The most significant barrier was concern that it would take too much time and effort to share
knowledge through a social media platform. If the platform is not easy to use and it does not
benefit the users by making their work easier, they will not want to use it but will stick to their
current ways of working and sharing knowledge. A third of the comments in the questionnaire
could be summarized as two statements: ‘‘using a collaborative platform takes too much
time’’ and ‘‘hanging in this kind of a ‘‘company Facebook site’’ is not real working but a waste of
time’’. Respondents’ greatest concern about knowledge sharing via a social media platformis
the assumption that it either increases the workload, takes excessive time from the ‘‘actual’’
work, or is inefficient altogether. Some of this may spring from a traditional perception of what
working is, which does not include chatting or sharing links.
Another concern was that a social media platform would be just another information system.
As there are already many information systems the employees are obligated to use even if
they do not find them beneficial to themselves, it is understandable that they are not too
eager to learn how to use yet another information system to contribute to. Respondents
suspected that most people would still be clinging to the current practices and channels of
knowledge sharing even if new ones would ease the workload in the long run. It is also seen
that some, often ageing, employees are not willing or able to adopt new ways of working or
use new technologies. To study whether age had any significance to the barriers, Chi-square
tests were performed to find out if the age and overall familiarity had an effect on the
responses. In this case, too, no significant effect was found between these background
factors and the responses ( p . 0.05).