EXPRESS: Enterprise Social Media Platform Design and Knowledge Worker Productivity

Companies often use enterprise social media platforms (ESMPs) to promote helping behavior among knowledge workers and to improve their productivity. However, many ESMP implementations have had mixed success due to employee reluctance to engage with the platform (e.g. by requesting and giving help). Prominent ESMPs have added varying design features to promote helping behavior, but the effectiveness of individual design features remains unclear. Our paper studies this using a laboratory experiment that consists of two studies. In Study 1, we explore the effect of individual design features on a participant’s decision to make and answer help requests, and the impact that has on their performance. Our first two treatments vary the level of platform helping behavior visible to participants. Our third treatment sets helping goals that participants can complete by making and answering help requests and rewards them with private badges for doing so. We find that only the treatment with helping goals and badges results in a significant 5.5% increase in participant performance. It achieves this primarily by increasing a participant’s propensity to request help and, to a lesser degree, their propensity to answer help requests. In Study 2, we show that similar improvements can be achieved with just a helping goal that asks participants to help others (without a badge). This speaks to the effectiveness of using goal setting motivation to leverage an individual’s intrinsic motivation to help others, even when it comes at a cost to themselves. Interestingly, we further show that helping goals that explicitly ask participants to help others also encourage participants to request more help, increasing the overall use of the platform. Based on our findings, we encourage companies to adopt ESMPs with badges for the helping goals they have. We also encourage ESMPs that do not have badges to consider adding them natively to their platforms.