A perspective on replacing Enterprise

Emails with Social Media Platform

Enterprise Social Media A Powerful alternative to

flooded mailboxes!!!

Aditya Dashora

© Conceptualized and Published by Aditya Dashora

1

Aditya Dashora, a senior

consultant from Infosys

Limited is an IT

Enthusiast with around 9

years of experience in

delivering many IT

Service Management

consulting projects for

large enterprises across

the globe.

Aditya is quite passionate

about helping CIOs and

CTOs in improving their

IT Strategy to meet the

current and future

demands. Also, he is

instrumental in exploring

and defining new ways of

working for the

organizations by

leveraging technology.

Aditya is based out of

Bangalore, India.

Contact Information:

adydashora@gmail.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/

adityadashora

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

© Conceptualized and Published by Aditya Dashora

2

1 NEED OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN ENTERPRISES

In my recent conversation with one of our customers, an unusual request came up which

triggered a very interesting discussion. Customer wanted us to assess the email culture in their

teams and find out if engineers have to tendency to miss any important emails because of large

number of incoming emails. According to the customer, most of their staff is getting hundreds

of emails every day and obviously not every email is important for everyday work. The fear is,

what if people get into the habit of ignoring emails and miss out something important.

After this discussion, the first thought which came into my mind was: “isn’t it a problem with

every organization?” I think it is. Be it my current organization, previous employers or the

customers I have worked with, I have not only faced this problem, but also ignorantly added to

the problem.

So the question here is, is there a solution to this problem? If yes, than what would it be and

how complicated it is? If no, than what is the best way to ensure that no important emails

remain un-noticed?

A precursor would be “how many of us would see this as a problem?” I am assuming that more

than 50% of us would not see this as a problem. However, since our customer is seeing this as

a problem, than we must have a solution. That’s IT Service Industry for you. Yow know that’s

how it goes!!! Pun Intended!

Alright, so before we get into a possible solution, let’s define and measure the problem. In

order to do that, we need to analyze the kind of emails we receive in a week and categorize

them. There are three high level categories can be defined:

- Category 1 - Actionable Emails

- Category 2 - Work Related Information (CCs etc.)

- Category 3 - General Information/Group Emails

Going further, we need to do some sampling on emails received last few weeks. (The sampling

must be done during the usual work-month not in the holiday season). We need to categorize

each email in one of the defined categories.

I targeted first and last week of a month do the sampling and then did the categorization

exercise. Here are the results:

In a given week, only 30% of the emails I received are Actionable Email. Of the remaining, 40%

(i.e. 30% of the total) are Work Related Information and rest are General Information/Group

Email. I ran this test one more time and observed similar results.

Table 1

Workweeks Category 1 Category 2 Category 3

Week1(month start) 30% 30% 40%

Week2(month end) 35% 35% 30%

Week3(random sample) 28% 25% 47%

Week4(random sample) 36% 40% 24%

Week5(random sample) 20% 45% 35%

© Conceptualized and Published by Aditya Dashora

3

I ran this test with a colleague of mine and found similar results.

On the whole, the results were eye opening. Some of us might not be agreeing with these

numbers and that’s perfectly alright because it depends upon multiple things like nature of

work, job level, team size, organization culture etc. However, we can’t disagree with the fact

that there are lot of emails all of us get on our official email IDs that have nothing to do with

the work.

In the second phase of my study, I tried to analyze the “Category 3” - General Information type

of emails and understand what value they are bringing into my professional life. They only value

I see in those emails is a little distraction which can keep us motivated at times. Some examples

are Announcements, Events, News, Blogs, Notifications and Advertisements etc.

A similar analysis was done on “Category 2” emails that are Work Related Information emails.

Surprisingly, in this category, 50% of the emails are just for my information where no action is

expected from me currently or in future. The other 50% were intended to me so that I can

prepare myself for possible future action.

