GDS and the Home Office released their Social Media Guidelines for Civil Servants on 17th May. With introductions from Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake, I’m hoping that this backing will help to support changes in policy for using social media channels and platforms within the workplace.
The recent guidelines for civil servants have a lot of positive points concerning the workplace such as upgrading to modern browsers and increasing bandwidth and using social media to communicate and listen.
I’m feeling the tipping point at work now. More frequently we are seeing requests to implement social solutions, from the recent request for a director blog and staff commenting platform on the intranet to requests for Huddle workspaces and increased use of crowdsourcing platforms.
Yet still we do not have a central platform inside the firewall for staff to engage with each other. I hope that the new intranet project will tackle this issue. Working in communications, I know how important it is to get messages out to staff and to listen to staff. We’ve relied for years on spot surveys and form-filled opinions but we’ve never had our ear to the ground.
#SWCONF, the Social Workplace Conference is on Thursday 24th. I hope to pick up on what problems social media is solving within the workplace, how other comms departments are using it internally and I’m especially looking for ideas around the staff user profile.
The new intranet will also involve a massive information architecture exercise so I’m keen to find out if and how other organisations encourage their staff to organise their content, socially, via tagging and liking etc. and how this might compare to formally structured content.