Social Networking Changing Collaboration at Work

Social networking is starting to change the nature of worker collaboration within companies, new poll conducted by Harris Research suggests. Of workers who use social networking at work, 59 percent say that their usage of social networking has increased over the past year. But only about 17 percent of the 1,000 workers surveyed report using social networking.

The study found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent), but that what people want from their email is changing. In addition to email, the Harris poll found that other applications being used by respondents to collaborate with others in the workplace include shared spaces (66 percent), voice calls and teleconferencing (66 percent), web conferencing (55 percent), video conferencing (35 percent), instant messaging (34 percent), and social networking (17 percent).

Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communication and the ability to communicate with many people at once. Users also rank email prominently among various collaboration tools because there is a high level of comfort in using the application to easily communicate with others inside and outside their organizations. However, the poll showed there are many pain points associated with the way most email solutions function today.

While email remains the preferred method of collaboration, many respondents complained they receive too much irrelevant email (40 percent) and that they lack the ability to collaborate in real time (32 percent). End users also dislike the fact that they have very limited storage (25 percent) and that large volumes of email come into their inbox with no organizational structure (21 percent).

Half of those using social networking for work by-pass company restrictions to do so. The study participants who prefer to use social networks indicated they would like to have control over who sees their content as well as be able to share with groups of users using different tools. The respondents also indicated the desire to collaborate in real time without having to open up an additional application.