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Employees are going to talk to each other, whether their company provides the forum or not. There’s a message-board site created by and for UPS employees called Brown Café. The forum is not part of any UPS network and it operates completely independently of the company. A recent thread on Brown Café, spotted by the gang at Simply Blogging, features UPS employees engaging in a conversation over a racist remark overheard at a UPS facility.

The thread is definitely worth reading through, as it highlights differing reactions to a serious incident from employees in various locations—all without the intervention of HR. It’s also gives a nice glimpse of message board politics, which should be of interest to anyone looking to establish an internal forum for employees.

There are loads of other threads on the site, with topics ranging from competitors’ wages, bad decisions made by management, rants & raves, complaints and company rumors, in addition to normal message board chatter.

In the digital age, people are going to converse with their coworkers with or without the aid of their employer. This is clearly an exchange that HR would want to be involved in, but it took place entirely outside of the reach of the company’s HR and communication managers. UPS would have been in a much better position to remedy this situation if its leadership team was part of the conversation. As it stands, they’re out of the loop.

Another threat posed by deferring online communications to a non-intranet site is that non-employees can easily become part of the exchange (in a matter of seconds, I registered a profile, Erikj13, on the Brown Café forum—imagine what a devious competitor could do if they had access to all of your employees’ work-related conversations).

The challenge for any company is to create a portal where employees can discuss any number of issues—including sensitive topics—in an open, honest environment. Rumors and resentment can often be traced back to inadequate communication. By allowing employees to engage each other through a company intranet, leaders can freely interact with their employees and gauge the mood of the workplace. Managers can then develop a communication plan based on those conversations, rather than being reduced to trolling off-site message boards which are difficult to monitor and respond to, and which could be populated by any number of people from outside the organization.

Huh????

That was my first reaction when I saw the title “Facebook: Your Company’s Intranet?”. Why would a company use Facebook as its Intranet? The main thing I thought about was privacy since information on an intranet is usually company-specific and in many cases proprietary. This and other concerns are addressed in the article.

I can, however, understand the logic behind the decision and I actually applaud it. Rather than defaulting the intranet to being simply a repository for documents and forms or a mechanism of one-way impersonal push from the executive suite, using Facebook acknowledges the interaction and lateral communication that employees desire at work in the same way they are accustomed to at home.

Obviously, this is not for everyone. In fact, most companies will still opt to keep their intranets behind their firewalls. But, incorporating social media functionality can help any organization transform its intranet from a hyperlinked file cabinet into an interactive tool for company news, relevant business information and interaction and collaboration.

One of the hottest topics in internal communications right now is harnessing the power of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for social networking and peer-to-peer employee communications. This was a big topic of conversation at a networking meeting of top internal communicators Insidedge hosted recently in Dallas called MindShare.

During that day of brainstorming and strategy sharing, Al Comeaux, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, for Sabre Holdings Corp. (owner of Travelocity and other travel-related companies) shared SabreTown, a virtual village where you can connect with co-workers on a personal and business basis, share contacts and information and rack up “karma points” that allow you to post photos and other fun insights.  Sabre has a history of taking internal work tools and turning them into full-fledged, money-making enterprises a la Travelocity and now they’re looking to incubate and repeat that success with their employee tool (being marketed externally as cubeless). 

Maybe Sabre is onto something here?  I think if you were to ask Peter Vogt, head of eBay’s Internal Communications, he’d agree.  eBay, which dubs itself as “the first social networking company on the Internet,” communicates internally almost exclusively by electronic methods.  Peter was in Dallas last week to address the local chapter of IABC.  At eBay, employee communications is no longer a series of top-down executive messages; it’s a by-product of how employees across world geographies live and work together virtually.  The intranet is the central communications hub where 70% of the content is employee generated and employees can have their own blogs and wikis and Facebook-like pages.  And get this, the company hosts 35-40 webcasts a year to connect employees to the business.

So perhaps it’s time to shift the debate from whether or not companies should block access to social networking sites during work time and instead figure out how to measure a link between increased worker-to-worker connection and employee engagement?