Never Eat Alone and the impact of an enterprise social network on companies

For the scope of this research, which is to establish whether the impact of the adoption of an enterprise social network is rather positive or negative in terms of tangible and intangible benefits, the entire article is basing on a collaborative software called “Never Eat Alone”. Never Eat Alone is a social network operating as a sort of intranet that allows to encourage exchange and collaboration among the employees of a big company. This helps the collectivistic soul of the organization to grow rapidly. A further explanation of its features by the co-founder and CEO Marie Schneegans is available on YouTube: one video is a TEDx talk (TEDx Talks, 2015. How to be happier at the workplace: connect with your colleagues | Marie Schneegans | TEDxEMLYON) and the other one is an interview for the American CNBC (Schneegans, M. 2016. CNBC: Tired of eating lunch alone? This could help).

Literature Review

In order to analyze briefly the relevant literature, a clear distinction must be done: as suggested by Lauren Trees (Trees, L. 2013. Social media’s role in knowledge management, APQC Blog), it is important to categorize and differentiate our traditional image of a social network from an enterprise social networking. In fact, it is reasonable to expect a minor participation from the latter, which must be monitored by the managers but not that strictly, so that employees can feel free to use it however they feel like. In addition, she explains the reader that it is better to measure or detect the improvement of the degree of relationships between employees coming from different functions, rather than focusing on the tangible benefits such as the return on investment.

Another important study has been conducted by Wing S. Chow and Lai Sheung Chan in their research about Hong Kong companies “Social network, social trust and shared goals in organizational knowledge sharing”. Their framework examines the relationship between these three factors and the employee’s willingness to share his knowledge: the result is that enterprise social networks and shared goals bring positive effects on this, both tangible and intangible, whereas social trust is neutral. Hence this framework supports an internal social network.

On the other hand, there are some issues to be faced. For instance, as mentioned by Gerald C. Kane on the MIS Quarterly Executive ("Enterprise social media: current capabilities and future possibilities"), managers have to be aware of the fact that the internal social network is strongly correlated to many other digital trends, especially when it comes to evaluate the data collected. Therefore, it is of primary importance to set these two on the same level (e.g. the enterprise social network cannot be used properly if the internet connection is slow or if the user is not technically educated). In addition, the adoption of a social network inside the company may create more separation than union (e.g. groups creation that strengthen differences, isolation and biases).

To sum this part up, most of the literature supports the thesis of tangible and intangible benefits coming from an enterprise social network, but there are some issues to be considered, especially from the management standpoint. However, it must be noticed that in the literature there is a lack of research that indicates numerically to what extent an enterprise social network influences the organizational structure and the overall performance of the employees.

World and Enterprise Factors

Now that the relevant literature has been analyzed, we should now focus on the real world. In the case of Never Eat Alone, what are the environmental factors that this enterprise social network would fight, and what is the benefit of its adoption by a big company?

A study conducted by James K. Harter and colleagues in 2010 ("Causal Impact of Employee Work Perceptions on the Bottom Line of Organizations", Sage Journals) showed the direct causality relationship between employee perceptions and bottom-line performances: which means that lower job satisfaction leads to a worse performance. A low job satisfaction can be attributed to several factors, and these are exactly the variables that an enterprise social network such as Never Eat Alone is meant to smooth.

One of them is the level of stress at work, which is particularly relevant for big companies. A brand new study (March 17th, 2017) conducted by the American Institute of Stress highlights the reasons of workplace stress. As the reader can deduce from the pie chart on the left, personal lives and personal issues cover the 48% of the main causes of stress at the workplace: Never Eat Alone impacts directly these two causes, which, if minimized, would increase the employee satisfaction, therefore his performance and the overall business performance too. For instance, if employee number 1, who comes from the marketing department, has some private legal troubles, this social network would easily connect him with an employee (number 2) who specifically treats the legal facts of the company. This would solve a private issue for employee 1 and would strengthen the relationship between the two, creating a more cohesive working environment horizontally, impacting several functions of the company in terms of communication and knowledge flows and modifying the organizational structure, which would become flatter.

