Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights

The caller to today’s live episode of “For Immediate Release” (via BlogTalk Radio) was something of a revelation. Evidently, there are those who believe the counsel I and other communication consultants give to organizations about the adoption of social media is based on a fundamental belief in an employees’ right to do whatever they want.

Not so.

Like our caller, I believe that company management has the right to impose whatever rules on employees it believes are in the company’s best interests (within the limits of employment law and other relevant regulations). The workplace is not a democracy. I also believe that companies should make decisions based on their best interests, which ultimately should accrue to the owners of the business (investors, for the most part, including those retirees whose pensions are tied up in funds managed by large financial institutions).

My job—since I became an organizational communicator in the mid-1970s and continuing through today—is counseling organizations on communication practices that will enhance their bottom lines. In short, I represent my clients. I am not an employee advocate.

However…

The leadership of organizations frequently want to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the organization. That is why companies employ counselors, either internally or externally. Lawyers counsel on legal issues. Public relations practitioners provide counsel on matters of reputation. Companies do business only with the consent of their constituents. If they lose that consent, constituents can create obstacles ranging from legislation and regulation to strikes and boycotts.

Public relations is the practice of managing an organization’s relationships with those constituents. Companies pay communicators in order to help them figure out the best way to do that. Sometimes companies take that advice, sometimes they don’t.

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention—Deloitte is frequently named the best company at which to begin your career. Deloitte is also the company that hosted an employee film festival, in which employees submitted creative videos articulating the company’s values and culture. The best of these are now on YouTube. Deloitte has engaged in social media in a variety of other ways, which in part accounts for the company’s ability to choose from the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, Clive Holtham, a professor at the Cass Business School, notes some California firms “are finding they cannot attract or retain staff because their IT infrastructure fails to meet the demanding standards of the new generation,” according to an article in Data Storage Today. Let’s face it: If employers in the don’t want to pay for the lion’s share of employee medical coverage. They do, however, because without it, they wouldn’t be able to attract the talent they need to implement their strategies.
  
• Employee engagement—Companies with populations of mostly actively engaged employees tend to outperform those with populations of mainly disengaged employees. Engagement flows from a number of factors, but it won’t flow at all without trust. Once employees are engaged, they produce discretionary effort on behalf of their employers.
  
• Increased customer satisfaction—It’s not impossible to make the case that companies can succeed even when customers believe customer service is terrible. However, terrible customer service also leads to damaged reputations, and statistical research by Charles Fonbrum has correlated a decline in reputation with a decline in value. I suppose one can take either side of this issue, but I’ll come down on the side of maintaining a strong reputation. My experience with employees who have reached out to me as a customer reinforces that the company’s reputation benefits from such dialogue. Thus, empowering employees to represent the cmopany—whether it’s online or in the real world—adds value to the company.
  
• Improved brand experiences—A company does not own its brand; the brand is the reaction people have when seeing the company’s mark or hearing its name. That reaction is based on all of the various brand experiences they have. Online, these experiences are occurring on the company’s website with less frequency. As more and more content is consumer-generated (consider the amount of time spent on YouTube alone), these edge encounters increasingly are shaping the brand. Employees who are prepared and motivated to create a positive brand experience on blogs, social networks, and other Web 2.0 properties will serve the company’s bottom line.

There’s probably a whole book in this topic, but I just wanted to get the main point out there: Sure, a company can impose rules against employee engagement in social media and still succeed; look at Apple, for example. People may still want to work there even if they cannot engage in social media. The pay, the experience, the benefits all may carry greater weight than the ability to talk about work on a blog.

In general, though, based on dramatic shifts in culture, society, business and communication, most organizations will be well-served to integrate social media into their communication models. That’s the counsel I provide, along with the strategies for getting there. Ultimately, it’s still all about the company’s best interests.