Your Vendors Are Not Your "Friends"

Today's typical firm is being transformed inside and out by collaborative technology; many of the key questions surrounding how the extended enterprise best functions in our ever-changing social media environment are still being worked out on an everyday basis in offices around the globe.

Add to this continuing conversation a datapoint from OfficeTeam (via Boston Biz Journal), a survey based on telephone interviews with randomly selected senior executives at the nation's 1,000 largest companies that revealed the following:

Thirty-two percent chose the strongest category out of 5 comfort levels and were "not comfortable at all" being friended by their boss, 33 percent were "not comfortable at all" being friended by people they manage, and the same number felt the same way about clients.

Thirty-eight percent were "not comfortable at all" being friended by vendors.

This underlines the importance of policy-setting in the new environment; a policy should be tight enough to know that the organizations' "tone from the top" isn't being compromised, but loose enough to allow for collaborative behavior (especially at lower levels of the organization, where these types of informal networks have long existed).