Another factor that must be taken into consideration is the level of relationship between employees. In fact, especially in multinational companies and big companies, cultural differences and poor communication among employees can affect negatively the sense of community within the enterprise. Imagine the situation of an employee of a multinational company who is instructed to work in a foreign subsidiary for a few weeks. An internal social network would give him the opportunity to get to know quickly and efficiently other employees, which would strengthen not only the connection between two individuals, but also on a bigger scale the network between the subsidiary and the mother company, leading to a higher level of union and to a better defined common identity. On the one hand, in companies where the information system is perfectly shared in all the subsidiaries in terms of structure, composition and alignment, the benefits (above all the intangible ones) of an enterprise social media exceeds the costs of its adoption by far. On the other hand, companies that do not share a homogeneous information system may encounter high costs of adjustment in the beginning, therefore the relative benefit would be slightly lower than the opposite case. The costs above mentioned are connected not only to the initial expenses of adoption of the internal social network, but also to the way in which the information collected is monitored and processed.

Analyzing a single company generally, often there is poor communication between the different functions, not only among managers, but above all among employees. In order to link two or more functions, an enterprise social network has the power to shorten the distance between the two internal realities, so that the organizational structure of the company results more integrated, coordinated and compact. This facilitates the transmission of knowledge and communication flows through all the areas of the enterprise, allowing the employees to have a clearer picture of the current situation and the future objectives of the company. At the same time, the CEO and the managers are ensured that their messages have reached the audience in an effective and efficient way. This is one of the reasons why Never Eat Alone targets massive companies such as Johnson & Johnson, BNP Paribas, Allianz, Vinci, where is not always that easy to deliver everybody news and messages successfully.

Empirical Analysis, Benefits and Challenges for the Company

In order to understand properly how an enterprise social network such as Never Eat Alone impacts a company, one member of its team accepted to be interviewed and share her field experience (see transcription of the relevant parts in the appendix). The focus of the interview was understanding how Never Eat Alone impacts the company practically, and from the interview it came out that this enterprise social media helps merging companies, growing companies, new employees and the different departments within an enterprise by creating connections and meetings that otherwise would not have taken place. One of the main characteristics of this kind of social network is its flexibility and dynamicity, in fact it grows and improves its functionalities thanks to the direct feedback coming from the customers (for instance the feature “instant lunch” has born from the communication between software developers and users).

From the company’s point of view, there are several advantages to benefit of:

·     new links are created,

·     employees can share their interests and raise their level of comfortability in the workplace environment,

·     new employees are allowed to be integrated much faster in the company culture and identity,

·     the company speeds up the knowledge sharing and improves collaboration and retaining talents,

·     employees are more creative and productive, hence new projects can be developed due to a higher innovation, which gives the company the chance to become more digital through human connections.

The cost for this service, comparing to the benefits above listed, is very low: the company pays 1 Euro per month per employee, according to the total number of employees in the site or company. The person in charge of the project inside the company (IT manager, HR manager…) has the chance to send push notifications to employees in order to encourage them to use this internal social network. He or she can therefore also monitor and influence the level of usage of the service, but it is crucial that the person in charge and the managers in general lead by example, using the social networks themselves: this would have a great positive social impact on the employees.

In general, the other benefits (Editorial Staff, 2017, "3 Key Benefits of an Enterprise Social Network", business.com) that an enterprise social network assures are the streamlined communication (a live direct discussion can limit the high amount of mail exchanged within the organization and the time spent writing, reading and processing those), the possible creation of a company knowledge storehouse (storing important documents, updates, news) and even a real-time crowd-sourced content (in the interaction between customer and sales employees, the latter may ask for a quick specific question on the shared enterprise platform and then report just in time the answer).

But the benefits reported above and the ones identified in the previous sections can not be exploited if the CEO and the managers do not control and monitor the use of the internal social network. In fact, it is important that the persons in charge encourage its use among the employees without being too oppressive, and the data collected must be processed in a proper way. Therefore, analytical software services such as SAS Social Network Analysis have been developed in order to collect, analyze and apply all the information extrapolated from the internal social network and use them to improve the internal company environment.

