Four Benefits from Improving Collaboration in Your Organization

By Posted in - Talent Management on October 29th, 2013 1 Comments

Social media’s rise in popularity is largely about collaboration and sharing. These sites, such as Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc, have made it easier to establish and nurture personal and professional networks and maintain visibility to the actions and opinions of others. Social media is now being increasingly applied within organizations to improve collaboration. Yammer is a good example of an enterprise social network. A talent community is also an excellent example of applying enterprise social networks. I discussed how enterprise social networks could be used to broaden collaboration with potential job candidates in a recent blog on talent communities.

Using Social Media to Improve Collaboration and Your Organization

There are significant benefits to using social media features for improving collaboration within an enterprise. Four of the main benefits include:

Benefit Number One – Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is the process by which information, skills, and expertise is exchanged within an organization. With the coming massive departure of baby boomers from organizations, this has become a critical problem. Social media features can facilitate this transfer of knowledge within an organization and lessen the negative impact of losing highly experienced staff.

Benefit Number Two – Innovation

Building on others’ ideas is a short cut to innovation. There is a huge advantage in bringing greater visibility to new or novel ideas within an organization. Others can react to them, shape them, and transform them into powerful game changing initiatives. A talent community is the perfect medium for this innovation of ideas to occur. There are numerous such talent communities on Google+, LinkedIn, and in more niche websites like Yammer as mentioned above. Find one of these talent communities and get involved.

Benefit Number Three – Problem Solving

Action learning is an educational process where individuals collaborate and learn by tackling real world problems. There is no reason why the power of this process should be restricted to development initiatives. Social media allows problems to be shared within one’s network and gather feedback, thoughts, and recommendations. The popularity of threaded discussions in professional groups on the internet provides testimony to the potential for attacking a multitude of organizational issues.

Benefit Number Four – Personal Development

In another recent blog, I introduced a new development concept called development circles. This is an alternative approach to traditional training which uses a social media approach to individual development. The key component of this approach is the introduction of focused personal development capabilities within the enterprise social network. Given the high degree of interest in social media and the potential power of harnessing a social network for personal development support, there is a great opportunity for a developmental offering that would create a social media collaborative learning environment.

Social media concepts and features will soon be common place in mobile enabled enterprise applications. OMNIview plans on leading the way.

Patrick Hauenstein, Ph.D.

About Patrick Hauenstein, Ph.D.

Patrick Hauenstein is the President and Chief Science Officer for OMNIview. During his free time Pat likes to cook. He is particularly fond of traditional southern cuisine. Pat is also an animal lover ...
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