The Walk

Saturday, Dec. 19 was "The Walk" at the Stan Sheriff Center. It was a joyous occasion with everybody in good spirits. Virginia Pressler, MD gave a justly upbeat commencement address noting her varied path to her final career as a surgeon and now CEO of Hawaii Pacific Health. She overcame many obstacles, mainly gender discrimination, without complaint or bitterness.
Similarly, Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw urged us not to take ourselves too seriously, to take risks and to have fun along the way. I previously only read things from her in email or news releases. She sounded much more personable and interesting in person.
It was both humbling and an honor to stand with such a talented group of PhD candidates and to sit with the faculty after the hooding. I skipped my masters commencement but I'm glad that I did not skip this one. Also good excuse to get the family together.

Waste of Time?

Thanks to socialmedia@smartbrief.com for the link to Forbes' story on social media as wasting billions in the UK.
The survey they cite mentions 40 minutes per week per employee on personal social networking. Unfortunately the benefits are not so easy to quantify and may exceed the costs.
The helpful point in the story is about the need for social guidelines at companies rather than bans. I would recommend a step further and say the policy should be one of appropriate encouragement of social media use at work.

P.S. Dissertation all done. To be posted soon.

Social Media Use and Employee Engagement?

Revisions done and out to the committee, day job back under control. It's time to catch up on the literature while awaiting advice on the final adjustments.
Interesting article in BusinessWeek on the importance of employee engagement. We know employees who produce significantly less than others. Not necessarily bad employees but ones that are not working up to to their potentials. Of course our job in management -- at any level -- is to get our people more engaged, more productive.
Take a look at this posting by Krisztina Holly and Jim Clifton.
It's not just about productivity, innovation is a key output to engagement. Engaged employees contribute ideas and encourage others. It makes sense that social media can help build engagement if management empowers them.

Social Media Correlates of Organizational Climate

The dissertation was defended successfully today! My sincere thanks to the committee and the Univ. of Hawaii Communication and Information Sciences Program. I'll be posting a few findings here and of course the search is on for a traditional journal publication.
Here is a sample: Those who use social media at work tend to be more trusting of top management. This is correlation not causality.
BTW -- anything posted here can be used by others as long as it is attributed.

Facebook the clear winner at work

(Click to enlarge)



Here's a tidbit from my research on organizational climate and social media use. Facebook is the clear winner at work over other social media sites. Does much better than the more business-oriented LinkedIn. I suspect that ease of use, huge membership and zero cost are the reasons. For many businesses Facebook is quite adequate for enhancing the external network of its people.
The data from my sample out of the Syracuse University Study Response pool. Selected were people in the U.S., 18 or over, and employed at least half time.

Sun's Blog Rules

Another interest story from Ragan was the interview with Terry "tMac" McKenzie, senior director of employee communications at Sun. Sun is of course a leader in employee blogging starting with the COO, Jonathan Schwartz and the well-known policy. A couple of topics in the interview struck me as particularly interesting.
Terry summarized the policy as
1. Be interesting -- including be controversial but responsible.
2. Don't be stupid. Follow SEC rules, don't slander, etc. (Is that like "Don't be evil"?)
3. If you don't follow #2, you are on your own if you get sued.
"We are all about sharing and open systems," she said.
In the same e-newsletter, Ragan offers a three hour social media boot camp. If you think that is audacious or on the other hand, too long, just watch the interview with Terry that covers a lot of the ground in just a few minutes.
Another part of the interview dealt with the disappointment and posts related to Sun's not making a best places to work ranking. Many of these rankings depend on an employee survey, a subject of research interest with me so I will follow up. Maybe Sun has some of its own surveys beyond the proprietary one used for the best places ranking. The best places survey is known to have a significant trust component.
BTW, I learned from Vida Killian -- Thank you! -- that Dell does not have such surveys with respect to social media impact.

An Example of a Great Site

Thanks to Lindsey Miller of Ragan Communications for the story on the employee blog at Children's Health Care of Atlanta. The site is called Strong Enough to Care Enough. It's got to be tough dealing with often very sick children.
They spent a modest sum to set it up well and then have realistic costs going forward. Yes, it could have been done for less but employee time is valuable too.
Congratulations!

Still need more data

I've been busy analyzing my social media and organizational climate data. I can use more since the "3-10-87%" participation rule -- or an approximation thereto -- still applies.
I've updated the link at the right. I'm debating donating a dollar to the Red Cross for each complete response. It's not compensation for your time but collectively -- a thousand completed questionnaires would be good -- the donation would be meaningful. What do you think?
The Society for New Communication Research (SNCR) is running its Tribalization of Business study. Looks interesting. See 2008 results and link to 2009 study at their website.

Organizational Climate and Social Media Use

Over to the right is a link to a recent version of my survey on social media use and organizational climate. The organizational climate measures are very similar to those that I have used before. That's of course because they have been validated by prior research that I build on.
What's new is the adaptation of the Groundswell social media use questions with some additions of my own. The Groundswell questions are from prior research but their scaling, etc. is proprietary; my scaling and research will be put in the public domain.
A compact valid and reliable measurement tool for social media use is one of biggest needs in this line of study. For example, there are some very good multi-dimensional trust scales that researchers would recognize. Disparate media use measures are a problem. It is hard to compare studies if the measures are different.
Feel free to take the survey and link to it. If you would like a customized version for your firm I would be delighted help by it a win-win proposition; you get the data and reports you need -- I'll do them for you at no cost -- and I get de-identified data. Both the individuals and firms remain anonymous.
Let me know what you think.

