They Built It, but Employees Aren’t Coming

According to a survey of large companies in the U.S. and Europe already involved in social initiatives, only 10-20% of their employees are actively involved in social collaboration.

Are companies that have made headway in introducing a social collaboration platform into their enterprise having success getting employees to participate?

According to one recent study not really.

Here are the details.

The research, titled Current State of Social Engagement Inside the Large Enterprise, was done this past summer by the DachisGroup, a social marketing optimization software company located in Austin, Texas. The firm’s chief strategy officer, Dion Hinchcliffe, is a well-known author and analyst on enterprise uses of social tools.

A short ten-question survey was sent by the DachisGroup to members of its Social Business Council, a group of over 300 businesspersons from large global companies already engaged in enterprise-wide social business initiatives to share best practices. Seventy surveys were received, and these were filtered to 56 firms whose revenue was 1 billion or more. About two thirds of the responses were from the United States, while the rest were from Europe.

The most startling result was that when asked to assess the overall engagement of employees in the company, more than half responded that only 10-20% of its employees were active.

That was surprisingly low, and we’ll say more on this below.

Another noteworthy result: when asked what function in the company “owns” social, the highest response was IT (cited by 74.5%) and the second was “Corporate Communications (not marketing),” cited by 38.2%. While the fact that IT was listed first is not at all surprising, the fact that Corporate Communications was also so highly ranked indicates that this function may be carving a role as a leader in social, and where it is seen as playing an important role.

The survey also asked respondents to rank which features of their social platform were most popular. The two that ranked highest were: “groups” and “discussions/forums.” These beat out microblogs, activity feeds, status updates, wikis, blogs and ideation.

What is interesting here is that groups and discussion forums represent more “old fashioned” types of collaboration, whose existence precedes blogs, wikis, microblogs, social status updates and other more recent “2.0” features.