<p>One of the principal benefits of social business is that it increases productivity in our workplaces. It allows knowledge to be found more easily and assists employees collaborative endeavours. So goes the theory anyway. Does the reality match the hype though?</p><p>After all, despite a huge investment in social business technology over the past 24 months, with predictions that the market will hit nearly $5 billion by 2016, employee output per hour rose a meagre 0.3% in the 12 months to June. This compares to an average rise of 3% during the decade encompassing the dot-com boom.</p><p>So something is wrong somewhere, but is social business helping? A SAP whitepaper earlier this year claimed that the average business loses around $25,000 per employee because of communication barriers, whilst a McKinsey report claimed that a successful implementation of an enterprise social network could deliver productivity gains of 25%.</p><p>University of Chicago professor Chad Syverson wrote a paper earlier this year looking at the history of productivity gains, and found that they tend to arrive in cycles, with technologies such as electrification and the world wide web delivering a decade of improvements, followed by a slump before the subsequent acceleration.</p><p><a href="http://www.managers.org.uk/practical-support/management-community/blogs/what-role-does-social-business-play-rising-productivity">Keep reading...</a></p>