Why You Won't Find Us on Social Media

June 17, 2025

By

Eve

X

min read

You Might Have Noticed...

Whether you’re a current client, or just getting to know us, you’ve probably noticed that the only place you can find us is, well, here. We know that in today's hyperconnected, digital world … the very one that we actively promote … that might seem a bit counterintuitive, but we don’t think so.

Internal vs External

We believe wholeheartedly in the power of tech for good; it’s truly changing the world in ways that were unimaginable to previous generations. However, it’s really important to acknowledge that not everything that technology has facilitated has been for the best and understanding the risks is paramount to a healthy tech relationship. We think of good tech vs. bad tech as internal vs external.

Internal technology draws you into it, encouraging you to pick up a device more often, login to a platform regularly, has you thinking about it when you’re not using it, or evokes an emotional response either while or after using it. Its purpose is to hook you into its system and keep you there, excluding you from those around you.

At it’s worst it will imperceptibly alter your thinking for the benefit of unknown actors.

External tech by contrast is designed to support you living a better, outward facing, life. Application’s that allow you to be more effective like medical technology, learning platforms, collaborative working and environmental impact assessment tools are all examples of where tech can enhance our lives, exposing us to experiences and opportunities that can help us build more fulfilling and engaging lives.

Social Media

For the Yopla team, we’re firmly in the “social media is internal tech” camp. We’ve experimented with developing healthy relationships with it, but for us, we don’t think it’s possible. With the average social media user clocking up 151 minutes per day (the figures are even higher for Gen-Zer’s) and using 6-7 different platforms, we feel that partaking and contributing to the already huge amount of content out there is not reflective of our values.

We’re conscious of supporting mental wellbeing, and encouraging others to be mindful of what’s good for them too. With around 40% of users now reporting social media addictions, and increases in associated mental wellbeing challenges, it’s incredibly important to recognise the effect online engagement is having on many people.

It’s also crucial to realise that one person’s interpretation of social media is not that of another. Millennials, as an example, report that their primary purpose for using social media is to communicate with family and friends, by contrast Gen-Zer’s primary reason is to ‘kill time’. This has the potential to lead to very different experiences of the same platforms. That’s without getting in to the risks of social contagion, polarisation, echo chambers and doom scrolling.

The Like Button

One click, with oh so much power. Anybody on social media (who’s being honest!) will acknowledge the anxiety around how much interest their posts receive. This can lead to a whole manner of issues, but is the point of that little button really to enable you to show your appreciation for a particular person or organisation?

Research from The University of Cambridge and Stanford University suggests not. They devised an online personality test and posted it to Facebook, requiring the participants to give them access to their Facebook data. Over 80,000 people took part, providing a huge amount of information for the researchers to analyse.

Their findings were staggering. Having devised an algorithm to establish whether the data could predict an individual’s personality more accurately than a fellow human, they found that with access to only 10 likes, the algorithm could out-perform a work colleague. With 150 it out-performed immediate family, and with 300 likes it out-performed a spouse. The scariest part? That data was from 2007. Over 15 years later, with all the advancements those years have brought, how little data does social media require now to ‘know’ you better than you know yourself?

Surely social media being able to predict habits and interests with such accuracy must be good for organisations who use it to advertise and promote? Perhaps. But what about the immense amount of control that hands over to the companies at the helm? Small tweaks in computer algorithms can completely change who sees your posts and when, meaning that overnight you can go from hero to zero. Often, you’ll need to pay for an increased amount of advertising to secure your position in peoples feeds and your competitors (who are also entrenched in the social media game) will be in a financial battle with you for those prized followers and likes. It becomes increasingly (and deliberately) difficult to determine what the real value is in the time and money you spend on developing a ‘successful’ online presence.

This potentially opens the door for bad actors, companies, criminal organisations and people who use the same tools and techniques with ill intent.

Perception

Everything online is infinite, both in time and scale.

When you post something on social media, you’re not just sharing it with your friends and followers. You’re sharing it with the whole world, and perhaps most importantly, with the future. To put that into context, that means that anyone, anywhere, anytime, can see what you posted, and use it as they see fit.

