Make Tools Like Slack Work for Your Company

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch, in for Sarah Greene Carmichael. Slack, Yammer, Chatter, and Jive. They don't sound very corporate, do they? They sound more like names that got picked up because Twitter was taken. But these social tools are getting pretty comfortable in a suit and tie. McKinsey Global Institute surveyed more than 4,000 firms, and almost 3 out of 4 of them reported using these social tools to facilitate employee communication. And they're not just doing it to be cool and to attract younger employees. Increasingly, they're doing it because there's a clear business case. Our guests today have studied firms that use these internal tools. The result? Employee collaboration is up. So is knowledge sharing across silos. So is the speed of decision-making. So is innovation. So is employee engagement. Joining us now to tell us how your company can effectively use these social social tools are Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi. She's a professor at Harvard Business School. He's a management professor at UC Santa Barbara. Together, they wrote the article, What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools. It's in the November-December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. Paul and Tsedal, thanks for talking with the HBR IdeaCast.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for having us.

What's the biggest fear that companies have when it comes to implementing social tools in their workplaces?

That they'll roll it out and no one will use it. A second fear is that they might use it too much—personal, work-related, crossing boundaries, putting them in all sorts of legal predicaments.

There's a real concern amongst a lot of leaders at companies that people are going to be wasting time on these tools. That if you think about the quintessential post on Facebook that people like to complain about, it's someone posting what they ate for lunch. A big worry that companies have is that people are going to be— their employees are going to be posting the equivalent of, this is what I ate for lunch, instead of actually doing their work. Yeah.

And to be fair, if you look at the statistics for the number of hours people spend on Facebook, That's kind of scary.

[Speaker:GHION.AI] Yeah, it can be. But the kind of tools that Siddharth and I have spent the last couple of years studying aren't Facebook, right? They're not tools that people use in their personal lives, but they're the kinds of enterprise-scale tools like the Jives or the Yammers or the Slacks or the Trellos, right, that companies implement internally to help their employees work more effectively. But still, that concern is there most of the time. That I'm going to implement these tools as a leader, and then what's going to happen? My employees are going to be on there screwing around and engaging in all kinds of chitchat that I'm not going to be able to control, and it's going to sap their productivity.

So are those fears fair?

Those fears are actually not fair because we find that employees do think very differently about social tools that are in their organization compared to Facebook. In fact, they— make the distinction so much so that they might hesitate to use company-wide social tools precisely because they know what they do on Facebook and other social media, and they don't want to replicate those.

And I would say that one of the biggest surprises that we found was that the employees that you would think would be wasting most of their time on these tools younger employees who grew up in a world where they didn't know what it was like to not be online, typically millennials. And we've actually found that it's quite the opposite, that they're the most consistently concerned about their own appearances. And so they often shy away from using these tools in the workplace more than senior people do because they don't want— they're afraid that they might give the impression that they're too casual or too informal, or their bosses might be seeing what they're doing outside of work. And so they end up shying away from these tools.

The name social tools, right? It almost sounds— just the word social makes it sound like non-work related. Right. That's almost like a bad name for these.

It is in some sense because our tendency as leaders in companies would be to look at that and say, well, that's not work. They're talking about all of these other things that are probably distracting them from actually doing their calculations that I want them to do or from developing a new marketing plan or whatever the task might be. But one of the things that we've found pretty consistently in our own research is that having those kinds of what we might consider non-work conversations on these tools actually can be a really great benefit to companies. Because if you think about it, so much of the work that gets done in companies happens around the water cooler. We don't have water coolers in most organizations exactly anymore. But social tools can become like a virtual water cooler of sorts, where I can get to know somebody so I can learn what Sadal, what sports team Sadal likes, or I can learn that Sadal has a few kids, and that can endear me to Sadal in a way that would be very much the same as if we sat 2 cubicles away from one another and we chatted about our kids. Then I'm more likely to ask them for help on work-related topics or to ask them to join me in some new innovation project that I'm working on.

[Speaker:GREG] I wanna ask about your research because you found some kind of startling numbers when it came to how social tools, using them at work, could affect productivity, help people work better across teams, things like that. So first of all, what companies did you study?

Yeah, we studied a range of companies, some in the financial services industry, others in software and product development, telecommunications. E-commerce. E-commerce. Research organizations. So—

Sounds pretty corporate, right? Yeah. And what did you find?

