Social Networking Takes Over The Workplace
Davis
Software developer Virtusa may be based in Westborough, but it really only has a handful of employees there. Its footprint is truly global, with thousands of its programmers located in Sri Lanka and India.
Because of that geographic spread, keeping all its employees connected and innovating together is a challenge.
One of the solutions, for Virtusa's management, is to use a free corporate social network called Yammer. You've probably heard of THE social network, Facebook. Yammer is just like that, but geared less for photos of your cat and more for discussing challenges at work.
Across The Enterprise
According to Madu Ratnayake, vice president and general manager at Virtusa (who happens to be based in Sri Lanka), Virtusa now has 5,000 employees on Yammer after using the platform (known in the software biz as an enterprise social network) for two years.
The reason Yammer has worked for Virtusa, according to Ratnayake, is that the company's workforce is overwhelmingly (80 percent) Millennial or Gen Y. "A lot of Millenials … are very in tune for Facebook-like experiences inside companies," he said. "What we thought, is to really engage our workforce, we would need to be able to provide a platform to connect them with each other to get their work done and drive innovation."
"Out of the box, Yammer helped us get going," he added.
Yammer made headlines in July when it was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. A deal as big as that, with one of the leaders in the tech field, definitely sends a message to the marketplace that social networks in the office are here to stay and will likely grow.
In fact, Framingham-based IDC expects the worldwide enterprise social software applications market to grow from $767.4 million to $4.5 billion by 2016, according to Vanessa Thompson, research manager for enterprise collaboration and social solutions at IDC.
Barriers To Entry
But before you go setting up a social network for your business, Thompson recommends doing some analysis of your business's culture and see whether it will support a social network. A company with a very rigid, top-down culture probably won't lend itself well to a social network. The more flexible or flattened the corporate culture is, the more likely a social network will take off — and pay off.
Virtusa's strategy was not to make Yammer yet another boring corporate initiative. That likely would have resulted in no one joining. Instead, they let it go viral. A few members of management hopped on, started talking about stuff, and then soon enough, 5,000 of the company's employees were on.
In addition to letting adoption be organic, Virtusa also had buy-in at the top, with everyone from the CEO on down committed to the network from the beginning.
"A lot of the young guys cherish the opportunity to have a conversation with the CEO or any other senior executive," he said. "Having the leadership team on it makes a big difference."
Got news for Digital Diva?
Email Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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