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The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations
ASTD - American Society for Training and Development, April 2010, Pages: 93
The ASTD Rise of Social Media report explores the business case for supporting and using social media technologies from a learner’s point of view. This exclusive perspective provides business leaders with insight for a new strategic priority: to leverage the power of social media tools in order to maximize learning and increase the performance of the entire workforce. While most organizations have yet to fully embrace the use of social media in the workplace, there is a strong belief among the professionals surveyed that adoption of social media technologies will continue to grow in the coming years. Hence, it is critical for business leaders to prepare for the fundamental shift in habits and expectations that the surging Millennial generation will bring to the workplace- computers and collaborative technologies are an extension of who they are. This report includes valuable results and recommendations to help executives make strategic decisions that can positively affect organizational goals and growth.
Are social media technologies transforming today’s workplace? And, will they increasingly become essential to improving learning and boosting productivity, especially for younger generations of employees? To answer these and other critical questions about social media, ASTD partnered with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) to examine how organizations are using and should be using these technologies to achieve maximum benefits.
It was found that, although there are some strong relationships between using these technologies and reported learning productivity, these technologies have not yet garnered the widespread adoption one might expect. Most organizations have yet to fully integrate and formalize the use of social media in the workplace. Employers that don’t figure out how to leverage social media could fall behind both as employers of choice and as learning organizations.
How are people using social media at home and at work?
This research report, “The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations”, hereafter referred to as the Study, defines social media as technologies designed to facilitate social interactions and communication. It was found that most employees have, in fact, embraced social networks, especially in their personal lives. Nearly two-thirds of respondents to the major survey conducted in late 2009 said they used social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, either often or all the time in their personal lives. Less than 10 percent said they never use them. But that doesn’t mean that all social media has become mainstream. Other tools are used less often. For example, just 12 percent of respondents said they use micro-blogging sites such as Twitter often or all the time.
Social media technologies tend to be used less for work-related purposes. The most popular are shared workspaces, which include technologies that are designed for business use such as Google Docs and SharePoint. On the whole, however, these tools are not used very often for work-related learning. While some companies have figured out how to use shared workspaces, wikis, and social networks, other technologies such as micro-blogs, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, and augmented realities have yet to gain the same kind of traction.
Despite relatively low self-reported usage, many signs point to a rise in social media usage for on-the-job learning. In fact, more than four-fifths of the respondents to the Study said use of social media for learning within their organizations would increase over the next three years. What’s more, respondents from the Millennial generation (born after 1981) are more likely to use these technologies at home or at work than Generation Xers, who in turn use them more than Baby Boomers. If this trend holds, then a growing proportion of the future workforce will rely on social media technologies in the workplace.
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