Well, we found a number of things. Once you break barriers to people engaging with one another, you create the condition for people to collaborate more, to increase innovation activities, to be more productive because they're not duplicating work. And to give people the sentiment that they're part of one organization that increases their sense of commitment and loyalty to the organization, organization that then feeds their motivation to do more. So it really affects an important aspect of organizational work, innovation, collaboration, and learning, right, Paul?

So basically, anybody who used them—

Will see increases in those areas. Yeah.

It's the nature of the 21st century information economy that information moves at us so quickly that one of the best ways you respond to this is to increasingly break your organization down into smaller and smaller units so that you can more effectively deal with it. I think the smallest company that I've seen where this was a problem was maybe 30 or so people. And it's a funny story. They had spent somewhere on the order of $5 million working on this new product, 30-person company, all located in the same building, spread across 2 floors, and found out that they already— one of the other teams had already basically developed this exact same product.

That doesn't seem possible.

It doesn't seem possible, but it— but we've seen countless examples of this kind of thing. Yeah, right. Where teams are so siloed and insulated from what's going on in the rest of the company, and management can't quickly enough figure out what everybody's doing and how to connect the right people. You need some kind of secret weapon that cuts across the middle of the organization or slices it open in ways that allows the employees to make those connections that senior management once did. And that's where these tools are starting to come in really handy.

It's almost letting management off the hook in a way, right? If you think about that one company, they might have saved $5 million by installing a $200 water cooler, right? Absolutely. Management's job is to figure out where the strengths are and tie everybody together. I mean, this is a new technology that helps them do that in a way that they haven't been able to do before.

Right. Particularly important in global organizations too. Where not only do you have geographic distribution that Paul's talking about, but you also have differences in the maturity of markets. So if you have subsidiaries of an organization in emerging markets, and if you have others in more developed markets, they can actually help each other advance in their market development based on what they know. An example of this is we had employees in one particular company not knowing how to do some optimization work from a software standpoint, but those in a much more developed market knew how to do it. And once the employees in the emerging markets learned about the skills that their fellow engineers had in the developed markets, they were able to bridge the knowledge gap very, very, very quickly. So instead of trying to learn and figure it out and spend spending weeks and weeks and weeks trying to get it right. They were able to get it right in 4 days. So to be able to leverage the knowledge and the power within the company is very difficult in the absence of the secret weapon that Paul is talking about, the social tools.

What's one of the coolest successes you've seen?

Maybe one of the biggest successes comes from a big financial services organization. And this organization had 15,000 employees. They're distributed across multiple sites in the United States and some abroad as well. They went through a pretty big implementation of a tool called Jive. Sort of the instruction from the senior leadership was, if there was something that you would have typically communicated to someone else through email, private or completely proprietary that others in the company couldn't see it, what we want you to do is to shift your communication onto Jive. People commented after they've been doing this for a couple of months, how boring it was to read what everybody else was saying because they were just talking about really basic fundamental work tasks like, hey, we need to get this contract signed and legal's pushing back at us. What do we need to include in here to make legal happy? Those kinds of things. Yeah. But what they started to see over time was that because other people were watching those communications, those people often had answers to the questions that people were asking each other. And so they could chime in and say, hey, I worked with legal on a very similar problem, and here are 3 things that we did to make this contract process go more smoothly. And I was fortunate enough to be able to do an experiment with this company. And what we found was pretty striking. So there was over a 30% increase in people's ability to identify experts. In the company. And they did it just by reading those really boring communications that were going on, like, hey, I'm having trouble with contracts, and seeing someone respond and say, hey, I've got a lot of experience working with legal, and let me give you some pointers. And they increased their ability to find people that could connect them with experts by almost 90% of an increase. It was huge. And all this happened just because the normal everyday kinds of communications that they were making around work-related tasks with their colleagues became visible for anyone else in the organization to see. And that's really a powerful change for companies that use these kind of tools.

So do you have a favorite success from a company you studied?

One of the things that has been striking for me with social tools, we know that global employees always struggle to build relationship and to forge a shared identity with a particular company. There's always this perennial global local tension that managers and global employees and leaders always talk about. Yeah, I'm from corporate.

She's from regional. Exactly. Yeah, I'm from corporate.

She's from regional. I'm from Boston. She's from Kentucky. I'm from China. He's from London. We're so distant. We're so far away. We are struggling to come together as a, as a common group. Social tools, I found, can create an environment for people that allows them to feel connected with one entity.

