Social networking sites are reshaping the world of work in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of the Microsoft era. This blog series will shed some light on the huge advantages they bring to the workplace that will affect the way the next generation works.

A recent Harvard Business Review report highlights six fundamental shifts in the way we work. The post outlines 6 ways tomorrow’s office doesn’t have to be like a scene from “The Office”. Here’s what I found most interesting…

Collaboration within the professional graph increases efficiency

Social networking sites have now been able to scale the number of connections (to the hundreds of millions, in some cases) and interactions (think of the immense potential here with millions of nodes) in the ecosystem, we should now be able to see increasing returns thanks to  the “collaboration curve”.

As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.

The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to “crowdsourcing” to “creation spaces.” In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. 

I think we’re just scratching the surface as we figure out ways to get better at how we work, using existing social networking ecosystems. LinkedIn alone has over 75 million professionals on the site, which should lead to numerous opportunities for increasing efficiencies at work. We are able to close deals better with help from friends of friends, ditto for finding a job, asking questions on LinkedIn groups helps us find answers on projects, that’d have otherwise taken us way more time in the past. Don’t you think so?

In what other ways have you seen social networking sites like LinkedIn change the way we work? Leave a comment.

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