NPSC Blog

I have posted once or twice in the past about the need for government agencies to ensure that, as digital natives start to flood into the workplace, the working environment in the public sector is not too dissimilar from the networked social environment that this generation (and any other early adopters of social media) are immersed in.

This story, on the expectations of younger employees stitches together threads from an Enterprise 2.0 conference where a number of speakers made similar observations.

According to one of the presenters,

45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on. (my emphasis)

It seems this is not only the easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0, but also the most prevalent.

What can we do?

If we want to attract and retain these sort of people into public sector roles, then we need to be aware of their expectations around social media. James Durbin recently posted an excellent series of social media questions for job interviewers and applicants: things that should be discussed and answered prior to signing on with an organization. Some of these questions would make a good set of tools to audit your agency for social media/digital native ‘friendliness’.

If I was looking at moving to another agency, I would include a couple of other, more specific ones:

1. Can I FTP through the corporate firewall? (You can’t run a blog – properly– without this permission)
2. What browser(s) do you run on your network? (If the answer doesn’t include Firefox, go back to the whiteboard)
3. What sites are whitelisted for downloading and installing software on my machine? (Mozilla extensions would be an obvious one)

Yes, there are ways to get around these constraints. However, agencies should be moving to recognize social media as both a communications channel and practice to engage and understand, and as an opportunity for a point of difference as an employer of choice.

Attracting and retaining smart, motivated people is critical to delivering high quality government services. And, as one of the speakers at the conference observed:

The upcoming generation is going to have a major impact on business. She will expect to have access to her tools in the workplace… It would be like someone from my generation not having access to e-mail and instant messaging. If they don’t get this stuff, they probably won’t be there for a long time.

Conclusion

Social media is changing not only the environment that public sector communicators operate in, but the environment that public services are delivered in. We need to understand these changes and to be actively feeding them back into our organizations so that we better manage the demand and expectations of the people we serve and employ.

It is happening anyway, the question is whether or not we want to ensure that it happens in strategic and focussed way?

Photo: Mrs Sarah Reed. Hat tip Canadian Cybrarian for the excellent neologism.