I had an interesting experience coming to work for Harvard Business Review because they used Slack before I got here. And I found it super helpful not to start from scratch, but actually to be able to log in and go back through past discussions, just to see how they spoke with each other and the things they talked about and the questions they had for each other. For months in retrospect, I was able to go back and see how all of that was done. And it was a really interesting way of just kind of getting a sense of the culture, how people work together. Yeah, just bringing me up to speed that much faster.

Totally. That's one of the powerful things that you can get with social tools. This window that I spoke about, it gave you a window into your team, past interactions, and you're able to even begin to assess who can I connect with, who can I trust about these future activities I want to discuss. It's a really powerful window.

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Let's provide a window into the future now for companies that are thinking about doing this. So how do you do it? What questions should you be asking? What's the right way?

Well, the first thing that I think is important is to— I mean, once you select a tool that's appropriate for you, is to help the organization or employees in the organization understand what the social tool is meant to do. Okay. If you just implement these tools and expect people to understand what the boundaries are and how to use it, it's not going to work. If you're looking to increase innovation, say so. If you're looking to increase collaboration, say so. If you're looking to increase learning, say so. If you're looking to Increase networking. Say so. Define the purpose of this tool. And surprisingly, many companies just don't do that. They just say, hey, here it is. Not enough.

Right. OK. Most of the time, senior leadership just doesn't do it at all, right? Like, here's a new tool. Use it. They'll throw out some kind of number or just say, we're going to see dramatic increases in innovation. And what happens is if employees don't feel like they're seeing dramatic increases in innovation, you've essentially given them a license to stop using the tool. Put the right kind of metrics in place so that you could assess if the tools are actually doing the things that you want them to do, and then making sure that that's reflected to employees so that they understand, OK, this really is increasing innovation in our company, so I better continue to use it.

For the companies that are afraid of people sharing too much personally or socially, what would she tell them?

Companies and leaders in companies have to be comfortable with seeing a different type of interaction among their employees when it comes to social tools. To have a dose of non-work communication on these social tools is actually an important prerequisite for people to organically begin using the social tools for work purposes.

And why is that? Like, why is that a lubricant?

Think of it this way. Imagine that you go to a party and you don't know anybody at the party.

I'm already leaning on the comfortable— Feeling against the kitchen table.

Right, exactly, right? Yeah, right. And you know, you're—

Let me get a drink in my hand.

Looking around the room, you're trying to look at the artwork on the walls, right? Yeah. I'm out of sorts here. Why is it so difficult? It's because we don't have a conversational opener. With anybody, right? Now imagine you go to that same party and one of your friends says, Kurt, see that person over there? They used to work in radio just like you used to work in radio before you came to HBR, right? And they worked at such and such a station. And you would say, oh, great. There's something I can talk to them about. And immediately, the apprehension about going to talk to that person drops. Right. And it's not just sort of professional transactional. No, it's not.

Same thing with social tools. Leaders have to use them as well. They have to lead by example.

And they have to use them in the ways that they want their employees to use them.

Precisely, which means they use them for non-work things. They use them for exchanging information with individuals. Recipes. Whatever. It could be recipes. It could be a question. To lead by example could also be about frequency of use. As well, because people need to see their managers, their executives, even their most senior people on these social tools so that they themselves use them. But the thing not to do is for them to use the social tools for this one-on-many type of announcements that you may have on email. Any, any significant announcements, hires and acquisitions and things like that still need to continue to take place on email, go somewhere else.

Right. Let me give you the best CEO post I've ever seen and the worst CEO post I've ever seen. Let's start with the worst. The worst was, congratulations, today is a huge milestone. We have just exceeded X million, X hundred million dollars in sales. Thank you to everybody who made this possible. The worst.

You're like, I have to put a star on that. Right, exactly.

What am I supposed to do with that? Put a party emoji. This is me telling you how great our company is. The best CEO post that I've ever seen was, hey Joe, I completely forgot why we have this equation in that Excel sheet to predict sales for the next 5 months. Can you tell me why? And then Joe responded, I'm not totally sure I know, but I think Tony does. And then Tony responded, oh, the reason we have that equation is da da da da da da da. That makes you feel like, as an employee, like I've just seen some of the inner workings of my company happen, right? I've seen that my CEO doesn't know everything. I've seen that my CEO is not afraid to ask for help when he or she doesn't know everything. I've seen that Tony is the guy who knows a lot about how to calculate projected earnings in the future at our company, which I didn't know either. It's really important for organizations to encourage people to eavesdrop on each other.

Or ear hustle, I think, is the slang term in prisons. Exactly right.

