The use of collaboration tools at work

This research examined how employees perceive the use of social media type collaboration tools (SMTCT) at work. Organizations and their environments have changed. Technology is taking an increasing role in employees’ everyday work and tasks, making their work less visible and more abstract to their peers. Besides, organizations have evolved in a way that they are more and more “jobless” or “boundaryless”. Therefore, employees have to work in a broader perspective than their own job duties and they are expected to go beyond their job, to understand the “big picture”. At the same time, the way people communicate with each other in their private life has also evolved during the last decades. People are increasingly becoming users and, sometimes, heavy users of social media platforms. While social media have outperformed emails as the primary way to communicate socially, in the workplace, emails remain the primary means of communication. However, social media technologies are increasingly implemented and adopted by organizations and many experts foresee social networks as the most popular form of communication among teams within organizations within a decade. In this study, in-depth interviews were conducted in order to explore and understand employees’ perception of the use of SMTCT at work. The findings suggest that employees perceive SMTCT as having brought significant changes to their everyday work. Besides, employees’ experience with such tools also seem to be contradictory at some points. First, the findings highlight the fact that SMTCT tend to have an impact on employees’ relationship with immediacy. SMTCT enable employees to save time for different reasons such as communicating in a way more straightforward and targeted way or benefiting from other employees’ connectedness and responsiveness. Employees tend to see SMTCT tone of voice less formal, which enables them to create more intimate relationships with their colleagues. Finally, it enables employees to communicate with each other beyond geographical limitations. However, we could also observe that this immediacy can also generate a feeling of loss of control over time among employees. Second, SMTCT induced some transitions in the way people share, exchange knowledge. While respondents tended to perceive SMTCT as a way to better learn collectively by sharing their views and experience as well as a way to centralize and archive knowledge. They also seemed to recognize that SMTCT do not enable a very organized and structured archiving. Finally, SMTCT seem to have an impact on employees’ mental resources management. The addition of new tools on top of many already existing tools within organizations seem to be sometimes a bit complex to handle. Having to deal with a great variety of attitudes and behaviors from other employees towards SMTCT and having to deal with a multiplicity of communication tools can sometimes increase employees’ mental load.