From the Anointed Few to the Collective Many
By Dave Wilkins

How workplace communities will transform your business.

For more than a decade, the world of business information systems has experienced significant change. From accounting and inventory management to sales and human resources, technology has streamlined, automated, and simplified nearly aspect of the business information landscape. What has not changed significantly, however, is the nature of human interactions in business – email, conference calls, and presentations by experts to non-experts are still the dominant means of interaction. With the exception of WebEx-style virtual meetings (and possibly instant messaging), this model has remained fundamentally unchanged.

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, however, the Internet has morphed from a presentation medium to an interactive platform in just a few years. According to data from Technorati, a leading web analysis site, the blogosphere now features 70 million blogs and is growing by 120,000 blogs per day, or 1.4 blogs per second. In addition, there are roughly 17 new blog posts created per second, for a total of 1.5 million new posts per day. As of September 2006, Wikipedia boasted 1.7 million pages and over 150,000 authors.

The IBM Institute for Business Value study “The End of Advertising as We Know It” reports that more than 50 percent of Americans aged 20-30 years old use Facebook (based on an analysis of Facebook ad data and U.S. census information), and among Americans under the age of 35, social networking and user-generated content sites have overtaken TV as a primary media. But this is not just a young person’s medium: According to Comscore, another web analysis site, “Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.”

It’s clear that change is upon us. Through a combination of technological evolution and a continuing cultural shift toward individual empowerment, the web has become a platform that now enables and relies on the empowerment of the individual, the collective wisdom or intelligence of the crowd, the ability to create and foster social connections online, and the ability of everyday consumers to become producers of content. We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift where individuals are indeed connecting “in ways and at levels that [they] haven’t done before” either implicitly, through vast data mining frameworks like Google’s Page Rank, or explicitly, through social networks and communities.

Workplace communities are just one example of how businesses are beginning to see the real value of this shift. Not surprisingly, workplace communities are designed to solve workplace-related challenges, such as attracting and retaining talent, employee development, performance and growth, and alumni and retiree engagement. Community and social networking technologies such as blogs, wikis, and message boards—all of which provide different frameworks for user-generated content—help facilitate conversations, communication, and transparency, enabling connections between people and information, both within and outside of the organization. These captured connections and conversations ensure not only greater business performance, tighter relationships, and better overall alignment, but business intelligence as well.

One of the most significant areas of focus that workplace communities impact is talent management. In recent years, talent management has come to represent the full lifecycle of an employee’s tenure with a company, including formal processes such as compensation and performance appraisals. But at its most basic level, talent management is about finding, developing, and retaining key talent within the organization. And some companies are already applying workplace community technologies to address these critical business needs.

Ernst & Young, for instance, has a significant presence on Facebook in support of its recruiting efforts. This site features employee-generated videos that provide an authentic picture of what it’s like to work for them. As a Facebook site, it also enables conversations between possible recruits and existing employees. Google, Home Depot, Enterprise Rent a Car, and Deloitte also are recruiting using Web 2.0 tools through YouTube videos and even alumni social networks. Dow Chemical is about to launch a workplace community designed “to address workforce planning issues in a tight labor market, with a focus on retirees, alumni and diversity.” Kevin Small, leader of Dow's Global Resource Management Center, had this to say about Dow’s commitment to community and social networking: “If companies keep social networks out, they will be doing a significant disservice to their bottom lines. This is a natural progression, especially with the generation that's entering the workforce—connectivity and connection to the company are primary drivers for them when accepting a job.”

In the next 10-15 years, talent management will continue to be a significant area of focus for businesses, particularly as the Baby Boomer generation retires. Between 2000 and 2020, 75 million Boomers will reach retirement age. Generation X, with only 45 million workers, lacks the sheer numbers to make up the gap. While these numbers are daunting, the percentages are actually much worse in most other developed countries, particularly in Europe, where over 43 percent of the population will be 65 or older by 2030. For global organizations, therefore, this demographic shift and its impacts will be felt globally, not just in the United States.

Given these issues, companies that want to create or maintain competitive advantage must begin implementing long-term strategies as soon as possible. And this challenge can only be met in one of three ways: outperforming the competition in recruiting and retention; improving employee development, performance, and growth to backfill critical gaps from retirement; or rethinking the roles and responsibilities of talented Boomers who are willing to re-imagine or postpone their retirement. Fortunately, workplace communities provide unique features and benefits to help companies succeed.