Ear hustle. Ear hustle. All right.

I mean, you might look at that example and think, well, maybe Tony should be CEO. He's the one who knows these equations. So is there a danger of looking at interactions and some people are better at using these tools than others or knowing just how to communicate? In kind of fun, free, informative ways, looking really stronger in this forum, and great employees who have a lot of knowledge actually not doing well in this system.

Tell them about Peggy.

Who's Peggy? I was doing this project at this organization, and the organization had recently gone through a restructuring. And the manager implemented a social tool to try to help these newly formed groups communicate more effectively. What started to occur was that as people began communicating about how they solved different problems and how they dealt with particular client needs— this was a professional services organization— they began to realize that some of the more junior people in the organization were actually the most technically competent. And the person who was the most senior in the organization began to realize that people weren't asking her for advice as much as they had in the past. And she started to feel devalued. And she eventually decided to quit. This is Peggy. This is Peggy. And Peggy told the boss when she quit that, I used to be a really important employee at this organization, and now nobody seems to value what I bring anymore. Can't get no respect. So I'm gone. Exactly. And the senior manager was initially quite ecstatic, actually, that Peggy left because he said, well, if Peggy's not the most technically competent, then why— we don't want her working here, right? I pay her the most out of anybody because she's the most senior, so she should, she should be out. And what the manager did was had these sort of quarterly evaluations of how well this group was doing with the customers. And after Peggy left, the customer evaluation scores plummeted. Peggy had been giving lots of really important information that was social or cultural or political in nature. Like, you know, if you're going to deal with this problem, fix this thing first rather than this, because then the person will be very happy. Or deal with this issue in this way rather than in that way, and this person will be very happy. Peggy couldn't execute on a lot of the technical stuff.

Wouldn't that come out via whatever social tool they were using?

Well, it didn't, and that's exactly the sort of point of the story here. Is that the norm that got established on this tool was to talk about the technical successes that you had. Okay. And so everyone who was using the tool started to get this distorted sense that some people were more expert than others, but they were basing that evaluation just by looking at their reports of their technical competence. People sort of stopped remembering that Peggy was actually a very useful member of the team. And so the senior manager had to end up hiring Peggy back at a 30% premium. Go Peggy. Yeah. Go Peggy. But then put into place a system whereby on these tools, people would communicate not just technical information, but information about what's the best way to talk to the clients and what's the best order in which that you should be dealing with client requests and complaints and things.

These social tools also let you kind of cross hierarchies. Much quicker. You can actually Slack at the CEO or your boss's boss. You can reach out to them. Is there danger there that it seems so transparent that maybe your company's hierarchy is maybe more fluid than you think it is, and you can get in trouble that way? You're nodding.

There's no doubt that social tools loosen the strict organizational chart and hierarchy. And that's good.

That's good.

To some extent.

That's good in many ways. The thing to be cautious about is not divulging information inadvertently that could be problematic, especially doing it so publicly, violating some cultural or hierarchical norms in the organization with very limited ways to recover because everyone is seeing it. So how does the target person respond? How does your manager feel about you going to his or her manager in order to engage them? So there's, there's a bit of that concern there.

There are all kinds of different channels available to us through which we can communicate in our companies. If there's a critique that you want to make or a concern that you have that you want to elevate to your boss's boss, I think those kinds of things are better to do through other channels that are more private in nature. So it's not that we're advocating in any way that the company should shift all of their communication onto these platforms. But the kind of communication that would help to foster better connection and help employees learn about what each other is doing and what they know seem to be, at least in our experience, the appropriate kinds of reasons to move onto social tools and the appropriate ways to use them?

I always say that people just have to use common sense. Understanding how these social tools work, they have to use common sense.

There was a New York Magazine article that talked about major Slack leaks as chilling possibilities. IT departments at firms must be worried about having what's pretty essential communication happening on a platform that's handled by a third party. What do you tell companies that are worried about leaks or putting, putting all this stuff in the cloud?

Well, most of the software companies that produce these tools still offer a choice, right? You can have on-prem hosting, right? So that the company hosts it on premises, or it can be hosted by the software vendor, right? In the cloud. And, you know, honestly, over the last 3 or 4 years, we've seen about a 50-50 split. Of companies deciding, no, we want to host it locally versus we'll let you host it on the cloud. The ones that seem to err more towards we want to host it locally are those that have sensitive client information, right? That they're really concerned, um, you know, it's going to get broadcast in some way.

