It’s commonly known that you can often get the best information from your informal networks. “Water cooler gossip” is more than just a cliché. Most people get a lot of good information through those informal chats with teammates in the kitchen or hallways, exchanging ideas about current projects, sharing news across departments, and just experiencing camaraderie among colleagues. This informal connection to others can be crucial to your success at your company, both strategically and politically.
But the organizational structures at most companies today don’t always revolve around a team of employees working in the same office. Many work teams are now composed primarily of people who may have never met face to face. For geographically dispersed work teams like these, web-based collaboration tools such as social networking are quickly becoming the new water cooler.
Kate, Ravi, Nadine, and Donovan, for example, are all product managers recently assigned to create business requirements for a new global compensation product that their company, a large software firm, plans to introduce to the market during their next release. Kate and Donovan met briefly at a conference a few years ago, but neither has met Ravi or Nadine, and none of them have worked together before.
Fortunately, their company just implemented a new internal social network to supplement the basic collaborative features available on its existing intranet. The new system takes its current collaboration tools a step further, offering employees the ability to create detailed profiles and blogs, provide commentary on each other’s work and ideas, share bookmarks of useful web content, collaborate using common work areas, and integrate their new environment with their existing email and instant messaging tools.
Kate, located at the company headquarters in Seattle, knows the IT project manager responsible for implementing the new social network and thinks this tool will greatly facilitate her work with Bangalore-based Ravi, Nadine in Paris, and Sydneysider Donovan. They’re scheduled to have a kick-off conference call at 11 PM Pacific time the following week, but doing all their collaboration during ill-timed conference calls will soon take a toll, Kate feels, particularly with a project estimated to last several months. She sends an email to her new colleagues to suggest using the new social network as their primary collaboration tool. All respond favorably by the next day, so Kate sets up a secure project area for them to store common work documents, as well as a blog for them to post ideas about the project and provide commentary.
Donovan is eager to use the social network to make it easier to work with his new global team. He starts by reviewing the profiles of his fellow product managers. He hates to admit it, but he doesn’t remember Kate from that conference in Boston several years ago. But when he looks at her profile photo, he suddenly recalls the American woman with the long, dark hair whom he met at a customer presentation. With the detailed background data the profiles provide, Donovan feels like he’s beginning to get to know his new team. He adds some posts to the blog about the brainstorming sessions they held locally in Sydney and awaits his colleagues’ replies.
Ravi is new to the company and is eager to develop rapport with his teammates. As the youngest and least experienced member of the team, he’s also eager to validate his contributions. He replies to Donavon’s blog posts with commentary of his own and shares some of his favorite articles and content on the latest trends in global compensation through shared bookmarks and uploaded content. He also starts a side conversation with Donovan, an industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience, who mentors Ravi on how the industry works and the best ways to succeed.
As their work progresses, the team discovers that they need information from their peers in other countries, as well as other compensation experts throughout the company. Previously, they would have handled this the old-fashioned way: calling varied contacts until they finally found the people who had the answers they needed. But with the detailed profiles that the new social networking system offers, Nadine is able to do a search for the key contacts who have the knowledge they’re looking for. In addition to obvious resources, such as people who are currently involved with compensation at the company, she finds employees who have relevant previous experience that wouldn’t be obvious based on their current positions. Some of these contacts turn out to have the most useful information, and Nadine invites several to participate in their online community, further benefiting from the wider pool of resources that the new internal social network offers. The team is soon making much faster progress than they ever imagined.
Scenarios like these are frequent occurrences in companies that offer their staffers internal social networking tools. If your company has an internal social network, the key to making the most of this tool is quite simple—use it. As with any social network, it’s easy to set up a profile and then do nothing. Instead, take the time to learn about the features that your company’s network has to offer, and think out of the box in terms of how it can make your life easier and more productive. In today’s increasingly global workplace, extending your network beyond your local colleagues isn’t just a good idea; it can be a critical factor in your future success.