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The purpose of this paper is to provide an interview with Monika Wencek.

The paper presents an interview with Monika Wencek, Senior Customer Success Manager at Yammer,

Wencek speaks of the value of Enterprise 2.0 technology for businesses, and, in particular, ways in which Yammer can be utilized by human resource departments, and for the provision of e‐learning.

The paper looks at Yammer, which is one of the leading providers of enterprise social networking, and has recently been acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

The paper aims to explore “content” factors influencing consumptive and contributive use of enterprise social networking within UK higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The methodology uses genre analysis and grounded theory to analyse empirical data from posts obtained through Microsoft Yammer and a focus group.

The findings reveal the motivators-outcomes-strategies and the barriers-outcomes-strategies of users. Motivators (M) include feature value, Information value, organizational requirement and adequate organizational and technical support. Barriers (B) include six factors, including resisting engagement on the online platform, emotional anxiety, loss of knowledge, the lack of organizational pressure, lack of content quality and lack of time. An Outcomes (O) framework reveals benefits and dis-benefits and strategies (S) relating to improving user engagement.

The research method and resultant model may serve as guidelines to higher educational establishments interested in motivating their staff and scholars around the use of enterprise social network (ESN) systems, especially during face-to-face restrictions.

This research study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic which provides a unique setting to examine consumptive and contributive user behaviour of ESN’s. Furthermore, the study develops a greater understanding of “content” factors leading to the benefits or dis-benefits of ESN use, drawing on user motivators, barriers and strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic in UK education.

Enterprise social networks (ESNs) in organizations have become an increasingly important technology to support the exchange of information and knowledge. Many ESN projects fail due to insufficient engagement in the long run, leading to the high risk of sunk costs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how hedonic motivations, along with normative motivations, play an important role in determining an employee’s intention to continuously participate in ESN. Based on the Four-Drive Model and hence borrowing from behavioral economics, it is investigated how such hedonic motivations emerge in organizational ESNs.

This study is set within the context of a global enterprise of the logistics and courier industry. The authors first derived hypotheses from the Four-Drive Model to build the research model on the emergence of hedonic motivation. Then, the authors derived hypotheses from existing adoption literature regarding the impact of hedonic motivations and normative motivations on ESN use continuance. Following, a quantitative survey was conducted to test these hypotheses. In the study, structural equation modeling is applied, based on partial least squares.

The results show that the extent to which an ESN supports the drives to comprehend, acquire, bond and defend starkly influences an employee’s hedonic motivations. In addition, it is shown that hedonic motivations have a much stronger influence on use continuance than normative motivations.

Research on hedonic motivations in the work context is still underrepresented, in management science as well as information systems (IS) research. Hence, theoretical approaches to explain and predict the emergence of hedonic motivations in IS usage are missing. With the study, the authors will close this theoretical gap. The study contributes to IS research not only by evaluating the role of hedonic motivation for ESN usage, but also by providing an approach to explain key drivers behind it. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically test the Four-Drive Model in a voluntary IS context, adding valuable knowledge about human behaviors in digital work environments.

The purpose of this paper is to present enterprise social networking and gamification as two potential tools to help organizations engage Millennial employees in collaboration and learning.

The research provides general descriptions of enterprise social networking and gamification approaches, shares data on adoption of these approaches from APQC’s “2015 Knowledge Management Priorities Data Report” (based on a January 2015 survey of 524 knowledge management professionals) and includes four company examples adapted from APQC’s Connecting People to Content and Transferring and Applying Critical Knowledge best practices studies. The methodology for APQC’s best practices studies involves screening 50 or more organizations with potential best practices in a given research scope area and identifying five or six with proven best practices. APQC then conducts detailed site visits with the selected organizations and publishes case studies based on those site visits.

Enterprise social networking platforms are in place at 50 per cent of organizations, with another 25 per cent planning to implement them by the end of 2015. By providing near-immediate access to information and answers, enterprise social networking helps Millennials learn the ropes at their new workplaces, gives them direct access to more knowledgeable colleagues who can assist and mentor them, and helps them improve their business outcomes by reusing knowledge and lessons learned across projects. Younger workers can also harness the power of social networking to create a sense of belonging and build their reputations in large, dispersed firms, where it is particularly difficult for them to gain visibility. A recent APQC survey indicates that 54 per cent of organizations either currently employ gamification to encourage collaboration or expect to implement it within the next three years. The rush to gamify the enterprise is, at least in part, a reflection of employers’ desire to satisfy Millennials and make them feel connected to a community of co-workers. Although games appeal to a wide range of age groups, Millennials grew up with digital interaction and tend to prefer environments that emphasize teamwork, social learning and frequent feedback – all of which can be delivered through gamification.

The value of this paper is to introduce the value of and relationship between enterprise social networking and gamification platforms to human resource (HR) professionals looking to increase engagement and retention rates for Millennial employees.

This paper aims to present the use of social media to engage internally with employees and stakeholders, which is becoming a popular option of communication for many business, organizations and libraries.

The popularity and importance of social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram cannot be ignored.

The number of users on these networks continues to grow with 65 per cent of American adults using social networking sites (Perrin, 2015).

Social networking tools provide an ease of communication that allows for increased interaction and audience engagement.

