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Corporate Culture And The Internal Office Communications Clash

This article is more than 9 years old.

A lot has been made of organizations aiming to reduce silos, encourage collaboration and communication among employees, and move towards a flat structure. Two technology trends make this all possible.

  • Unified Communications and instant messaging systems such as Microsoft Lync 2013, now show us when everyone is online so we may connect instantly for a chat or even video.
  • Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) such as Jive, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter and others, allow us to work collaboratively and more efficiently. They owe their popularity in large part to the goal of flattening the organization. Implemented as an alternative to intranets, spend on ESNs is on the up – from $4.77 billion this year to an estimated $8.14 billion in 2019.

But there is a dark side to corporate transparency. Adoption is a well-known challenge for firms. Organizations are struggling to convince employees that they should log on, blog, comment, post and get involved on collaboration tools.

The solution? As with all things, senior leadership needs to lead the way in order to encourage adoption. However, I have been surprised to learn that just the opposite is happening.

Rather than break down silos, some firms seek to “block” employees from contacting senior executives. For example, they may wish to prevent the “field” from seeing when senior executives are online, or want to allow a senior executive to initiate a conversation with the “field,” not the reverse.

After all, senior management may not want to open the floodgates of communications and to be instantly available to all employees all the time. And more traditional middle managers may loath the concept of direct reports bypassing the “chain of command” to communicate directly with senior management.

In response to these concerns, some organizations are looking into technology traditionally used to create virtual “ethical walls” that block one group of employees from speaking to another. This type of separation is not new. For example, “ethical walls” are required by FINRA, the financial services regulator, between traders and research analysts because the nature of their work could be a conflict of interest for the firm, and this needs to be properly managed.

It is not too much of a stretch for organizations to use this same technology to prevent employees from contacting senior execs. This has implications for the deployment of these collaboration tools and unified communications such as instant messaging. Organizations need to examine just how connected they really want to be and how they can implement these tools in a way that suits the culture of the firm both now and as it evolves. As new communications systems are rolled out, clear cut policies and training will be required.

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Joanna is a social media expert and recently submitted a panel on this topic to potentially appear at South By Southwest (SXSW).