They were presented as the next big revolution in collaborative work. Enterprise social networks were supposed to connect knowledge, bring teams closer together, and free the flow of ideas. They promised to break down silos, flatten hierarchies, and give everyone a voice in the collective conversation.
However, just a few years after their arrival, the mountain gave birth to a mouse. These platforms, supposed to be at the heart of a new way of working, have become just another internal communication channel, and the tool that was supposed to change the way we work has changed nothing at all (The rise and fall of enterprise social networks).
In short:
- Enterprise social networks (ESNs) have failed to transform collaborative work because they have remained on the fringes of daily activities, without integration into workflows or organizational change.
- The few effective uses, rooted in concrete tasks, have remained isolated, hampered by a lack of managerial will and a vision focused on communication rather than collaboration.
- Community management, often disconnected from the ground and led by people outside the business, reinforced the distance between the tool and the real needs of employees.
- Cultural and structural barriers (fear of exposure, lack of recognition, pressure on productivity) prevented the widespread adoption of open and fluid collaboration.
- The community approach eventually prevailed elsewhere, integrated directly into business tools, proving that the concept was relevant but that its implementation in the ESNs had been poorly thought out.
A promise forgotten from the outset
When they first appeared, corporate social networks held great promise: they would streamline collaboration, facilitate knowledge sharing, bring remote teams closer together, and speed up problem solving. They were supposed to extend the physical office into the digital space, not by replicating it, but by reinventing it. However, this ambition quickly faded.
The tool remained a separate space, operating alongside work rather than at its heart. The architecture of work was not changed, and social media was not integrated into business processes, remaining an add-on, a supplement that was consulted out of curiosity rather than necessity. Logically, without being anchored in everyday life, it had no chance of becoming indispensable.
When use in the flow worked but remained marginal
The few attempts at direct integration into the workflow nevertheless proved effective. Where online exchange was directly linked to a task to be performed or a concrete problem to be solved, the tool ceased to be an empty virtual room and became a natural extension of the activity. We moved from discussion for discussion’s sake to contributions that advanced a topic (Are in-the-flow activities a cure against cultural barriers ?).
But these examples remained marginal. Few managers dared to impose this practice, and few organizations were willing to invest in the necessary integrations with business tools. The difficulty was not technological but one of will: believing in this model, understanding what it implied, and accepting to change the way work was organized. Without this conviction, we fell back on what seemed simplest: turning it into an internal medium, which was all the easier since internal communication was sometimes the origin of the project. This may have skewed many projects from the outset, but in any case, it was a perfect example of “you can’t fight nature”.
From network to internal media
This shift is not insignificant. Within businesses, running a social network has become synonymous with publishing information and artificially stimulating conversations around communities that, for many, did not exist spontaneously. Community managers, often from outside the business, were tasked with creating engagement without any legitimacy on the subject.
This “above-ground” animation created a gap between the network and the realities on the ground. Employees quickly perceived the distance between their daily work and this space, which at best entertained them and at worst took up their time without offering anything in return. Without a business foundation, the tool lost its relevance.
Added to this was the fact that businesses wanted to call any group of people they would like to see collaborating a community, thus creating communities of people who had no desire to participate (Lessons on the hard job of designing communities in the organization) or using community management to animate groups that were not communities in the strict sense of the term (Can participation be mandated into communities. Yes…most of all when it’s not communities).
Mainstream social media: same effects, different causes
We could see a parallel with the evolution of mainstream social media. I have already shown how public space on these platforms has given way to private spaces, and how exchanges have changed: users no longer share who they are or what they know, but rather the image they want to project (From social networks to social media: the story of relational impoverishment).
In business, the phenomenon has been different, but the effects are comparable. Here, it is not image building that has dominated, but the fear of exposing oneself. Speaking up in a community of experts or interest groups means accepting the risk of being judged, of not being up to the task. And this inhibition is even stronger in a professional context than in the personal sphere, where the stakes are less directly related to one’s career (Social collaboration isn’t lacking tools, it’s lacking permission).
The fear of exposing oneself, an avoidable obstacle
Integrating social media into the workflow could have been a game changer. Employees are not asked to speak up, but to contribute to a project, answer a work-related question, or document a solution. These are factual, contextualized actions that are less subject to subjective interpretation.
By placing the tool at the heart of processes, we shifted the conversation toward the concrete and factual, reducing psychological barriers. But this approach has not been widespread, often due to a lack of vision or organizational courage, and approaches based on social routine (Enterprise 2.0 : adoption through social routine) or process socialization (Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?) that I and others promoted struggled to find traction with businesses looking for a self-sustaining tool that would create change without having to be managed, even though we have known since the dawn of time that in reality the opposite is true.
Structural obstacles have not helped matters
Added to this are deeper obstacles. Little or no recognition for those who take the time to share, no dedicated time in their schedules to do so, and organizational double talk: we celebrate knowledge sharing while maintaining pressure that leaves little room for anything other than immediate production.
These contradictions end up exhausting even the most willing contributors. Without recognition or integration into everyday life, momentum fizzles out. We then come to the wrong conclusion that it doesn’t work, when in fact it is the approach that has failed, not the concept.
Logically, we ended up with artificial communities kept alive by community management acting as a life support system.
Worse still, we confused team management with community management, even though managers did not want to get involved in what was a profound transformation of their way of working (Sometimes you need a community manager. Sometimes a manager is enough…).
In the end, we tried to make two worlds coexist without working to create synergies (How to understand and position enterprise 2.0 in the real enterprise), but to do that, there would have had to be organizational and managerial will, rather than hoping for a miracle to happen on its own.
The right approach won out, but elsewhere
Ironically, the community logic of enterprise social networks eventually prevailed… but elsewhere. Today, it is directly integrated into business tools: conversation spaces linked to documents, discussion threads attached to tasks, collaborative groups associated with a project.
In other words, exactly where it should have been from the start. Enterprise social networks did not fail because the principle was wrong, but because we refused to make them part of the reality of work and, by repositioning them as a media, we emptied them of their promise. By not placing them at the heart of workflows, we missed an opportunity to profoundly change the way teams collaborate.
Bottom line
The history of enterprise social networks is not one of a bad tool, but of a missed opportunity. We tried to import a conversational model without adopting the assumptions necessary for its success (We should not expect an application to work in environments for which its assumptions are not valid). What failed was not network collaboration, but our inability to think about it in the context of work.
Today, community and conversational features are thriving in business tools because they are natural and integrated into the action, proving that there was no error in vision, only a poor choice of execution. And this lesson applies to all innovations: if they are not part of everyday life, they remain at best promises and at worst memories.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Related articles:
33 things to know about those who make your online social spaces live
The rise and fall of enterprise social networks
Social Networking for Business : a collaboration engineering guide in the 2.0 era
What place for communities in collaboration ?
Can participation be mandated into communities. Yes…most of all when it’s not communities
Quiet Constraint”, an HR topic? Really?