Many of the elements that make social networking platforms strong communication tools are now being used internally, allowing employees of these organizations and businesses to collaborate and connect with the same ease as with external audiences.

For many years the excellence theory (Grunig, 1992), with its ideal of two-way symmetrical communication, has been the dominant normative framework in public relations (PR). From an affordance perspective, social media seem to side perfectly with this promise of a more balanced power relation between participants in the communication loop. The purpose of this paper is to see if this promise was realized in the context of an internal communication practitioner’s social software use.

The authors used a critical case approach for the organizational ethnography. Therefore, the authors selected an IT company where the formal position of internal communication was being created. In this environment, the authors considered it “least likely” to find the unidirectional model of “push communication.” The authors used the network gatekeeping theory (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) to study technology usage patterns in the organization.

The analysis indicates that the internal communicator uses social software to interact with other employees. The authors additionally found these tools to affect the gatekeeping role of internal communication, altering the position’s ideological focus through its ability to shape the technological environment.

On a theoretical level, the network gatekeeping theory proved to be useful to study power relations inside organizations. On a practical level, the authors found themselves combining different data sources to grasp the complexity of organizational communication practices.

This research questions the widespread assumption that adoption of social software leads to excellence in PR. Additionally, the use of ethnographic methods in PR has been rare.

The management of organisational knowledge and the promotion of staff knowledge sharing are largely neglected in higher education institutions. The purpose of this study is to examine how enterprise social networks can enable staff knowledge sharing in communities of practice in that context.

The study is framed as an Action Research project, covering three cycles over a 12-month period. During the Diagnosing phase, a conceptual model was developed for empirical testing. Data were collected through 30 semi-structured interviews and a number of focus groups. This was supplemented by content analysis and reflective journaling.

The findings support the conceptual model and provide insight into the antecedents necessary for the creation of an enterprise social network-enabled knowledge-sharing environment, the motivators for and barriers to participation, and the perceived organisational and individual benefits of increased staff knowledge-sharing activity.

As the study has a higher education focus, all of the findings may not be generalizable to other types of organisation. Further development of the conceptual model and testing in other contextual settings will yield greater generalizability.

A number of findings have practical implications for the management of higher education institutions, such as the evidence of a divide between faculty and other staff. In general, the study findings provide an opportunity for educationalists to better understand the scope and impact of employing social media platforms for knowledge sharing.

This paper adds to the growing body of work on organisational implementations of social media, and should be of interest to practitioners and researchers undertaking similar projects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors influencing knowledge sharing on enterprise social network (ESN) use behaviour among academic staff in universities, using the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as the underlying research framework

A conceptual framework was created by extending the UTAUT by incorporating three additional factors, namely, feature value (FV), relationship expectancy (RE) and professional benefits. A quantitative approach based on the survey was used to collect data from 254 academic staff. Data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The result indicated significant differences around factors influencing both consumptive and contributive usage patterns within ESNs. These factors suggest more contributive than consumptive use.

Future research should consider a longitudinal study focusing on the change in ESN use behaviour among academic staff and the fundamental aspects influencing this change.

This study extends the UTAUT model by incorporating three additional factors: FV, RE and professional benefits, to study ESN use behaviour in a higher education context. This study has significantly modified UTAUT to include the dynamic nature of ESN usage.

This paper aims to investigate the mechanisms for transforming construction professionals’ intentions into use of social media (SM) for knowledge sharing (KS). The objectives are to: identify the common types of SM platforms used by the construction professionals for KS; identify the key problems influencing transformation of the construction professionals’ intentions into use of SM for KS; identify the factors mitigating the problems; and provide recommendations for enhancing construction professionals’ use of SM for KS.

The data was collected through semi-structured interviews with Australian construction professionals and analysed using grounded theory (GT). The outcomes of the analyses formed a framework for the enhancement of SM use for KS.

The findings show that private SM followed by enterprise SM are more appealing to the construction professionals for KS compared to public SM; and uncertainties about users’ privacy/confidentiality and the quality of the shared knowledge adversely affect the transformation of the construction professionals’ intentions into use of SM for KS. Three types of trust are identified as the mitigators of the identified problems. A framework is proffered to enhance SM use for KS by construction professionals.

This paper contributes to the construction literature by developing a GT to explain the factors which impact the transformation of the construction professionals’ intentions into use of SM for KS. Additionally, the practical contribution of this study is the provision of framework constituting recommendations for the enhancement of SM use for KS.

This paper aims to build on affordance theory from a discovery perspective, to illustrate how motivations and goals behind enterprise social media adoption by companies in the fashion and apparel industries are discovered and realized in performance. Enterprise social media and its exogenous technological affordances are introduced as action opportunities in an organization during implementation, to be discovered and acted upon by users to effect various performance outcomes.

A case study approach was adopted. Data was collected on five fashion companies that have implemented enterprise social media for their internal communication.

The findings show that fashion companies adopt enterprise social media offered by external vendors to actively seek more effective internal communication and collaboration among their employees. However, fashion companies embark on different pathways of discovering and actualizing the affordances from the newly implemented enterprise social media. As a result, these firms achieved various kinds of performance benefits, which range from improved customer loyalty to enhanced innovation performance.

This study is the first to introduce a discovery perspective to affordance theory and systematically document the success of enterprise social media appropriation by companies in the fashion and apparel industries.