Upon returning to Apple in 1997 after years of exile (or so the story goes), Steve Jobs observed that employees were hunkering down in their offices. Wanting a more free-flowing exchange of knowledge, Jobs ordered urns of coffee and boxes of donuts delivered to Apple’s buildings on Fridays. Employees emerged from their offices to enjoy the caffeine and sugar but, while there, they began talking to other employees with whom they normally wouldn’t exchange a word. The notion is similar to what one CEO told me a few years back: “If you want to know what’s going on in this company, step outside and hang out with the smokers.”

No matter how many organizations struggle to resist it, work is social. (The very definition of the word organization is “a group of people who work together” or “a group of people with one or more shared goals.” Note the emphasis on “a group of people.” In an organization (as anywhere else) knowledge transfers from person to person, not machine to person. Computer networks are most valuable when they facilitate that exchange. And social networks have emerged as the best set of tools for facilitating the person-to-person exchange of knowledge. Why wouldn’t a company want to take advantage of that?

Admitting that he is a “wet blanket,” Roger D’Aprix has written one of his “Inside Out” columns for the Ragan Report offering employee productivity as a key reason for companies to be wary of enterprise social media. D’Aprix is one of the sharpest minds in the internal communications business; in fact, his early thinking on employee communications in the 1960s and 70s has shaped many of the principles employed today. His book, “Communicating for Change,” should be required reading for business leaders and communicators.

His take on internal social media, however, deserves some scrutiny. D’Aprix begins by reminding us that workers already face an ever-worsening information overload problem:

To get some idea of the overload problem???s severity, consider that The Henley College in England has just conducted a study which shows European managers are spending two hours a day dealing with e-mails. The study???s authors calculate that that adds up to a staggering 10 years of a worker???s life! Of that number three and a half years are seen as a complete waste of time since 32 percent of the messages are deemed irrelevant. The cause (which to be fair is obviously out of our control as communication professionals) is that each e-mail message typically spawns four to six additional ones in the user???s inbox.

The problem with lumping social media into the message meltdown issue is that the messages contributing to the overload are pushed at employees. Employees don’t ask for most email they get. But employees will not read blogs, listen to podcasts, or participate in social networks they don’t find valuable; these are all channels that employees pull based on interest and need.

Consider this. In a company of 15,000 employees if just 1 percent of the work force succumbs to the invitation to begin a personal blog, the productivity and cost consequences are huge.

D’Aprix applies the same math to employee blogging that organizations like Websense and Challenger, Gray & Christmas use when making the case for blocking employee access to external content: 1,500 minutes equals 25 hours of productivity at $100 per hour, totaling $2,500 in production costs. The time invested by the 30% of the workforce that reads one blog for five minutes comes to 22,500 minutes, totaling 375 hours of reading time per post, or $37,500 per blog in lost productivity. “Now multiply that number by the number of blogs that attract large readerships.” It’s the same kind of calculation that led to the belief that Facebook is costing Australian businesses $5 billion in lost productivity.

As I noted on Monday, such calculations fly in the face of evidence that worker productivity in the U.S. is on the rise and is the best in the world. D’Aprix admits that his calculations don’t account for a number of factors:

• “Not everyone can be productive every minute of the day. The actual productivity per worker is probably closer to 60 percent of his or her working day. So lost productivity is inevitable anyway.”
• “Not every worker represents $100 an hour in company costs.”
• “Some of those 150 blogs could well be part of a valuable information exchange that might even lead to a productivity gain.”

Despite these factors, however, D’Aprix remains unconvinced:

But who can tell which ones are valuable and which ones are a waste of time without inspecting them? So the productivity losses still add up. The pro-bloggers will hate it, but maybe we need some good gate keeping to filter out the inevitable junk.

D’Aprix misses some critical points in his call to “give careful thought before you succumb to the hype and recommend any activity that adds to an already maddening overload problem.” At the risk of repeating myself (since this is a hot-button issue for me), let’s undertake a quick review:

• Employees who blog on the intranet do so primarily about work. They are codifying their thoughts and efforts, often as a means of creating a record for their own reference.
• Employees will read blogs they find worthwhile and ignore those they don’t. Ditto podcasts. Ditto social network profiles and groups.
• Companies that implement RSS make it easier for employees to manage most of the content they consume, helping them focus their attention on what’s important and ignore what’s not. Using an RSS news reader, employees can subscribe to all manner of content, from policy updates posted to the intranet to company news releases to internal blogs to external web sites, all of which can be scanned and consumed in one compact place.
• Even if an internal blog doesn’t provide immediate benefit to a reader, it does create knowledge touch points in the organization that never would have existed before. It may be two years before Mary realizes that the author of the internal blog she’s been reading has the skills required to kick-start a stalled project.
• Even though Tim may not benefit directly by reading Jennifer’s internal blog, he could leave a comment to a post that helps Jennifer (or any of her other readers) solve a problem or do their jobs better.
• Trusting employees with internal blogging increases job satisfaction, trust, and engagement. It also becomes a recruiting tool.
• Most employees will not risk their jobs to do anything non-work-related, whether that’s blogging, web surfing, or working crossword puzzles. The measure of productivity is whether work is getting done, not the minutes spent on non-work activities. Consider how much work you do when you’re not in the office (at home, on the road, on vacation). Where does that factor into these calculations?
• Employee blogs also create a permanent record of employee knowledge that remains in the organization after they leave.
• Clearly communicated and enforced policies can address most of the problems internal blogging might create. As for employees who are bound and determined to waste time, they’ll waste time with or without computers and should be managed by exception.

Ultimately, though—as the leaders of companies like Siemens USA have suggested—anything that gets employees to share knowledge with one another is a good thing; the benefits far outweigh the risks. Instead of back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’d like to see real evidence that internal blogging is costing a company in terms of sales, innovation, product (or service) introduction, time-to-market, the ability to attract and retain employees, market share or any of the other factors that keep executives awake at night. That’s evidence I’m just not seeing. Instead, I have found only reports of how these networks have increased organizational nimbleness and competitiveness.

Here is just a small sampling from some informed resources on blogging in the enterprise:

• InfoWorld: Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis
• Change & Internal Communications post from Hill & Knowlton’s David Ferrabee
• Types of internal blogs by George Athannassov
• Blogging at IBM
• When they leave, what goes with them?, addressing employee blogs as institutional memory
• Internal blogs: Where to start, from HP’s Stan Garfield
• Enterprise RSS use cases proliferate

Please contribute your own links and your thoughts and experiences. The sooner we can move beyond the superficial objections to internal social media, the sooner organizations can begin reaping the benefits of a culture in which knowledge flows freely from employee to employee.