IBM Serious about Social Media & Corporate Culture

Luis Suarez had a recent post about meeting with IBM customers concerning corporate culture and social media. That is, uses of the media beyond utilitarian purposes. Of course that's my hypothesis about an ROI for social capital that's an amplifier of productivity.
I thought about some recent flaming email I saw recently -- yes it still goes on, amazingly -- and speculated that the author would have written differently on a wiki related to the project. In addition to the productivity gain of a wiki, greater civility would result.
An indication of how serious IBM is about social media is that they have 500 or so "ambassador" talking about their products.

CSCW '08 & SNCR

Two big social media (broadly construed) events happen this past week. The first was the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in San Diego. I feel a little guilty for not being there but with dissertation behind schedule and the proceedings available on line, I'll try for next year. I was struck by the large presence of IBM researchers in the largely academic crowd. That's a good thing and shows how serious IBM is about social media and basic research. It also gives a clue as to the diversity and breadth of their research program. The Social Networking at Work and School session looked particularly relevant to my interests and I look forward to getting beyond the abstracts.
If you don't already have access to the publications of the ACM a good place to go would be your local university library.

With more of a practical focus on social media, the Society for New Communication Research presented its Visionary of the Year award to Charlene Li (present in cardboard) and Josh Bernoff for Groundswell. That book, as Josh noted in his acceptance speech, is of high quality because it is based on research. The social media participation scales they created may become a standard after some validation in academic research. IBM had some wins at SNCR but nothing on the scale of CSCW '08.

Surveys and Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is what we got this week with the election of Barack Obama. To quote one of my favorite articles on the subject, “Transformational leaders exhibit charismatic behaviors, arouse inspirational motivation, provide intellectual stimulation, and treat followers with individualized consideration.” (Dvir et al.2002, 735). That’s a report on a leadership experiment. Today I want to comment on Ryan Williams’ excellent review paper and recommend it.

We can’t expect individualized consideration from the president but we can expect it along with other transformation leadership qualities within our companies. Because I believe the evidence that such leadership makes for a more enjoyable and productive workplace, I was grateful to receive last week Ryan Williams’ (2007) paper “Achieving Leadership Results through Employee Surveys.” Ryan is president of twisurveys Inc. (www.twisurveys.com). The paper is based on his masters thesis on servant leadership, a variant of transformational leadership. It gives an overview of the history of employee surveys, leadership theory and the practicalities of developing valid surveys.

There is little doubt that effective communications with employees improve the organizational climate and that normally improves performance of the firm. Surveys are part of the listening that transformational leaders must do. Communication assessments, including surveys, are themselves a form of communication that change whatever is being measured. This truth of social science is one to be understood and exploited. The essence of Ryan’s paper is that regular employee surveys are one of several assessment tools that measure whether leaders are perceived as transformational, etc. The questions on the survey say to employees, “This is what we are concerned about.”

Of course as Ryan points out, management must act, must change, when the surveys bring back data that is actionable. That may be a challenge for managers or transactional leaders.

The implications of transformational leadership are profound because the beneficial consequences flow to the followers who become motivated to take initiative, smart risk, and perform beyond expectations. Both leaders and followers must change and take responsibility. President-elect Obama made the point clearly Tuesday night. I should also note eloquence of Senator McCain’s concession speech that night too in which he transitioned to follower.

Twisurveys’ work puts Ryan in a good position to gather data to evaluate his four hypotheses:

• H1. Transformational leaders listen to followers.
• H2. Survey research enhances organizational unity.
• H3. Organizational survey processes can share transformational leadership attributes
• H4. Organizational surveys can enhance transformational leadership.

The point being that surveys extend the listening reach of transformational leaders in large organizations beyond what is possible face to face.

I originally came across Ryan’s work because of his podcast interview with Shel Holtz. They were confirming the validity of a research theme I have been pursuing since late 2005 from a slightly different perspective: Social media within the firm promote desirable attitudes and behaviors, particularly trust and information sharing.

Social media inside the firewall are low-cost tools as are surveys. We may see social media as “qualitative research” to be used to focus surveys for more systematic “quantitative research.” A blog or wiki may post a theme that should be tested for its true degree of concern within employees across the firm.

Customers, existing or potential, of twisurveys should feel confident about their work as it is based on generally accepted theory and good practices of execution. They can check out the theoretical and the methodological support papers. With Ryan’s permission I post it here.

Dvir, Taly, Dov, Eden, Avolio, Bruce J. and Shamir, Boas. (2002) The impact of transformational leadership on follow development and performance: a field experiment. Academy of Management Journal. 45(4), 735-744.

Williams, Ryan (2007) Achieving Leadership Results through Employee Surveys. Delta, BC, Canada: twisurveys.

