to waste two weeks bringing the team together, especially when you might end up with whoever is available, not necessarily the experts.

This led me to the idea of what I like to call micro-teams. Essentially, you reach out directly to the subject matter experts and collaborate immediately, either for a quick five minute conversation, or as a starting point for a long-term project. In order to find the experts, and avoid the problem of only seeking out team members you know personally, you can use social.

By using social, you can search for experts yourself, by looking through profile information. You can also send out a signal across teams, and allow those passionate experts to identify themselves. Either way, you avoid the barrier of interacting with managers to reach their team members. This direct access speeds up the team formation and leads to a higher level of expertise.

Don’t think about a team as a permanent unit. Think about it as a micro-team: a group of experts that come together quickly through social, to reach answers more efficiently.

To find out more about how social builds better teams, contact one of our experts.

Since my recent blog post on Marissa Mayer’s decision to stop working from home at Yahoo I learned something that really astonished me: Credible sources are reporting that Mayer made the decision after looking at Yahoo’s VPN logs.

VPN logs? Seriously?

The whole thing seems so…1990s.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) access is a really crude measurement of activity. In the 1990s, when remote employees were just working on email and static websites, it made sense. But the world has come a long way since then. Today’s collaboration tools track and analyze activity down to a highly granular level: Who’s saying what to whom, who’s lurking, who’s contributing, what’s being read, who’s checking in code when, who’s visiting which clients. All of that matters a great deal more than who’s logged into the VPN.

Speaking of the VPN, let’s talk about that for a moment.

If the reports are accurate, Yahoo views VPN access as an indicator of who is collaborating, who is showing up (remotely) for work. That suggests that Yahoo’s senior leadership expects (and maybe even requires) all collaboration to happen inside the Yahoo network.

All collaboration happens inside the Yahoo network? Again, so 1990s.

I’ve used VPN’s. They’re annoying. They’re slow. Lose connectivity even for a moment and you have to log in again.

My experience with innovative companies–especially in the tech industry–is that a great deal of collaboration happens outside the corporate network. Where in Yahoo’s equation are cloud-hosted collaboration tools like Yammer, Skype, or Socialtext? Where are Salesforce and LinkedIn? Where’s GitHub? Heck, last time I checked Yahoo.com lived outside the VPN.

The collaboration industry is evolving much faster than Yahoo’s (or any company’s) internal network will be able to keep up with. Does Yahoo really expect innovation, connectedness, and collaboration to happen inside the VPN?

At Socialtext, we are constantly using collaborative tools not “officially” sanctioned by the company. Some of them stick, some of them don’t. Some are open source, some are built by friends, some are built by us as skunkworks projects, some are even built by competitors. When our staff use those tools, we don’t view it as slacking. We view it as R&D.

If Yahoo were an investment bank or a pharmaceutical company, I might have some sympathy with their position. But they’re operating in a very lightly regulated industry, and technology innovation is supposed to be what’s going to turn them around.

I have a thoroughly unscientific theory that our world views get defined and frozen at a particular moment in time–usually some time that was particularly good, when we feel we were at our peak, our best selves. Once that world view is frozen, it’s very difficult to change.

I went back and looked at the date when Yahoo’s share price hit its all-time high: January 3, 2000.

That was a pretty good year for VPNs, too.

The recent uproar over Yahoo’s about-face on working from home is missing the point.

In her memo to staff, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer describes the move as a matter of communication, collaboration, speed, insight, and quality:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together.”

Quite a bit of research has been done on the relationship between creativity and physical co-location. It does not support Mayer’s position.

Susan Cain’s fascinating book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking” reviews the research done on this very question. Citing research done at U.C. Berkeley in the 1950s and 1960s, Cain argues that the most creative employees tend to be introverts, who prefer to work alone for large periods of time. As she puts it, “Solitude is an important key to productivity.”

Even more interesting for Yahoo’s situation, further studies showed that programmers are particularly productive when left alone. “Top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Cain describes online collaboration–an area in which Yahoo was an early pioneer with its Groups offering–as the sole area in which group-based work yields more creativity than solitary work. “The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs.”

Electronic collaboration, it seems, delivers the best of both worlds: The ability to collaborate with others, combined with the solitude to develop one’s own ideas.

So why is Yahoo turning away from it?

The Huffington Post quotes a number of ex-Yahoos saying that employees have been “milking” the working from home policy.

That’s really the point here.

Mayer is not trying to solve a communication problem, or a collaboration problem, or speed problem, or an insight problem, or a quality problem.

She’s trying to solve a management problem.

Yahoo suffers from too much dead weight, too many people who aren’t producing. By dragging everyone into the office, Mayer hopes to suss out who’s working and who isn’t.

Unfortunately, it won’t work.

Bringing people into the office tells you who’s on the clock and who isn’t. And yes, there’s some value to that. But what Mayer (well actually it’s Mayer’s middle managers) really need to know is who is producing and who isn’t. Who’s hitting their numbers? Who’s delivering quality code? Who’s generating leads? I don’t care how good you are, you can’t tell that by physical inspection.

The only way to solve a management problem is through, well, better management. If Yahoo wants to know who’s producing and who isn’t, then they need to do it the old-fashioned way: define goals, measure outcomes, hold people accountable.

No matter where they sit.

Note: Mark Oehlert is hosting an Enterprise Social Summit Lunch in Sydney Australia on October 24th. Join us down-under and read on to learn why attending may give you that philosophical advantage in your workplace. Click here for more Summit info. 

One of the greatest things about the advent of Web 2.0, social media, Enterprise 2.0, or Social HCM is that it brings to light one common thread – people. Ten plus years ago when e-learning burst onto the scene, it was decidedly not about people, but rather technical specifications, authoring tools and saving money on travel budgets amongst other things.  This focus was not truly about helping employees learn and perform in a better way, with more ease and efficiency.  As it stands, the way businesses use social has not caught up with what today’s social technologies have to offer .

In this sometimes overwhelming world of social, bringing these collaborative technologies into the workplace has never been easier. New coding environments, the capability to run almost everything within a browser and the advent of backend resources like Amazon, combine to make the threshold of market entry extremely low. What then will be the Darwinian imperative that clears out this Cambrian explosion of social software for the enterprise? Simply put, the ones that will survive and prosper will be the ones who understand that at base, what these new technologies offer are ways for people to work together with less friction; to discover previously untapped enterprise resources hidden in invisible networks; and to offer a place for colleagues from across the enterprise to come together and move more rapidly and effectively to accomplish organizational goals.  In other words, let’s help people do their jobs better.

People are the unmistakable core of the social explosion. For organizations to succeed in deploying social solutions inside the enterprise, the issues have to be understood from a people-centric point of view; Not from an IT dominated view or any view that puts technology ahead of understanding dynamics. For instance, if you deploy a system that is unmatched in terms of capabilities but fail to sufficiently train and empower or “permission” your employees to contribute to and participate in such a system, then it will never realize its full ROI. It’s about people. It’s about confronting issues at an organizational level like “trust,” “fear” and “control.” The technology is awesome. The potential is dizzying. The core to a winning, enterprise-wide social strategy is understanding people, their workflow, their networks and turning them loose with tools that can transform their organization.