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Research by McKinsey and Company shows that more than half of all firms use some form of social media to enable employees to collaborate and exchange information. According to Wharton operations and information management professor Lynn Wu, the adoption of enterprise social media can improve a firms bottom line, but it also has a surprising effect: The more individuals use social terms such as coffee, lunch or baseball while engaging with colleagues on social networks, the less likely they are to be laid off.

Wu wrote about that finding in a paper titled, Social Network Effects on Productivity and Job Security: Evidence from the Adoption of a Social Networking Tool. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Wu discussed her research and its implications for workers and managers who use social networking tools.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

About the research:

I study how enterprise social media affects various types of work outcomes. There has been an uptick in [enterprise social media adoption] in recent years. In 2009, a McKinsey Report showed that only 28% of firms used some type of social networking tool. But by 2012, that had gone up to 53%.

We are familiar with consumer facing social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. There are lots of studies, start-ups or industry activities around consumer facing social media. But how enterprise social media affects performance, affects firms, affects employees and affects collaboration hasnt been examined. And thats what Im trying to do to understand how enterprise social media enables network formation and information acquisition, and how these benefits ultimately affect various outcomes, such as your billable revenue or you probability of being laid off in the next cycle.

Social communication has bigger power than objective performance [measures] in predicting whether individuals were laid off during the recession.

How social media affects the bottom line and more:

Information diversity and social communication are two factors I looked at in this research. I found that both have an impact on work outcomes, but affect them differently. For example, information diversity measures how much information [you have] or how diverse your information is. We found that [an individual's] information diversity is strongly correlated with billable revenue. The more information you have, the more youre able to bill. It makes sense the more information you have, the better a worker you are and the better able you are to solve your clients problem.

Interestingly, we found that social communication [itself] does not have a direct impact on billable revenue, but it had a tremendous impact on whether individuals were laid off in the 2009 recession. And, the more social words you include in your communication such as coffee, lunch, dinner, football and baseball the less likely you are to be laid off. TwitterIn fact, thats the most significant predictor, above and beyond objective performance measures, in predicting whether youre laid off.

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