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 currentwaysofworkingandsharingknowledge.Athirdofthecommentsinthequestionnaire could be summarized as two statements: ‘‘using a collaborative platform takes too much time’’and‘‘hanginginthiskindofa‘‘companyFacebooksite’’isnotrealworkingbutawasteof time’’.Respondents’greatestconcernaboutknowledgesharingviaasocialmediaplatformis the assumption that it either increases the workload, takes excessive time from the ‘‘actual’’ work, or is inefficient altogether.Some of this mayspring 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).