Another question, um, some criticism of these platforms is that they're great for conspiring. They also amplify bad parts of people at work, which is conspiring, being envious of coworkers, leading to office romances, things that are tricky for companies to deal with. Do you think that's a fair conception?

We just really haven't seen it. Yes. Really?

Haven't seen that much. In fact, if people are using social tools and using them consistently, That's great news for companies.

In order for social tools to work, senior leadership has to be comfortable with the fact that I'm not going to be able to script every interaction. There are going to be things that happen on here that I'm not going to like, and have some faith that because we set the right ground rules for people, that our employees are going to come in and they're going to, as my grandmother used to say, be the heavy, and tell people, hey, you can't do that. You got to stop talking about these kinds of things. That's a very uncomfortable feeling for senior executives that are used to being in control of much of what happens in their organizations. But we've seen it work effectively when leaders are setting those ground rules and modeling the kinds of behavior that they want to see on the tools.

Yeah, because in the end, control has made companies less productive. Mm-hmm. You're trying to take away control a little bit. Where do you think this is going? I mean, these are relatively new technologies. Where do you think this is going, and what do you envision companies doing with tools like this down the road when they really get rolling?

Well, let me start on the technical side. So one of the things that we're seeing in terms of technology is that tools like Yammer or Jive, maybe even Slack, although Slack's still early in its evolution, that have been standalone tools that companies implement are not gaining the kind of traction that they were 5 or 6 years ago. Instead, what's happening is tools for other purposes, like project management tools like Trello, for example, are starting to get social functions built into them so that you can be on a platform like Trello doing project management-related things and reproducing some of the functions that you would have had on a separate tool like Slack, let's say, or Yammer. So I think we're going to see more of that happening in the coming years.

So not just companies integrating social tools, but the social tools integrating with each other.

And, and the tools that companies are already using, the sort of productivity tools that they're already using, are going to become more social. So where we today are sort of talking about how do you manage social tools, I don't think we'll be talking about that in 5 years. Instead, what we'll be talking about is how do you manage sort of the social communication environment of your organization? Because that social communication environment is going to happen in all kinds of tools that we're using in the workplace.

Gotcha. Like Salesforce or Microsoft Teams or whatever. Right. Okay.

You know, Salesforce is a good example, right? I mean, they, you know, they developed this tool called Chatter that looks like Facebook. And for a while at least, we're giving it away free to clients that were using the Salesforce CRM because they found that there were incredible synergies between the two tools, right? When people started talking more about their work, then you ended up, you know, seeing more, getting more input that was able to then sort of translate into more effective use of the CRM. And eventually, you know, what we're going to see is that the CRMs themselves will be social tools rather than having to have another standalone. And that's going to be a big change for a lot of companies.

From a workforce or an employee standpoint, I think more and more people will be fluent in the use of these social tools. They're not going to need the guidelines as much. As an individual goes from one company to the next, the use of social tools will be part of their repertoire. What we're going to see is that these numbers are just going to grow and grow and grow and grow. And so in the next 5 years, we are going to see the massive spread of these social tools and people become much more sophisticated in how they use them and they'll be part of their regular communication repertoires.

In terms of changes to work. Yeah, I think the biggest change that we're, we're starting to see, but we're going to see grow, is people today often work in a way that's invisible. To others in the company. You sit at your desk.

Tell me about it. No, I'm kidding.

Yeah, you do, right? But you know, you're sitting at your desk and you're typing away at something, right? Or you're building an application or you're putting a spreadsheet together and other people don't know what you're doing and don't know the steps that you've taken. What we're going to start to see is that that process of work is going to become more and more visible. So we're going to have lots of these questions that are going to pop up about the nature of work and what it means to do work. That we haven't had to think really hard about over the last couple of decades because we sort of hire experts. We maybe give them a process they're supposed to follow. Then we send them away to do that process. And as long as the output looks good, we're happy. Now we're going to start to get in the weeds and see how everybody's working and what's going on. That presents tremendous learning opportunities for our organizations, but it's also going to raise a whole host of questions about what does it mean to be a worker and what does it mean to be a manager. That we're going to be dealing with for the next several years.

Tsedal Neeley, Paul Leonardi, thank you.

Thanks so much.

This is a great conversation. Thank you. It's terrific to be with you today.

That's Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi. She's a professor at Harvard Business School. He's a management professor at UC Santa Barbara. They co-wrote the article, What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools. It's in the November-December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review and at hbr.org. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Curt Nickiff.