Of all the major demographic groups at play (Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers), Millennials are perhaps the best overall “fit” for workplace communities. Unlike other demographic groups, Millennials have grown up with web technology and already participate in online communities. According to an analysis of the most recent Facebook advertising data, over 50 percent of the 20-30 year olds in the United States have Facebook accounts (based on a comparison of Facebook’s ad data and US census bureau numbers). A recent digital consumer study by IBM cites similar data, reporting that “The only content service with mass adoption (greater than 50 percent) was Social Networking, and this was only among respondents under the age of 35.”

In addition, Millennials are the first generation to spend more hours online per week than watching TV (16.7 vs 13.6). In a recent blog post, analyst Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates listed some of the characteristics of Millenials, which included a desire to work in  “[open] and flat organizations” as “part of a tribe.” He also noted that Millennials make “heavy use of technology (messaging, collaboration, online learning) as a daily part of their work lives.”

All of these data points suggest that organizations with robust and active communities will have an easier time recruiting talented Millennials. This group will be naturally drawn to environments where they have opportunities to meaningfully connect to their peers and supervisors. Bersin also noted that Millennials prefer to work in organizations “where peers provide coaching as much as managers.” In short, Millennials want to work in collaborative, flat organizations where they can form extended relationships and take full advantage of technology trends. Online workplace communities provide exactly this opportunity.

But workplace communities can also benefit Boomers, as well as the organizations that expect to see them retire in droves in the coming years. With the dramatic increases in life expectancy over the past few decades, many Boomers are quite healthy at 65 or even 75, and some may welcome the opportunity to continue their careers later into life. As award-winning author, Tammy Erickson, wrote in her book, Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, instead of retiring, Boomers might instead scale back on hours, become consultants, flexibly move between periods of work and periods of “retirement,” start new businesses, go back to school, or even start whole new careers. Much of this is very complementary to the idea of communities and how they might be used in the workplace.

Through community, Boomers can remain quite deeply plugged in while maintaining their own schedule. A retiring Boomer who is an expert in a particular field could be an excellent community manager, blogger, or wiki contributor. An expert Boomer might become an online mentor to an aspiring group of new Millennial hires, making him or herself available to questions, pointing out resources, or facilitating social connections between established players in the organization. Expert Boomers might be the subject of a series of videos documenting their unique wisdom or expertise, thereby ensuring the continuation of their expertise after they have left the organization.

Given the nature of community solutions, nearly all of these activities can be undertaken remotely and flexibly, matching the unique work/life balance desired by each Boomer. In some ways, community solutions offer benefits and flexibility similar in nature to distributed computing programs like NASA’s SETI program or Stanford University’s Folding@home project. Just as “grid” computing programs take advantage of widely distributed computer resources that become available ad hoc, virtual communities provide access to human expertise and wisdom ad hoc.

Two recent examples of this were the Mechanical Turk-based searches for Jim Grey and Steve Fossett. While neither search was successful, they both utilized hundreds of thousands of hours of human brain power that were made available on an ad hoc basis. Other notable examples of this “human grid” approach include the Linux developer network, LinkedIn’s Ask a Question feature, various prediction markets, and idea tools such as Dell’s IdeaStorm.

These community-based initiatives provide benefits similar to grid computing platforms, but instead of aggregating computer resources, they aggregate collective intelligence and collective human effort. The flexibility of this model maps perfectly to the lifestyle changes that many “retiring” Boomers may opt for as they scale back or otherwise rethink their work experience.

Overall, the concept of workplace communities provides an opportunity to rethink our existing organizational models—just as the electric grid can draw power from multiple locations and distribute where needed, so too can workplace communities draw ideas, knowledge, and collaboration from multiple locations to use for specific purposes.

Workplace communities have the potential to transform knowledge work and talent management—the cornerstones of our knowledge-based economy. And like the transition to electrical power, this change will be disruptive. Companies that fail to embrace Web 2.0 and community solutions will be the water wheels of the next century, quaint relics of a time when ideas and expertise came from the anointed few rather than the collective many.