The Social Enterprise

This chapter discusses a steady evolution that has been occurring in the relationship between employers and employees. Today's time is the radically different sort of economy. People are different, corporations are different, and the glue holding people and corporations together is different. Thus, new generation of employees are “social workforce”—because significant portions of their waking lives revolve around interactions taking place on social media platforms. It is also important to remember that the lives of one's customers also revolve around social media, so restricting employee access to social media will make it more difficult for one to find out what one's customers are saying. Thus, these pioneering organizations are inventing the next era of corporate evolution, the era of the social enterprise. The social enterprise accepts the idea that people want to collaborate, want to work together, and want to solve problems. For the social enterprise, the big challenge is not trying to figure out the best ways to entice or coerce their employees into working; the big challenge is providing employees with the social tools they need to collaborate.