Social ( we are talking internal social here) has broken down the many barriers that appeared in companies.
Now you can look at your internal social networks and see who is contributing. We use Slack to run the business and it's very clear to me, as CEO, who is contributing and who isn't.
The beauty of social means that employees in different countries, geographies and even teams can collaborate in an open manner. This is breaking down the walls of bureaucracy. Social is empowering, email is a time suck.
Social is also answering the hard questions of the day:
How do we increase the experience of new starters?
How do we get employees and salespeople contributing quicker?
How do we support the returners?
How do we increase the current sales process?
How do we get sales and marketing (in fact any department) working together?
How do we strip out cost from a business, while increasing the employee experience?
Or put it another way, how do we increase a company's efficiency and effectiveness?
How do we become the employee of choice?
How do we get access to our fair share of the talent?
If you have the challenge of any of these issues then you need to look at social.
Internal social has shown that you get a 25% employee efficiency increase, that in itself should give you the business and the launch pad.
How do we sell more?
How do we cut the time of the sales cycle?
All of the other answers to questions, should also give you a business case.
It has always fascinated me to see how most companies are still managed in the exact same way as a century ago. To understand why, let’s rewind for some decades - to about 1900 - and zoom in on the theories of Max Weber, who was one of the biggest champions of bureaucracy. Had there been “I heart bureaucracy” t-shirts around back then, he would have worn them every day. According to Weber, bureaucracy was superior to any other organizational form as it was the most effective, stable and reliable of them all. This was of course in the wake of the industrials revolution, when we needed an operating system to help us manage large groups of unskilled workers. And bureaucracy proved to be amazingly efficient at the latter. Today, … not so much.
