MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Are Enterprise Social Platforms All Talk?

To get the most from corporate knowledge-sharing tools, encourage users to engage with more content, not just build their personal brand.

The widespread shift to remote work has made organizations increasingly reliant on digital collaboration platforms that enable employees to work together, manage projects, solve problems, and share knowledge. But these tools’ effectiveness in practice is often limited by how participants use them.

The conventional wisdom, based on previous research, suggests that a lack of contributors is what limits the value of these platforms. However, we observed a strong tendency for users to post content rather than read content created by others. Our findings indicate that it’s not the lack of contributions but lack of engagement with the knowledge contributed by others that restricts the potential of these tools.

About the Author

Burcu Bulgurcu is an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Management. Wietske Van Osch holds the Canada Research Chair in Enterprise Social Media and Digital Collaboration and is an associate professor in the Department of Information Technologies at HEC Montréal. Gerald C. Kane is the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration and a professor in the Department of Management Information Systems at University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. This project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (IIS-1749018) and the Canada Research Chairs program.

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