[경영]직장 내 소셜 미디어가 생산성을 창출하지 않을 때

Innovation Strategy

When Social Media at Work Don't Create Productivity-Killing Distractions

Posted by: Bernhard Warner on April 01, 2013

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-01/when-social-media-at-work-dont-create-productivity-killing-distractions#r=hp-ls

Workers who are encouraged to tweet, chat, like, and Skype on the job are among the most productive, new academic research says, shooting yet another hole in the managerial argument that social media in the workplace leads to goofing off and slacking on company time.

Far from being a distraction, common social media tools such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and LinkedIn (LNKD), plus Skype (MSFT) to chat, enable employees to answer more customer queries, and more quickly, says Joe Nandhakumar, professor of information systems at the Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom. He and his research team attribute this productivity boost to something Nandhakumar calls the “theory of virtual co-presence”—the ability to collaborate with others over long distances in relatively short, productive sessions to resolve problems or accomplish tasks.

Plenty of surveys and studies have looked at the benefits of granting employees unfettered social media access in the workplace, often focusing on increased collaboration among co-workers and, at the very least, keeping companies digitally savvy enough to compete for young talent. The Warwick Business School study is unique: Over more than two years, it followed the way a company’s policy to encourage social media usage among its employees led to increased customer interaction and, eventually, higher productivity.

Nandhakumar and his team studied a large European telecommunications company that used Skype, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, alongside SAP’s (SAP) enterprise software to communicate with existing and prospective customers on various tasks: pitching products, closing sales, answering customers’ questions. In most cases, the social media-enabled workforce was able to accomplish more sales- and customer-relations-related tasks and did so more quickly, the researchers observed.

Nandhakumar does acknowledge corporate resistance to social media adoption—one of the most common reasons for outlawing, say, Facebook or Twitter from the workplace is concern that the social networks represent potential security breaches and could be vulnerable to hack attacks.

“Ubiquitous digital connectivity should be seen not as an unwelcome interruption but as part of the changing nature of knowledge work itself that needs to become part of normal, everyday practices of contemporary organizations,” Nandhakumar says.

요약

 직장 내에서 소셜 미디어로 이야기를 하거나 일을 하기를 좋아하는 사람들은 일을 하는 데 생산성을 떨어뜨린다고 한다. 소셜 미디어는 동료와 소통을 하는 데 더 빠르고, 고객들의 질문에 더 많이 응답할 수 있게 한다.

 많은 조사와 연구는 더 동료들과 협동심이 증가하고, 적어도 기업 내 젊은 인재들이 충분히 디지털적으로 경쟁을 할 수 있도록 한다고 중점을 둔 소셜 미디어에 대한 규제가 없는 직장의 혜택 여부를 검토하고 있다. Warwick Business School의 연구는 독특하다. 직원들과 소셜 미디어 사용을 권장하는 회사의 정책이 고객들과의 소통이 더 증가하고 결국에는 더 높은 생산성을 장려한다는 것이다. 영국에 있는 Warwick Business School의 교수 Nandhakumar와 그의 팀은 소셜 미디어를 사용하는 큰 유럽의 통신 회사를 연구했는데, 대부분이 더 많은 매출과 더 고객과의 관계와 관련된 일을 하도록 했고, 더 빠르게 진행되도록 했다는 것이다. 소셜 미디어를 규제하는 기업의 이유는 소셜 미디어로 인한 보안 문제에 대한 우려 때문이었다. "유비쿼터스 디지털 연결은 달갑지 않은 연결이 아니라 지식의 변화의 일부로서 현대 조직의 일상적인 관행으로 보여져야 한다."라고 Nandhakumar는 말한다.