Continuing on the theme of social media, this article, ‘Why ALL bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace’ which appeared in the Mail Online last Wednesday, neatly sums up why innovation is actually a dying craft in British industry.
Written by one of Britain’s prominent entrepreneurs, Dragon’s Den judge Theo Paphitis, the article rails against Facebook as a time waster in the workplace. He argues that while ‘the internet has created dramatic new opportunities in everything from marketing to distribution’, it has a downside: namely, an explosion in online activity which has resulted in ‘an orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism’ which ‘has polluted the air with meaningless babble and egomaniacal drivel’. This impulse, exercised through social media like Facebook, or Twitter, wastes work time and should be, in the opinion of this entrepreneurial dragon, ‘best kept to free time at home’. ‘In the end’, he says ‘businesses and public services cannot survive if staff prefer to be socialising online rather than doing the job for which they are paid’.
ARBITRARY SELF-INDULGENCE
Theo Paphitis certainly knows what he is talking about. As a regular on
Dragons Den he ought to to be intimately familiar with today’s ‘orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism’. And yes, it is certainly true that the Internet, like any technologically-based innovation, can be used for good and bad. A scalpel can be used by a surgeon to save a life and by murderer to take a life. The problem with his argument, besides its self-serving indulgence, is the arbitrary way in which he draws the line between what is positive or negative about the Internet and social media. If time wasting was the real issue, surely he would also advocate the banning of mobile phones from his workplace? Not only excessively one-sided and arbitrary, he is missing a much bigger issue which represents an opportunity, not a threat, for business and public services alike.
The behaviour alluded to by Theo Paphitis certainly exists. And yes, it does in many instances represent ‘babble and egomaniacal drivel’. But the evolution of social media is in its infancy. The technology is actually unimportant. It is the behaviours underlining its development which are (which I alluded to in my last piece). These are driven by social experience, rather than the technology. Understanding them is the first step towards seeing how they could be embraced in innovative and creative ways.
THE ELEVATION OF THE SUPERFICIAL
The need for self-expression and acknowledgment are expressions of a generation who have had to resort to the virtual world to experience the art of growing up in the increasingly claustrophobic world of adult risk aversion and fear. The Facebook’s and MySpaces of this world emerged because of this; they are an expression of this culture, not its creators – a point universally misunderstood. As a result, new social practices have begun to emerge across all demographics which are increasingly online and participatory. Based upon peer to peer communication, new practices of sharing and filtering have emerged where the network of communications has become as important as the content being communicated.
It is these behaviours and practices that need to be more fully understood and researched rather than dismissed as silly and time wasting, as Theo Paphitis does. We are at the beginning of this process, not its end. The adoption of social media in the workplace could be a huge opportunity for business and the public sector. Used innovatively they could help to enable greater collaboration, more efficient use of resources, cut down the time duplicating effort, enable the capturing of tacit knowledge and provide tools for easily sharing information at the point of need, rather than being locked away in an Intranet which no-one uses.
Far from banning Facebook from the workplace, innovative business leaders should be looking to introduce ‘Facebook’-like applications that can tap these new behaviours to create a more collaborative and efficient workplace. This is the the space that has become known as ‘Enterprise2.0′ – the introduction of social media tools and applications into the workplace.
By denying staff access to social networking sites, there is always the risk of driving employees to find a way around the ban. Not only does this potentially open up great holes in corporate defenses, it would waste even more employee time and effort. (The same things has been observed with children and the Internet – parental controls have only pushed ‘digital kids’ to work around barriers and have helped to develop, to some extent, their technical skills). The innovative thing to do is to stand back from the superficial prejudices of the day, understand what is driving these behaviours, and work creatively to embrace it. Open-Knowledge Ltd, a company I have been working with in Italy and the UK is doing precisely that.
Theo Paphitis may be an entrepreneur but he is clearly no innovator. In this regard he is a shining expression of the absence of an innovative culture in British business.
Filed under: Innovation, Entreprise2.0, social media
