Enterprise social media and collaboration tools could help employers to obtain a better return on investment from their knowledge workers and improve engagement, a study has found.

A survey among 150 managers and knowledge workers undertaken by Forrester Research on behalf of project and portfolio management software provider AtTask revealed that, despite often high levels of investment, many organisations had little idea what return their knowledge workers generated or how to fully exploit their skills.
 
To make matters worse, many of these employees appeared to feel disengaged. Almost half felt that their contributions were undervalued or unrecognised, although only a quarter of managers agreed.
 
A further two out of five believed that management did not understand how their activities contributed to business objectives compared with 25% of bosses themselves, while three quarters pointed out that missing and inaccurate information relating to what they did led to significant amounts of money being wasted. About two thirds of managers concurred.
 
Nonetheless, just over half of knowledge workers and two thirds of their bosses felt that peer-to-peer social media and collaboration tools could be used to help boost the visibility of their accomplishments and improve the quality of information available, thus helping to boost ROI.
 
In news elsewhere, a study undertaken by graduate recruitment web site Milkround.com revealed that only 29% of students currently use social media to promote themselves to potential employers, even though 96% visit Facebook on a daily basis and 84% turn to the site before any other each morning.
 
This failure to exploit social media for employment purposes boiled down to a lack of understanding of how to do so (81%). Just over half of respondents appreciated the value of professional networking site LinkedIn to search for jobs and said they would use it if provided with more guidance, but only 14% checked it on a daily basis.