Enterprise Social Media Platform Design and Knowledge Worker Productivity

Companies often use enterprise social media platforms (ESMPs) to promote help 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 help, 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 help requested and given, and the impact that has on performance. Our first two treatments vary the level of helping behavior visible to participants. Our third treatment sets helping goals that participants can complete by requesting and giving help and rewards them with private badges for doing so. We find that only the helping goals with badges treatment results in a significant 5.5% increase in performance. It achieves this by primarily increasing help requested and, to a lesser degree, help given. 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, and to help individuals overcome some of their reluctance to request help. Based on our findings, we encourage companies to adopt ESMPs with badges for the helping goals they have.