Marcia Conner, Principal with SensifyGroup and a Social Biz Expert and author, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, at the IBM Information on Demand 2013 event in Las Vegas, to talk about the organizational culture, the smarter workforce and the Social Business.

“For many years, when people went to work they were required to leave their personality in the car. Social Business is the first opportunity we have to be human beings at work. We’re allowed to actually talk about the things we care about, we’re allowed to bring our interests and our passions into the conversation, and to be real, trustworthy, people,” explained Conner. “People can be their full selves.”

“It seems so simple only because the backlash or the way that we have worked for so long has been so strong and so overpowering, that we almost equate not being human with what business is,” declared Conner. So the idea of social and business being together seems a little off because we assume that business is human. It’s inhuman, but the idea of bringing them together is a huge step in the right direction and it opens up the possibility of actually doing great things.”

Vellante recalled the 2006-2007 debates, when people were still wondering what the ROI was to applying social media to business. Then, as he said, people “just did it”, and everything turned out great: there are productivity gains, people are happier, and it’s just the sort of a natural progression of what we’re doing in our everyday lives.

“To me it’s more what can you do with all these data we’re collecting and how can you actually affect changes within organizations and feed back to people, empowering them in different ways,” said Vellante.

Still, Conner’s already thinking about the next steps: “We need to figure out what we need to remove, not add.”

What’s next for social business?

“It’s not that we have all these new data and we can actually be doing more stuff; the question becomes for me (and organizations I work with) what can we remove, what are the policies and the nonsense that happens in work every single day that shouldn’t be there. It’s only there because we don’t have a better way, a more trustworthy and a more human way of actually working together, so it’s incredibly liberating and incredibly open from our perspective simply because it’s less,” explained Conner.

The biggest compliment ever received was “You make work not suck” – recalled Conner. “That’s how people in large organizations feel like. The amount of time each of us spend on actually just maintaining the organization is time we could be using for far better things.”

Breaking old habits

“The most specific thing I do is I very rigorously scalpel – like the organizations tell me. I go in and I identify what is keeping people from doing the things they were hired to do,” said Marcia Conner. “We always hire the best and brightest people that we know, but something happens about two and a half weeks in – it’s not that we inject stupidity, but we put people in cages, we ask them to leave a large part of who they are, and what they are capable of doing, somewhere else.”

“What we find consistently is that the more you feel like you’ve been stuffed into a desk drawer, the more likely you are to still bring those capabilities to some other part of your life. I am a big fan of people doing great things in the community, but it’s really sad that we can’t bring the same capabilities and ingenuity into the workplace, where people are hired to actually share those gifts.”

Process implementing in organizations

“When they start introducing social tools in the workplace they were not worried about people saying stupid things, but because their employees were behaving like cats under a stare,” joked Conner. “Nobody would say anything because they were so terrified of what would happen as a result of them saying that. We had to start introducing into the culture of that organization processes that would say ‘we care about what you think’,” clarified Conner.

“We have introverts and extroverts at our workplace. We have people who are comfortable talking in public and people who aren’t. The simple introduction of on-line tools brings to our workplaces a way for people who are uncomfortable sharing to do that with a little more anonymity, and to have a lot more comfort in being able to do that. They may not actually look people in the eye when they do that, but it doesn’t mean they do not have valuable things to say,” said Conner.

“A journalist asked me a while ago if the introduction of social tools would mean the end of meetings. Absolutely not, but what they are now going to hear are the voices of people who never spoke up at meetings. In order to have a well-rounded workforce, you need the voices of all those brilliant people you hired,” concluded Marcia Conner.

View of the future

The conclusion of this great interview was that we are witnessing the end of a particular epoch, and we have the tools and technologies to do something significant. We have the chance to rewrite how organizations work, what work means, how human beings get to interact to be able to make change in the world. Conner is extremely confident that “the systems that are not working are going to fall away; we have the opportunity to be able to say ‘I want to be a human being 24 hours a day, I don’t wanna be a number or a chess pawn any longer and I’m going to make a difference in the work I’m doing everyday’.”