20%

of companies around the world in the next three years will use social networks as the main tool of corporate communications instead of email.

This will improve the productivity of office staff by 20-25%. 28% of working time (11.2 hours per week) is currently spent on reading and responding to email. When using corporate social networks, time spent falls by as much as 30% due to the possibility of searching all messages that have been generated.

These data are presented in a study by Olga Gaponova, Associate Professor in the Department of General and Strategic Management (Faculty of Management) at the HSE campus in Nizhny Novgorod; Evgeny Zakablukovsky, Director of Public Relations for the Intel Corporation in Russia; and Ilya Korshunov, Deputy Minister of Education of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. More on the study - ‘Corporate Social Networks in Modern Organizational Management’ - which covers how social networks can increase productivity, can be found on the OPEC.ru website (in Russian).