Social networking at the office: are public sites the way to go? Or does your enterprise need more control?

HR Magazine, March, 2008 by Bill Roberts

It was only a matter of time before social networking came to pass, Lukach says. The company embraces other Web 2.0 tools--including executive podcasts to workers--with the goal of making employees more productive, more collaborative and happier. One day, Lukach looked at Facebook and noticed there were nearly 3,000 Siemens workers on it who identify themselves as Siemens employees. The number has since risen to nearly 6,000.

Siemens neither promotes nor objects to employees using Facebook as an informal social network for the company. "We have considered proprietary social networking software," Lukach says. "I would prefer a Facebook-like capability inside the firewall, and so would IT. But so far, it has not been a high priority."

The company allows use of Facebook as an informal network, but not without some oversight. "We're close to putting the finishing touches on social network users' guidelines," Lukach says. "We already have them for internal blogs."

The number of workers using Face-book is a tiny fraction of Siemens' 470,000 employees in 190 countries, including nearly 70,000 in the United States. When Lukach studied which Siemens workers use Facebook, he found that most were not in North America or Europe proper but in more distant locales such as Scandinavia, Turkey and the Middle East. Lukach has no explanation.

Making the Leap

Serena's CEO Burton has no doubts about the value of social networking. "A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done," he says. "Companies that do not embrace social networking are making a huge mistake."

Social networking is useful, but most companies are not ready to follow Serena, says Nova Newcomer, president of Blue Hill Solutions LLC, an enterprise communications and Web 2.0 consulting company in Portland, Ore. "If you look at the corporate environment, there is a lot of fear--and for good reasons--about proprietary information getting out if they use public sites. Using Face-book would be a huge leap for a lot of large companies. For most, the way to go is behind the firewall."

The desire to use public tools usually does not come from HR professionals but from elsewhere in the company, Newcomer says. She leads workshops for corporate communications experts, who tend to be highly enthusiastic about Web 2.0 tools. Although a personal fan of these tools, Newcomer tempers enthusiasm among workshop attendees by urging them to "get real" about their organizational cultures.

As Newcomer sees them, corporate cultures range from autocratic to anarchic. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what end of the spectrum would relish Facebook. "If you put forth something that is a big stretch for the culture, then you can have headaches and growing pains," she says. Hence, Newcomer says HR professionals have vital roles to play in determining the kind of tools a company might be ready for. "The caution belongs in HR," she says. "They know a lot of the legal and cultural hitches."