If you post something without thinking about it from every angle, perhaps a joke, a selfie, or a comment which you thought funny or harmless, it can be seen very differently by somebody else. By releasing it in the online world, you’re giving permission for content to be interpreted in ways you didn’t intend, twisted, and at its worst, used against you.

Once you post something online, it's there forever, in the public domain. Even if you delete it, it may have already been saved elsewhere, screen-shotted, or shared; once that happens, no amount of deleting from your end will remove its digital footprint.

What is seen as acceptable and progressive now, may not be viewed in the same light in the future.

Conclusion

Any form of technology that helps you live a better life is a wonderful thing. We spend our days helping other organisations to find ways to make their operations more efficient and effective and that means utilising some of the incredible technology that has been developed over the last few years.

Anything that assists you and your organisations development, growth and learning is a really important tool. We believe that efficiency enables us to balance productivity and sustainable behaviour and a good balance, leads to happier, healthier people, who work collaboratively for the benefit everyone.

We believe that external technology - software, hardware and programmes that facilitate people engaging with one another - are increasingly making the world a better, more equitable place for everybody. For us, that's where our focus lies.

We’re committed to being a business that represents the world we want to see. So, while you won’t find us on social media, you can always come back right here, to this blog, to read about the topics that are important to us, and the ways we’re working to make business better.

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Discover 10 knowledge management best practices to unlock team potential, streamline operations, and drive growth. A practical guide for organisational leaders.

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How much institutional knowledge walks out of your door at 5 pm? In many organisations, critical information is trapped in departmental silos, buried in overflowing inboxes, or held entirely by a few key individuals. This is not just an inefficiency. It is a significant operational risk. When knowledge is not systematically shared, teams inevitably duplicate work, repeat preventable mistakes, and miss valuable opportunities for innovation.

True organisational resilience is not built on having the smartest people in the room. It is built on creating a system where their collective intelligence becomes a shared, accessible, and durable asset. This is the fundamental goal of effective knowledge management. It represents a crucial shift in thinking, moving away from a reliance on individual heroes and towards building collective organisational capability. At Yopla, we believe this transformation starts with aligning people and processes, long before any technology platform is chosen.

At its core, knowledge management is about creating clarity from operational fog. It ensures the expertise you develop stays within your organisation, empowering sharper decisions and freeing up time for high-value work. This guide cuts through the theory to provide ten actionable knowledge management best practices. Each one is designed to help you implement a structured approach, turning scattered information into a powerful, strategic advantage and embedding digital sovereignty where it belongs: inside your team.

1. Create a Knowledge Management Strategy Aligned with Business Goals

Effective knowledge management is not an isolated IT project or a standalone initiative. It must be a strategic discipline woven into the fabric of your organisation. One of the most critical knowledge management best practices is developing a formal strategy that directly supports and accelerates your core business objectives. Without this alignment, even the most sophisticated tools and processes will fail to deliver meaningful value, becoming a solution in search of a problem. A well-defined strategy transforms knowledge from a passive asset into an active driver of performance, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Create a Knowledge Management Strategy Aligned with Business Goals

This approach involves moving beyond simply collecting information. It requires identifying critical knowledge gaps that hinder progress, defining clear success metrics, and establishing robust governance to ensure quality and relevance. For instance, NASA’s strategy focuses on preventing the loss of mission-critical expertise from retiring engineers, a direct response to a significant business risk. Similarly, Siemens' ShareNet platform was strategically designed to connect global sales teams. This directly generated over €100 million in additional revenue by sharing leads and project insights.

How to implement this practice.

A successful strategy starts with people, not platforms. To build a plan that sticks, you must secure leadership commitment and involve key stakeholders from across the business in its creation. This ensures the strategy addresses real-world challenges and gains the buy-in necessary for widespread adoption.

