The Cowork­er Network

Leonar­di saw that com­pa­nies, big and small, were start­ing to imple­ment ​“enter­prise social media”— inter­nal tools sim­i­lar in func­tion­al­i­ty to Face­book and Twit­ter that make com­mu­ni­ca­tions between employ­ees more trans­par­ent. Unless you were copied on an email between two employ­ees, says Leonar­di, ​“you nev­er knew that they were send­ing mes­sages to each oth­er. It wasn’t that that infor­ma­tion didn’t exist, but it was invis­i­ble to most peo­ple in the organization.”

A Pas­sive Men­tal Direc­to­ry

Leonar­di learned that a major cred­it card com­pa­ny was about to imple­ment an enter­prise social net­work­ing tool called A-Life. The com­pa­ny want­ed their 15,000 employ­ees to have a bet­ter sense of who their col­leagues were, and what they were doing, in order to reduce inef­fi­cien­cies. After all, if an employ­ee cre­ates a report, only to dis­cov­er that some­one else has already done so, or gains a new skill set that already exists in anoth­er part of the com­pa­ny, this is not the best use of resources.

So Leonar­di per­suad­ed the com­pa­ny to allow him to per­form a qua­si-nat­ur­al field exper­i­ment to test the effec­tive­ness of the social net­work­ing tool. Leonar­di decid­ed to com­pare two demo­graph­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar groups with­in the com­pa­ny: a group in mar­ket­ing and a group in oper­a­tions. Before the tool’s imple­men­ta­tion, the groups were asked ques­tions about both whom and what their col­leagues knew. ​“The ratio­nale for ask­ing those two kinds of ques­tions is that know­ing who knows what is real­ly impor­tant, but in many cas­es, even if we know who knows what, we can’t get to that per­son direct­ly,” says Leonar­di. This is why know­ing who can pass the right infor­ma­tion along to the right peo­ple is also crucial.

Then one of the groups — the mar­ket­ing group — was giv­en access to the soft­ware. For six months, this group con­duct­ed a good deal of its rou­tine com­mu­ni­ca­tion through the site instead of through email or in-per­son inter­ac­tions. Leonar­di won­dered: Would the mar­ket­ing group — with their abil­i­ty to see all of these com­mu­ni­ca­tions occur­ring between their cowork­ers — build a pas­sive men­tal direc­to­ry of who knew what and whom?

A Major Pay­off

Indeed, as pre­dict­ed, after six months those who had used the enter­prise social net­work­ing site had improved their abil­i­ty to find infor­ma­tion by 31% — and to find peo­ple who knew the per­son with infor­ma­tion by 71%. This improve­ment occurred despite the fact that employ­ees sent, on aver­age, just one mes­sage on the site per week. The size of the improve­ment came as a sur­prise to Leonar­di, but he points out that the base­line was woe­ful­ly low. ​“That 71% real­ly… means that peo­ple are just get­ting up to speed,” he says.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Leonar­di did not find that use of the social net­work­ing tool dif­fered based on someone’s role in the orga­ni­za­tion. Instead, he found that use dif­fered by age: younger employ­ees across the com­pa­ny were gen­er­al­ly more skep­ti­cal of the tool. ​“So many young peo­ple use social media tools” — like Face­book and Twit­ter — ​“in their lives dai­ly,” and those tools are real­ly for social, non-work-relat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion, says Leonar­di. This, he believes, made it hard­er for younger employ­ees to embrace social tech­nol­o­gy in the work­place. ​“They would say, ​‘Oh, I don’t want to be post­ing things my boss would see.’ … On the oth­er hand, the senior employ­ees didn’t have that same con­cern. For them, the tech­nol­o­gy was anoth­er mode for com­mu­ni­cat­ing about work-relat­ed matters.”

Tools that con­nect peo­ple and knowl­edge in the work­place are not, of course, rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Any inter­ac­tion between two employ­ees can poten­tial­ly be seen or over­heard by oth­ers, says Leonar­di. But we can only sit across from, or direct­ly report to, a lim­it­ed num­ber of peo­ple. A social net­work­ing tool takes these for­tu­itous encoun­ters and makes them both wide reach­ing and routine.