Transparency and trust are critical to getting the best out of employees – and new collaboration technologies can enable this, says Marc Benioff, CEO of Cloud Computing company Salesforce.com.

Best known for its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Cloud service, Salesforce.com last year fleshed out its portfolio with a collaboration offering called Chatter. Chatter is a form of corporate social networking that is intended to flatten corporate hierarchies and enable greater sharing of information across rather than up and down organisations.

Last month, Salesforce.com ‘ate its own dog food’ by using Chatter to invite all its employees worldwide to participate in one of the firm’s regular worldwide management meetings. “These are usually held behind locked doors, but this time we broadcast the meeting live on video internally,” explains Benioff, adding: “So anyone who worked for Salesforce.com could tune in live and see our ceremonial robes, see the Illuminati symbols and so on."

Staff around the world were able to interact with the meeting and provide their input.

Benioff said: “We put Chatter groups up on big TV screens that we had around the room and we kitted everyone out with iPads with Chatter on them, and new iPod Touches with Chatter on it. We let all our employees worldwide comment on what was going on in the meeting and we could see all the status updates on the TV screens.”

He added: “It changed the management meeting into a worldwide alignment meeting with input from our employees worldwide.”

There is now a class of employees within Salesforce.com known affectionately as ‘the Chatter-ati’, particularly heavy users of Chatter who Benioff refers to as “the life blood” of the company. But beyond these ‘super-users’, the roll out of Chatter internally is having beneficial effects in terms of management insight into employee performance.

“Something else is really amazing about Chatter. We’ll soon have 5000 employees at Salesforce,” said Benioff. “It’s hard to know what everyone is doing, what’s going on and who is really great, who is adding value, but Chatter makes it all very visible. It becomes a meritocracy. We really see the employees who are making a difference. When it goes enterprise-wide, you get that value in an incredible way. That’s why I’m definitely so bullish about social networking.”

Benioff adds that Salesforce.com customers are also adopting Chatter for similar reasons. “[The CEO at] one of our very largest customers has been using the product very extensively himself, because neither one of us has ever seen a tool that’s given us this transparency into organisation. That’s what we’ve needed. Email does not give you transparency. When you’re in Outlook, you don’t really know what’s going on in the company [from] seeing these email messages flying by, but with Chatter you do. You’re able to really see what’s happening and you can make better decisions.

“[This] CEO had a major deal that was working on in a telecommunications’ company that he didn’t know about. He was able to see it with Chatter [by] going through all the posts and seeing all of his employees [and] what they are doing, watching their collaboration. All of a sudden he saw that they were having a hard time working with the manufacturing department of his company. So he called the manufacturing department and said ‘You need to help these guys who are working solely with this telecom company ‘. He said that was the greatest thing for him, that he could relieve the organisational friction using Chatter.”

Overall, Benioff regards Chatter-empowered inclusion as a major benefit to encouraging employee engagement and boosting a sense of involvement and loyalty. “Transparency is the key future value for employees. Having that level of communication, transparency, trust and loyalty is essential,” he argues. “This is what happens throughout our company every day now. The level of synthesis is amazing. That is the key – having the global conversation.” 

• If you’re interested in discovering more about tools like these, the Business Cloud Summit is the place to be on 30 November. Editor Charlie Duff will be hosting a special HR-focused session and there’s plenty of opportunity to get your hands on technology which could transform your department and business. Click here to find out more.