Go Big Always

The most important things at work are Social Objects

As I’ve mentioned, the instant companies make social software available to its employees, it immediately becomes work focused (about productivity). E-mail is the easiest analogy. It’s (old) social software and it only works because everyone uses it. We all have work e-mail that helps us do our job. Obviously, email is not close to a comprehensive enough productivity tool so we bebop in and around it as needed.

At work, our most productive efforts revolve around putting attention on the things that will make the most impact to the organization. The problem is, this is really hard to do. We spend way more energy bebopping around then on the actual work. The people, assets, and attention we need are scatter-shot across our personal inboxes, applications, and our meetings. It’s like working with blinders on. Just finding the right efforts to focus on takes a crazy amount of “push-brooming” time. We run around trying to gather what’s happening, what has happened, and what needs to happen next. While we do this, the rest of the company continues to swirl around their own initiatives while we try to stay connected to make sure our scattered pile of efforts still maps to what’s important. Phew.

This changes drastically when everyone starts working in a single place. Then it’s much faster to focus people and their efforts, not to mention everyone can see all the “piles” clearly and shape them as need be. This is unbelievably more productive. These piles are essentially “social objects” (if you haven’t read Hugh McCloud’s well-documented unravellings of Social Objects or Thomas Vandar Wal’s post on the role of a social object, or checked out this slideshare presentation, then catch up). Social work objects are key to productivity.

Examples of social work objects can be different at different companies. But some generic examples include:

• Projects, initiatives (i.e., launch the website, )
• Timing
• Active subjects, topics, issues
• Brainstorming
• Status meetings and reports
• Standing meetings
• Plans
• Competitive information
• Agendas
• Reporting/analytical data
• Policies/procedures
• Group Tasks (actions following a meeting or as part of an activity)
• Content “kits” (for marketing collateral, PR, sales enablement, etc)
• Meeting notes/minutes
• Group PTO calendar
• Company updates, announcements
• Recognition, props
• Customers/clients
• Initiatives, goals, and projects for a particular team or a company as a whole

As an aside, most of these examples came from brainstorming with Jive co-workers inside our instance of Clearspace. Contributors to this brainstorm were: the guy that runs our SaaS group, a contractor, a UI designer, an engineer and business analyst from Professional Services, and our head of IT–all within the course of one day.