Using social networking for your office survival

by Shadowmaster on 29/11/09 at 3:12 pm

I guess every­one today’s is using linkedin (www.linkedin.com) or twit­ter (www.twitter.com) , face­book (www.facebook.com) or any other form of social net­work­ing site in order to meet and know new peo­ple and estab­lish a con­nec­tion net­work between them.

Before I’ll start I want to write down the def­i­n­i­tion of net­work­ing (as taken from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/networking) — the act of meet­ing new peo­ple in a busi­ness or social context.

As an office sur­vivor and a mas­ter of the office pol­i­tics you are prob­a­bly ask­ing your­self how can net­work­ing works for me? It’s a known fact that peo­ple like to share oth­ers with what they need, want or look for, but in the same time they for­get that if they write about it in one of the social net­work­ing site every­one in their con­nec­tion list — even their supe­rior or work­ers can see it.

Using this infor­ma­tion and trans­fer it into your advan­tage is very easy, all you need to do is to find out which social net­work­ing sites your office fal­lows are signed to, sign there and add them as your friend.

This sim­ple action will allow you to a broad look about what’s going on in the office and some­times in real life, you prob­a­bly ask­ing your­self :  “Hey doesn’t this turn me into some sort of spy?”

well you are right, but when you know about issues in per­sonal life you can trans­fer it into infor­ma­tion for you.

Here are some exam­ples on things you should be aware when you “spy” on your co-worker:

• Your co-worker writes some­thing “Seek­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties…”, if his posi­tion is higher than yours or if it’s some­thing else you wish to trans­fer into this is your time. you may notice sev­eral stuff such as:

some­one is being inter­viewed for the posi­tion in that case the search isn’t dis­cred­its and you could come to the co-worker or HR and ask to be moved to that posi­tion. Some­times those search are dis­cred­its so wait until your co-worker find a job and than go and offer your­self instead of him. In case of female co-worker as females tend to write about fam­ily issues as well.

OR,

some­one com­plains and moan about how much work she has, this is tricky thing as you have to act with your charm because you see a per­sonal infor­ma­tion that isn’t really related to work.

Here is what you need to do – Go and talk with her small talk, how is she doing, how does she man­age to work with all the oblig­a­tion at work, etc.. try to see if she has any inter­ests to lower her work­ing per­cent­age at the office, if yes ask her :

“what does the office think about this kind of moves as you were think­ing to do the same?”

accord­ing to her answer you can know if it’s some­thing the office wel­comes, or doesn’t know, or per­haps she didn’t even talk with any­one about it yet.

This is your sign to be on the look out and notice any changes regard­ing her posi­tion in the near future and just be there to offer yourself.

• Some­one from your office has wrote in his net­work­ing pro­file he is look­ing for an employee for posi­tion Z. How won­der­ful you think to your­self as posi­tion Z is the exact posi­tion you wants to have.

It’s time to find out (if you don’t know by now) what’s the office pol­i­tics about being pro­moted from one posi­tion to the other within the office, what is needed and required for that posi­tion, etc…

When you know all that go and exam­ine your co-worker by ask­ing some­thing like :

“How’s the search for posi­tion Z going on?”

at this point he doesn’t know you are inter­ested and you’ll know if the posi­tion is taken and what he is look­ing for from the per­son to fill it.

At this point you can say :

“This posi­tion sounds inter­est­ing, I think it some­thing that might suit me”.

You have just opened your­self a gate to this posi­tion, get­ting it depends on your skills and if you are suit­able for it.

Some office sur­vivors will say that at this point they will go to talk with the HR about this, in order to be empower by them as well, but again it depends on the co-worker and what he looks for.

• Your co-worker has left the office with­out telling you to where, or in some cases he tells but don’t state his new posi­tion. Peo­ple tend to update their pro­file so sooner or later his social net­work pro­file will be updated with all the needed information.

your job now to wait for month in order to let him set­tle in his new place. After a period of a month or so start to search infor­ma­tion if the new place is seek­ing new peo­ple by ask­ing him, seek­ing the wanted sec­tion of his new office, or even look at the sta­tus of some of the peo­ple who works in the new office with your for­mer co-worker.

At this point you have all the needed infor­ma­tion, talk with your for­mer co-worker and tell him

“I have seen your office is seek­ing to fill posi­tion Y, can I pass you my CV so you could give it to your HR?”.

Using the social net­work­ing can be dis­ad­van­tage so use is wisely – as described pre­vi­ously about a co-worker that writes “seek­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties”. When you write some­thing like that and your boss or HR notices it than they will start to think and now you’ll have to find a new place before your cur­rent one will find your replacement.

For con­clu­sion, when you are open­ing a social net­work pro­file you allow other to see what you are think­ing at the moment, just remem­ber that if you wish to use the power of it, you’ll have to be smart enough and not to revel all your cards.

Using the tac­tics described ear­lier will help you to achieve what you want and that is to live another day and get your salary in order to exists.

Using social net­work­ing for your office sur­vival, 1.0 out of 10 based on 2 rat­ings

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