Saddened by the passsing of Madelyn Dunham

Life is not always fair. In a matter of hours I will go a few blocks to cast my (optical scan, please) ballot at Central Union Church. I will first look across Beretania St. to where Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or "Toots" as he called her, lived until only yesterday. It is where a likely president lived with her and his grandfather when he went to high school just up Punahou St. Win or lose regardless of party, everybody was hoping that she would hang on at least until the outcome is known.
I note the gracious comments of Senator John McCain and everybody else observing this unfortunate development. Hopefully she will be buried with her husband at the beautiful Punchbowl, the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

IBM Announces Center for Social Software

I'm grateful for people pointing me to IBM's September 17th announcement of its Center for Social Software. The research program looks very exciting. Read more here.

Their goals are to

• Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.
• Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry profile.
• Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia, industry and venture capital participation.
• Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery, social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.
• Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses of social networking in organizations.
• Develop the science of social software: Quantifying social networking.
• Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.

They will offer internships and corporate residencies as well. I did not hesitate to subscribe to their feed, and as they invited, "stay tuned."

Sir Tim sees need for web trust rating system

Who do you trust on the web?

Warning sounded on web's future

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Some feared firing up the LHC would doom the Earth

The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web.

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation.

Sir Tim spoke prior to the unveiling of a Foundation he has co-created that aims to make the web truly worldwide.

It will also look at ways to help people decide if sites are trustworthy and reliable sources of information.

Read the article.

Giving up on email -- a nod to Luis Suarez

After some weeks of vacation in Majuro fixing up the house and working part time over the Internet (at 46.2 kbs), I have been playing catch-up in Honolulu. The catch up is both for research and day-job matters.
In the latter I continue to remind people that if there is something important, phone me rather than email. By default, I have given up on much email with 2,900+ unread. Many more have been read. The ones that do get read are from collaborators who probably could be persuaded to use a wiki if they had a good one, and of course the ones that involve daily crises. Those really could use a good wiki too because one of the biggest problems is determining the precise details about what has been done and in what order.
Not surprisingly the winners in the Computerworld 100 Best Places to Work in IT (June 30/July 7 issue) tend to feature cultures that foster collaboration. See http://blogs.computerworld.com/tennant
With that note, I head back to the commentators listed to the right. I greatly appreciate the time that they take to share their ideas.

Therapeutic Value of Blogging

Searching on blog* in the Web of Science always turns up lots of articles on blogging in the medical field both for research groups and for support groups. There are blogs and writing about them in other fields of science as well but its pretty clear that blogging has contributed significantly to medical collaboration.
In the June 2008 Scientific American Jessica Wapner wrote about a line of research on the benefits of blogging for cancer patients. These may include feeling better and better sleep. Blogging is a form of expressive writing and more social than bedside journals. The social aspects and forming of communities appear to have therapeutic value.
The source journal articles and the researchers can be tracked down from the SciAm article.

HR Advocacy via Communication

Satish Kumar pointed out in a recent post that HR could and should be the advocate of employees as well as just serve the executives. Beyond processing documents (virtual or real), he recommends expanded roles:
"Fostering effective methods of goal setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility, builds employee ownership of the organization. The HR professional helps establish the organizational culture and climate in which people have the competency, concern and commitment to serve customers well."
It strikes me that social media are excellent low-cost methods to help HR become the "employee advocate" as well as the "change champion." Support of social media sends a message (McLuhan would agree I think) that HR is not just a rule enforcer. Think of a blog / wiki as a continuously running employee survey.

Building Trust

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share knowledge and add to social capital. Improved organizational climate fosters better productivity. There is plenty of evidence to support that claim.

These are the main references to trust that I found:

Geoffrey Corb at Johns Hopkins: “We have found that people involved in our projects are more well informed than ever before. Trust has strengthened between project participants and stakeholders since our operations are more transparent than ever before.”(Mader, 2008, p. 39)

“Wikis shift the social balance away from control and closer to trust.”(p. 49)

“Closed systems implicitly assume that people can’t be trusted and technology has to be relied on to control access to information. This encourages an organizational culture where people don’t trust each other and are concerned with maintaining control over information access. . . .

“Fundamentally open tools such as the wiki encourage just the opposite. Their design assumes that people can be trusted with the information they have access to, and will use it responsibly to further shared goals. This encourages a culture where people do trust each other, and involve others in their work to build the best possible end product in less time and with less unnecessary back and forth effort. . . .”(pp. 50-51)

“A wiki thrives on active participation by as many people as possible, and in turn brings greater value to each individual user. It relied on transparency, trust, and willingness to share information more openly, work more collaboratively, and see information as more valuable when more people have access to it.”(p. 121)

I believe the benefits claimed for wikis and my research needs a few (anonymous) firms where I may add some social media use questions to employee surveys to test my hypothesis on the subject of trust.

Reference

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Gas at $4/gal.: Time for TheBus

No danger yet of not getting a seat starting at about 6:15 a.m. Bused to work putting the bicycle in the rack (on the front of all the buses in Honolulu) and then bicycled home after work
Got an excuse to read some of another neglected book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Michael Banks. Details soon.