Blogs from Boston: Virtual Trust (Part 1)

At Naked Generations, we’ve realised that when it comes to the commercial success of a business, establishing a robust yet flexible culture is essential. It’s a familiar story: if employees are aligned both professionally and emotionally, working passionately together towards a common goal, productivity and innovation goes up, while costs go down. Pfizer and Google are cases in point.

In order for organisations to design and implement such a culture, it is essential to build trust. Trust is a tricky concept, as it means different things to different people. And multinational organisations must manage thousands of employees from hundreds of cultures and multiple generations, to each of whom trust has a unique definition.

So how can one build a trust-based culture which aligns such diversity? This is where organisations can learn from their Generation Y employees and their use of social media, including social networking sites and massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

The definition of Web2.0, social media is highly user-focused and empowers users from all cultures and generations to build trust-based relationships with each other. This is because the content creation aspect of the technology enables its assimilation into the values of national and generational culture and so users can connect with each other using the same networking site or online game, without having to sacrifice their cultural identity.

Specifically, social media fosters two types of trust essential to any organisation: fixed and swift trust. Social networking sites build fixed trust, while online games build swift trust. The following three blogs (Virtual Trust parts I-III) will explain these trusts in more detail, offering a solution as to how they can be combined into one dynamic system to enable organisations to build a robust yet flexible corporate culture, which will result in commercial, as well as cultural, success.

Virtual Trust Part I: The Facebook Way

The need to connect is a fundamental human need. Whether it be dinner with a loved one, a phone conversation with relatives, or surrounding oneself with numerous online friends, we all want to feel part of something, within which we can define our place.

Social networking sites are a global phenomenon, enabling people to connect with others across the world, creating multiple trust-based communities, such as special interest groups or a cluster of close friends.  While those from different countries and generations use networking sites to suit their cultural needs (such as Americans keeping in touch with hundreds of acquaintances, as compared with Koreans just communicating intensely with a small group of friends; and Generation X and Baby Boomers using sites specifically to develop professional networks), when connecting on the same social network, users tend to adopt a temporary ‘shared’ culture based on the norms of the site. Social networking sites specifically enable users to build fixed trust, which can be defined as the emotional and temporal investment in order to build a relationship.

Facebook is a touchstone example. Here people can connect and build fixed trust in multiple ways, such as updating their close friends and acquaintances with their latest actions, joining specialist interest communities, playing games, chatting, and sharing photographs with friends. One can use Facebook to remain in contact with old friends and acquaintances or choose only to communicate with a small group of close friends. Users can link their Facebook profiles with other networking sites, such as Twitter (popular with Generation X and Boomers) and Orkut (popular in Brazil and India). Finally, Facebook has launched in non-English speaking countries, such as Spain and Japan, where it is working with volunteers to translate the site into the respective languages. This will provide even more opportunity for culturally-specific content to be demanded and created by new users, thus enabling more diverse cultures and generations to bond (on Facebook).

Thus social networking sites, rather than being exclusive to one culture, enable Generation Y to build fixed trust with multiple cultures and generations. Organisations which have cottoned on to this include Pfizer, which launched an internal social networking site, empowering employees globally to connect and share ideas, thus building fixed trust relationships multiple cultures and generations. 

.../next time: PART II: 'AIM OF THE GAME'