How outlandish would it be for a company to put participation in emergent social software platforms in the flow for at least some employees? In other words, why not put in job descriptions something like "being helpful at the enterprise level using digital tools such as blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Q&A forums, idea boards, comments, prediction markets, ratings, etc."
And then goes on to say:
I get the impression that few companies these days think of their employees as assembly line workers who should be focused exclusively on the job that’s right in front of them... I imagine part of the reason companies haven’t done much of this yet is that to date it’s been hard for people to work above and beyond their ‘normal’ jobs. Doing so typically involved physical displacement—hopping on a plane, going to a meeting, etc.— and so was time consuming, inconvenient, and often costly.
I suspect that may be a part of it but only a small part. I think the assembly line worldview is far more prevalent than Andrew realises. When I worked as a knowledge manager in a global consulting firm, we had terrible difficulties getting people to participate in knowledge sharing activities. While management consultants are paid far more than assembly line workers, there was a huge focus on utilisation and billable hours - and these people tended to work long hours. Many of them did not want to contribute to a wiki or write a blog on top of that.
I am a little cynical of the "rewriting job descriptions" suggestion as these are rarely worth the paper they are written on. My comment would be this: People follow their leaders. If senior execs are not contributing to this stuff then why would their juniors?
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