employee blogging: personal or work-related?

Employee blogging: personal or work-related?

Lilia Efimova Telematica Instituut

iceberg.telin.nlblog.mathemagenic.com

24 September 2007, What is missing in social software? ECSCW’07, Limerick, Ireland

As long as your company views your blogging as "you chatting with your neighbors on your personal time", you pose little risk. But the more that co-workers, CEOs, and so on are on-record as being cool with blogs, the more that blogs take on the timbre of being "official". The more "official" that blogs are, the more perceived risk the company takes on by allowing you to blog. And neither you nor your CEO is really keen to make things more complicated than they need to be. And this is why, IMO, you see most companies and employees today still dancing around the issue of employee blogs and seemingly settling on a "don't ask, don't tell, and please for the love of God don't do anything stupid" policy.

Joshua Allen, 26 May 2003


What is missing?

Employee weblogs

Missing boundary?

Personal Business


Approach

• Based on study of employee blogging at Microsoft– 10 weeks, summer 2005– 38 interviews++– Lilia Efimova & Jonathan Grudin (2007).

Crossing Boundaries: A Case Study of Employee Blogging. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07)

– More• Ad-hoc feedback round via my weblog

– Dimensions of employee blogging – My weblog – Other bloggers


Weblog shape

Personal Business

Location Personal server

Public hosting platforms

Company-affiliated servers (e.g. funded, but not a part of a corporate online presence)

Corporate servers (part of corporate official presence online)

Blog uses Not related to work Mix of personal and work-related uses Only business-related (good for my company) or work-related (good for performing well at work)

Content focus

Primarily non-work matters

Mix of work and non-work content Primarily work-related

Content style Personal, subjective, confessional

Some degree of filtering or editing to fit professional norms and business requirements

[Business, objective, defined by corporate communication policy]


Decision-making

Personal Business

Initiative Decided myself Decided myself, but checked at work

Decided myself given positive signals (that blogging is allowed and encouraged) at work

Was convinced by others at work

Was prescribed at work

Micro-level decision making

Who decides when and how to blog? What goes into a specific post?

Myself Myself, but I listen to others at work

Myself, but I have to get permissions from others at work

Have to be negotiated with others at work

Some moments are defined by work workflows (e.g. editorial processes of product weblogs)

Defined by work needs

Defined by others at work

[Defined by business logic and exiting workflows in my company]

Technology control

Who controls blogging tools?

Control myself

Company doesn't influence it

Technology is provided by the company, but I have control over some parts of it (e.g. template customisation, adding plug-ins, etc.)

[Full control by the company]


Integration with work

Personal Business

Affiliation with company

No

Explicitly hiding

Implicit – not immediately visible, but not hidden

Disclaimer

Yes, explicit

Impact (attribution)

Impact myself as a person

Impact myself as an employee (e.g. by helping to do work better)

Impact both, myself and my company (e.g. an incident gets into media)

Impact my company, but not me

Part of job description

No Not explicitly, but as an "extra" during evaluation

Blogging as one of possible ways to get work done

I can blog, but I don't have to

Yes, my job responsibilities explicitly include blogging

Time blogging

No, never To some degree: not officially, as a way to do the job

Yes, only blogging at work time

Content ownership

My copyright Both parties accept some rights of another side

Nobody knows for sure since it's too complicated

[Explicitly copyrighted by the company]


Ad-hoc feedback


Ad-hoc feedback: 15 blogs

Initiative to start

Content decision making

Process decision making

Technology control

Location

Blog uses

Content focusContent style

Affiliation w ith company

Attribution to company


Time blogging

Content ow nership


Ad-hoc feedback: one blogger, two blogs

Initiative to start

Content decision making

Process decision making

Technology control

Location

Blog uses

Content focusContent style

Aff iliation w ith company

Attribution to company


Time blogging

Content ow nership


Discussion

• Refining– Dimensions– Systematic analysis of blog profiles

• Business application– Extremes are not that interesting; the value is in the

middle– Where does it make sense to draw the boundary?– How that would translate into actions?


Follow-up?

• Permalink http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/24.html#a1944

• More on my research– In progress: blog.mathemagenic.com– Published: iceberg.telin.nl– Contact: [email protected]

employee blogging: personal or work-related?

Economy & Finance