Internal Social Network: Why It Boosts Your Teams' Efficiency

[This article is an extract from our White Paper "The internal social network at the heart of collaboration" >>> access the full White Paper (FREE)]

The rise of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Telegram, …) and their massive adoption by individuals has transformed the way we work — including collaborative practices in the workplace! The ability to interact with colleagues, share information and documents within a team or project group — in real time or asynchronously — is no longer optional: it's a necessity, and it's made possible with an internal social network.

And your employees want more: they want greater collaboration to gain efficiency and comfort at work. They want to be able to gather in communities (by profession, by interest, …), connect with the entire company ecosystem (including external parties: clients, suppliers or partners), and have permanent opportunities for interaction. All of this, through high-performing digital solutions that make their lives easier.

The explosion of collaborative tools

In less than a decade, collaborative tools have proliferated: some created specifically for the professional world, others originally personal tools that gradually found their way into professional use. Often, the average user (especially non-geeks) struggles to navigate the range of options available.

Indeed, the market for collaborative software has never been more abundant. On the shelf, you'll find: forums, wikis, cloud storage, video conferencing, group messaging and ChatOps, note and task management tools, livestreaming, chatbots, social features within business applications and, of course, the internal social network or enterprise social network (ESN).

To this list, let's not forget email — not the newest kid on the block, but still to this day the most widely used tool for collaboration in the workplace. Yet, despite appearances, it was never designed for that purpose…

The limits of email

Born in the mid-1960s within the walls of MIT, email was designed to send messages between computers: it was a communication tool through and through. Its use grew rapidly with the arrival of the Arpanet network (1969), then exploded with the invention of the Internet in the early 1990s, both in personal and professional spheres.

Clearly unsuited to collaboration, email nonetheless became a central tool in organisations very quickly — out of habit, with colleagues and managers convinced they were saving time. Yet in collaborative settings — that is, as the Littré puts it, "working with one or more people on a shared endeavour" — its limitations become glaring. In particular: the lack of cumulative knowledge, the fragmentation of information (depending on whether you were in the To, CC or BCC field), difficulty organising, finding and consolidating information, the inefficiency of iterative exchanges, and so on.

The following story perfectly illustrates the limits of email in a collaborative context. At T., a major automotive supplier, a team leader in the IT department responsible for mobile app development decides to run a poll to name a newly developed feature. He sends… an email to his 6 team members. Within a week, around thirty emails are exchanged, including three "recap" messages. You read that right: 30 emails sent by 6 people! The example is symptomatic of how hard it is to break old habits. Had they used the "poll" feature in their ESN, each person would only have needed to respond once for a decision to be made. And completely transparently!

The central challenge: converging collaborative tools

Among the many tools available (see list above), the enterprise social network stands out for its unique ability to cover both a wide range of use cases and to connect the organisation to its entire ecosystem. Internal and external stakeholders alike can be connected to it. In addition to this hub role, the ESN offers increasingly powerful integration capabilities — for example, connectivity with office productivity tools and shared storage spaces. This connectivity has become the standard that allows the ESN to enable users to collaborate on shared documents.

The major innovation of recent years, popularised by ChatOps, is the ability to connect easily with other components of the information system: these are the ESN's "integrations" with business applications. The ESN then energises and extends a business process, enabling organisations to improve the quality and speed of decision-making. The social platform thus handles simple processes, making employees more agile and responsive.

Today, one of the key questions raised by the rise of ChatOps and collaborative spaces built around group messaging is: what role should the enterprise social network play? Schneider Electric has clarified the distinction: the former (ChatOps) host project groups and small teams (up to a few dozen people), while the enterprise social platform hosts communities of practice and interest, which bring together a much wider audience.

Read: The 12 best enterprise social networks

Also discover: The best team communication platforms

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This article is an extract from our White Paper "The ESN at the heart of collaboration". It covers all the challenges related to internal communication, knowledge sharing, collaborative practices, and provides concrete guidance on how to collaborate more effectively with enterprise social networks. Read the full version (FREE):

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