I frequently come across organizations who are scared to death of social features such as the ones found in SharePoint 2013 or Yammer, etc. and have heard various excuses as to why they don’t want those in their company. Here are just a couple (with my responses to them!):
– CONCERN: Our employees might post something that is inappropriate. MY RESPONSE: Your employees also might jump up in the middle of the company-wide meeting and shout something inappropriate. Will you also cancel all such meetings just because that *might* happen?
– CONCERN: We’re afraid our employees will spend too much time all day on the social network and not doing their work. MY RESPONSE: People can also waste time on personal emails at work or talking to coworkers. A manager’s policies for dealing with those issues should also cover social media use. Bottom line is, if an employee is going to waste time, he will. Social media will not all of a sudden turn otherwise productive employees into perpetual time wasters.
What other excuses have you heard? Please share below!
Wendy,
This is a very useful contribution. I think most companies realise the benefit of Social. The question is whether it is SharePoint 2013 Community / Newsfeeds v Free Yammer v Enterprise Yammer. I wonder if anyone has done a pro and cons list as is, and what we might expect when the Yammer roadmap starts to mature. In other words, when we share tagging terms, permissions and more between SharePoint and Yammer.
Thanks for the reply Andrew. Those are actually valid concerns as well as security issues. However, like you said I think people use that as an excuse because they don’t want to take the time to put precautions into place in order to mitigate those risks.
Love that first one! I work in Insurance so there are legal, risk and regulatory issues/concerns to be taken into account, though that is sometimes trotted out as an easy excuse for not doing anything.