Based on these studies, I was convinced that something must be done to those non-value adding

email. The natural impulse was to find a way to stop the Category 3 emails and put some

restrictions on Category 2 emails by encouraging people to “not to reply to all”. But when I re-

looked at Category 2& 3 emails from the organizational perspective, I felt that there should be

a place for them. However, I was certain that these emails don’t have a place the pile of all

Category 1 emails.

Then I thought about

LinkedIn & Facebook and

the way we get all kind of

information on this

platforms which is related

to our professional life but

not directly to our job and

I realized that social media

can play a great role in

cleaning up our mailboxes

by providing right place to

all those Category 2 &

Category 3 emails. The

beauty of social media

platforms is that there is

no pile on. When I want to,

I can be actively

contributing and otherwise

I can just be a spectator.

(TV is a lean-back medium,

Internet is a lean-forward medium and social media can be both – Unknown)

How would social media behave in an enterprise? Just imagine a LinkedIn or Facebook like

platform within an organization. Anybody can post an update something s/he wants to share.

Congratulate Aditya for complete XYZ certification.

Aditya will be out of office today due to some personal work.

Please ensure that you complete your appraisals by end of July

Sweets at my desk

Latest version of XYZ proposal is uploaded here <link>. Please review and let us know if any questions

by EOD tomorrow. We will be sharing this proposal with the customer day after tomorrow.

Here is the customer appreciation note for Aditya. Great Job!

Upcoming Weekend Outage details are below. Please post a comment in case of a question.

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Figure 1

© Conceptualized and Published by Aditya Dashora

4

There are groups and access control and therefore s/he can decide the audiences. The

audiences have the luxury to comment on these posts and obtain required clarification. S/he

can “tag” people who are need more frequent updates on posts. Here are some of the examples:

And there can be many more. All of us see these emails in our mailboxes everyday but I strongly

feel that social media platform is the appropriate place for them.

2 HAVE WE FOUND A SOLUTION HERE? WELL LET’S DO A QUICK

ARGUMENT!

By implementing a social media platform like LinkedIn or Facebook on company intranet, we can

eliminate the big pile of Category 2 & 3 emails and convert them into “wall posts” or “updates”. This

approach would not only eliminate the sizable amount of non-value adding data from the servers but

also change our emailing habits.

Counter argument: Lot of organizations have already tried the in-house social media solutions and no

benefits have been seen so far. Only few HR guys use this kind of stuff for some events etc. People are

very comfortable with the emails because it still retains certain degree of responsibility. Social media

on the other hand can make things more casual at work.

Both the arguments are right and certainly there is no best practice available in this space, which brings

us to a very important point here. Social Media is successful only if it is being used extensively. Similarly

to make the social media successful in an enterprise, we need to have a great behavioral change

management strategy. The strategy should consider both top down and bottom up approaches. A top

down approach can be monitoring the mailing patterns, questioning people who are sending bulk emails

to 30+ users at the same time etc. A bottom up approach can be training people, start using social media

for Category 3 updates, do pilot runs etc.

It is needless to say that this kind of change is going to take time. And when I say time, I am not talking

about days or weeks. I am talking about months and years. But I am quite optimistic that this change is

going to survive. The reason is, the younger generation is social media savvy. I did not grow up with

Facebook or LinkedIn. In my school and college days, the term social media did not exist. For us, the

internet was all about mailing, chatting and browsing. On the other side, the younger generation is

growing up with social media. It somehow relates to their way of thinking and dealing with day to day

life. Therefore, having social media-like culture at work would be an easy sail for them.

The real behavioral change would be needed for people of my generation

and seniors (early thirties and beyond). For our generation, social media is

mostly about entertainment and information. We need to upgrade

ourselves and start smart utilization of social media at work. We need to

detach ourselves from the habit of mail trails, reply to all etc. and get into

social media style of workplace.

Finally, I would like to say that social media can play a great role in changing or upgrading our work

culture (especially emailing habits) in positive manner. IT itself is evolving at a very high velocity and

with the new trend of BYOD, an enterprise social media platform has certainly a long way to go.