Keep your employees on board: Uncap the power of Enterprise 2.0

A recent story in the CIO takes an in-depth look at how enterprises in the UK are dealing with social networks in the work place and also how to harness their power and use it to recruit a better workforce.

The first point the article makes is that it should be a company’s priority to attract and keep the brightest young workers. How is this to be done? Have the best internal systems by embracing web 2.0 also known as blogs, wikis and social networks. The problem a company has with fully embracing allowing employees to access this: over 233 million hours are lost a month because employees are not working. This leaves a company with two options: go with the flow and hope employees will see what they can do or harness the technology and ban employees from accessing it at work. Gartner embraced the new technology which has led to what they call a high performance workplace. They looked at the matter from a staff standpoint.

They have two very different internal departments that see the benefits of this technology. The HR department sees it as a way to recruit, manage, motivate and retain the best work force. IT sees it as a way to provide the best people in the work force with the best tools so that these employees can perform to their highest potential.

With all the best employees working together, many opportunities appear. Since collaboration can happen between two people that never meet, as well as people that span a continent, innovation is more likely to occur.

The new workforce expects this technology to be available in the workplace. If your company can’t provide it for them, they will find another workplace that they feel is better suited for their lifestyle. This leads to the problem of retention. If you retain your staff, they can use to fully utilize all the Web 2.0 tools that you provide for them. So, if you find high performance people, and use the capabilities of Web 2.0 to encourage them to stay at your company, then it is possible to have a highly collaborative workplace that uses this technology for the growth of you enterprise.