Last week, Entrance covered an article that shared statistics around the usage of collaboration tools like SharePoint, and how most people mistake social collaboration for Facebook or Twitter. This week, I ran into another article in TechCrunch announcing a new campaign by Microsoft to help businesses understand how social collaboration can make business teams more productive.
This new push by Microsoft to encourage businesses to use SharePoint and Yammer more effectively are the result of several studies. In particular, “a 2011 Gallup poll noted that a whopping 71 percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work.” The author of the article noted that even small changes as a result of leveraging technology more effectively “could lead to large productivity gains.”
Kurt DelBene, the president of Microsoft’s Office Division, also made this statement about the campaign, “As we look ahead at how collaboration and communications continue to evolve, we believe the tools people use today — email, instant messaging, voice, videoconferencing, social — will come together and be deeply integrated into apps in ways that will speed collaboration and truly transform the way people work.”
As we’ve noted before, getting any enterprise collaboration tool off the ground can be difficult, because many companies expect just to implement SharePoint or Yammer and then expect engagement to follow naturally. But if the numbers about employee engagement are to be believed, it’s worth the investment in technology and training to get employees plugged in. Particularly as opportunities are being missed every day for valuable brainshare to be shared across the whole company, a tool like Yammer can, “make it easier to tap into a company’s experts and the expertise that’s available in a large company but often remains untapped.”
For more on SharePoint and knowledge management, check out this post…