Serendipity may work in romantic comedies, but it doesn’t often work in the business world. Sure, serendipity can occasionally hand you a million-dollar idea and make you wildly successful, but it’s a notoriously unreliable business plan. More often, business success is the result of preparation and perspiration — as someone famous once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
But that doesn’t mean there’s no place for serendipity — it can be a powerful force for innovation assuming your communications system encourages it.
Don’t leave serendipity to chance.
How? By increasing the likelihood of the connections that lead to serendipity with Enterprise Social Networking. Regardless of the size of your organization, effective communications and knowledge management is critical to all facets of your business. That’s why we’re giving you “5 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs An Enterprise Social Network.”
1.) Awareness
When I look across the office at people sitting fifteen feet away, I have no idea what they’re doing or how I could be helping. What are the critical next steps on their specific projects? What documents/files have they spent hours looking for? Are they creating a customer presentation that I already created last month?
Simple ignorance and isolation prevent people from making critical connections. Think how many “water-cooler moments” end with a breakthrough. Would you have guessed that Michelle used to work for a potential new customer? That Mike has a background in image editing? Or that Nipun has experience working in Europe?! This is all important information that colleagues should know and shouldn’t be left to chance.
2.) Emergence
When it comes to deciding whether or not you need an enterprise social network, the size of your company isn’t the issue — the real issue is the speed of your company. If you’re active in the Twittersphere, then you know how fast information flies — within seconds of a post, everyone knows and, more importantly, can act on new information. It’s this time-advantage that your company and your workforce gets with an enterprise social network. And, as a smaller, more agile organization, you can react more quickly than larger competitors, capitalizing on the ESN’s continual stream of emerging information.
3.) Tribal Knowledge
ESNs help companies retain the who, what, why and how of business decisions, the detailed information that often gets lost even in small organizations. If the reasons you made a decision aren’t apparent in the final product, presentation, or marketing plan, the learning will likely disappear. Social software captures the knowledge and, even better, makes it accessible after the fact. At a small company, preserving knowledge is even more important because when employees leave the company, they take a much larger percentage of the company’s knowledge with them. And the employees who replace them waste company resources and time re-inventing the wheel.
4.) Culture
If you’re like a lot of small companies, you make do with an ‘ad hoc’ approach to collaboration — a little email, a little text messaging, and maybe a few sticky notes. But, as we learned above, that “method” doesn’t really increase employee awareness, help identify emerging trends, or retain any tribal knowledge. Without a cohesive way to collect, share and organize new information, your employees are collaborating in silos, different systems that isolated from — and therefore, invisible to — the rest of your organization. What happens when the same problems or questions come up months later? It’s a never-ending loop.
5.) Mobile Workforce
For the last few decades, work has been slowly moving outside of the typical office walls. Telecommuting is on the rise, and a global workforce is now common. Employees need to have access to internal systems wherever they go because that’s where a lot of work is now getting done. Unreliable email systems and rogue applications just don’t do the trick anymore. With an ESN, employees always have access to everything — the company’s files, tools, expertise, and history. And apps for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones give employees all of it anywhere, even in remote locations. A social platform moves your company, connectivity, and collaboration away from the boundaries of the physical world, and into the future.
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