“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.”
― Maya Angelou
Many innovation thinkers propose the use of social media in the workplace, I’ve been one of them. If you stop and think about social media, it has been a spontaneous growth of voluntary connectedness with people in our lives. Connections are made on social media voluntarily, I want to be social with my connections, with my audience. I dont want to connect with just anyone unless it is a marketing activity.
Current friends, my family. relatives and old friends all make it to my social network.
So doesn’t implementing ‘social’ media within the workplace assume that we want to connect voluntarily with other employees. The fact is, the larger the company the more likely people will not want to connect wth one another.
I love social media but the truth is there are people that I do not want to connect with socially at my place of employment for a variety of reasons. Add the competitive nature of most employees and use social media tools at work becomes unlikely.
Maybe it is time to create a new platform based on the “social media” platform. We should not call it social because of all the assumptions that people have about social media (particularly facebook), we can call it “collaboration media” or “Your Company Name media” and the purpose of this platform is to be well defined and is not for being social.
Its stated purpose should be connecting for teaching/reporting to one another. It is simply a tool to share information and it should not carry with it all the strings attached friendships and voluntary connectedness of “social” media (like facebook).
Do you use a social media tool for internal communication or collaboration? Please share.
A quality engineering University does at least three things for society:
For the companies that heavily invest in high-tech R&D to generate future business, perhaps they should be looking to certain universities as models to innovate more effectively. #1 above applied to company is of course the main function of most R&D divisions in a high-tech company. With #3, companies typically keep possession of their own businesses and IP and do not often spin-off. Role #2 however, may be a stretch for a company to embrace as something they should focus on; in role #2 I propose that the educators should be the managers, scientists, engineers and technicians and the students are those same managers, scientists, engineers and technicians. We should be comfortable with wearing both “hats”, we should be full-time teachers and students.
I think the role of teacher in a R&D company is largely neglected, teaching skills are rarely developed if at all, they are only developed in a select few employees. I think this is a major mistake in R&D high-tech companies today.
The concept of collaboration, conferences, technical reviews and even internal monthly reporting is largely a teaching activity. If you think about it we are teaching constantly but largely we do not teach with intention.
Companies with large R&D investment in their business plans ought to accept the idea that almost all employees should be actively teaching and developing their teaching skills.
How much of your time is spent teaching and/or being taught throughout your work day?