At the same time, some challenges have to be faced. The main challenges are the following:

·     identity management: although it is true and proven that an internal social network helps through new connections to grow a common company identity, the opposite effect may occur, above all when the use of the social network is completely and systematically disconnected from the workplace dynamics (the CEO and managers’ contribution and directions are fundamental in this case),

·     technical challenges: implementing and maintaining an enterprise social network involves considerable efforts on a technical level and sometimes high costs,

·     monitoring: as explained before, this part is important in order to understand to what extent the social network is productive for the common objectives of the company,

·     productivity losses: it may happen that employees spend too much time on the social network during the work shift.

Conclusion

An enterprise social network, as Never Eat Alone, has definitely the potential power to improve the social dynamics inside the firm and the transfer of knowledge and information, above all in big companies. Nevertheless, its use must be well managed and monitored by the higher figures in the company, otherwise the result may be the opposite of the premises. The impact on the organizational structure, as the focus of such a collaborative software is the relationships among employees which are not mathematically predictable, takes place only if the managers set the appropriate pattern, in order to flatten the hierarchies or to integrate employees in the social environment of the firm. From the evidence encountered during the research, Never Eat Alone seems to fit perfectly for companies like Airbus (due to the high number of new hires) and Procter & Gamble (due to the massive number of employees in the headquarter). Regarding the possible future developments, Never Eat Alone could add the possibility of implementing a complete database which would record any connection that has been established during the day, so that the CEO and the managers would have the chance to monitor the relationships among the employees (in a medium-long term) and to prevent the birth of groups and separation between functions, in order to promote new activities and events (always via social network) which can flatten the differences. Never Eat Alone may even consider the chance to extend the network from one company to another (for instance suppliers), in order to create a strong relationship between two firms which would benefit of a spillover effect.

Appendix

1)    How do you think Never Eat Alone could help the companies?

? We work towards the objectives of the companies:

o    For example if 2 companies or 2 sites of the same company are merging, we help employees from both companies getting to know each other so that they can collaborate quickly and be more productive

o   If a company is moving to a new location: it’s a big change for a company and the employees who have trouble getting used to the new place and are often lost and disappointed: we help them getting to know their new office and the colleagues working next to them

o   If they have a lot of new employees: NEA helps the company with the onboarding à New employees get to know how the company works, the culture and the different departments more easily. They can also benefit from getting to know a “mentor” who has been in the company for a long time

o   When there is no collaboration between departments: it helps breaking silos, realize that some colleagues we would have never known otherwise have the same interests.

2)    Is there any update / improvement on the way of being developed?

? We keep the comments and feedbacks from the companies and this is how we develop new features. Eg: it is how the Instant lunch (Instant group lunch) has been created and this is how we improve the way the app is working.

3)    To what extent can it benefit the teamwork?

? By creating links in the company that didn’t use to exist. All the encounters made through NEA would never have existed otherwise. 

? People are sharing their interests and are happier

? New employees are onboarded more easily and get to know the company culture and colleagues rapidly and in a better way. 

? It helps companies with collaboration, knowledge sharing and retaining talents 

à Thus, employees are more productive and new projects can be created. There is more innovation and enterprises become more digitals while creating human connections. 

4)    Is there any push notification sent to the employee? Is there the chance to create an event?

There are push notifications that can be sent to employees. The person in charge of the project in the company has access to it and can send notifications if there is a special event. 

But if employees want to create an event, they can use the “Instant lunch” functionality which allow people to create a meetup with a thematic that up to 8 other people can join freely.

5)    Can Never Eat Alone change somehow the structure of the organization or the method of capturing, processing, and exploiting the flows of knowledge and information?

Inside a company you mean? If so, we are not there to change the way a company is structured or working and even if we wanted to, we couldn’t because companies we are working with are huge companies often with several thousands of employees. And our goal is to help companies increase knowledge sharing and collaboration but there is no need to change the structure, we just need to make people understand how to use the app and how they can benefit from it. We adapt.