  • Start with a pilot programme. Select a single department or business function where improved knowledge sharing will have a high and visible impact, such as sales, customer support, or product development.
  • Define clear success metrics. What will success look like? It could be reduced onboarding time for new hires, a higher customer satisfaction score, or a faster product development cycle. These metrics must be measurable.
  • Involve stakeholders. Bring together leaders and team members from different departments to map out existing knowledge flows and identify pain points. This collaborative approach builds shared ownership.
  • Align with existing strategies. Ensure your knowledge management plan complements your current IT, HR, and overall business strategies to avoid creating conflicting priorities or redundant systems.
Effective Organisational Culture Change Strategies

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Discover essential tips for successful organizational culture change. Transform your team and foster a thriving, open business environment today.

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Organisational culture change is the complex process of shifting a company’s deep-seated values, beliefs, and behaviours to align with new strategies and goals. It’s not about tinkering with job descriptions or processes; it’s about fundamentally changing how work gets done.

What Is Organisational Culture, Really?

Image

Before we can think about changing it, we need to agree on what organisational culture actually is. The term is often confused with office perks like free coffee or a ping-pong table. It is not the mission statement framed on the wall, either.

Think of culture as your company’s invisible operating system. It is the unwritten code dictating how your team behaves when no one is watching. It is the collection of shared beliefs, attitudes, and accepted norms that quietly guide every decision and action.

You see it in how a leader reacts to a mistake, how a team scrambles to meet a customer demand, or how people pull together (or don't) on a difficult project. That is where the real culture lives, not in a policy document.

The real impact of culture.

Many leaders write off culture as a "soft" HR issue, separate from the "hard" business of strategy and numbers. This is a significant mistake. A toxic or misaligned culture will silently poison even the most brilliant strategy.

Culture is not just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organisation is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

This is where many great ideas go to die, in the gap between strategy and culture. If your strategy demands agility but your culture rewards slow, bureaucratic caution, the culture will win. Every time.

On the other hand, a healthy culture acts as a powerful amplifier for your goals. When your people, processes, and technology are all underpinned by a supportive culture, you create an environment that naturally fosters:

  • Faster decisions. When people trust each other and have a shared understanding of what matters, information flows more freely and decisions are made with more confidence.
  • Increased resilience. A strong culture is a shock absorber. It helps your team navigate uncertainty and bounce back from setbacks because they are united by a sense of shared purpose.
  • Sustainable performance. Engaged employees who feel valued and connected to the company’s mission are more productive and committed to its long-term success.

At Yopla, we believe that true transformation starts with people, not platforms. Any attempt to roll out new tech or processes without first getting the human side right is likely to fall short. To build a more open, capable, and operationally sustainable organisation, you have to begin by understanding and shaping your organisational culture. It is the only foundation for change that lasts.

Unlocking the Psychological Safety Meaning in Your Workplace

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Unlocking the Psychological Safety Meaning in Your Workplace

Discover the true psychological safety meaning and its impact. Learn how to cultivate a culture of trust and high performance in your organisation.

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At its heart, psychological safety is the shared belief that it’s okay to take interpersonal risks on a team. It means people feel secure enough to offer ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, and even admit mistakes without fearing they’ll be punished or humiliated.
It’s the invisible bedrock that allows innovation, straight talk, and high performance to truly flourish.

What Psychological Safety Actually Means in Practice

Many leaders hear the term "psychological safety" and immediately think it means being nice all the time, dodging difficult conversations, or letting performance standards slip. This is a common and costly misunderstanding. True psychological safety isn’t about comfort. It's about creating an environment where productive discomfort, like challenging the status quo, can actually happen.

At its core, the psychological safety meaning boils down to interpersonal trust. It’s the permission a team gives itself to be candid and vulnerable as they work towards a common goal.

Think of the difference between two meetings. In one, everyone nods along in silent agreement. In the other, a junior team member feels secure enough to say, "I think I see a potential flaw in this plan, can we talk it through?". That's the magic of it.

This isn't just an academic distinction. It has serious consequences for how your organisation operates. When people stay silent, you lose out on valuable insights, overlook critical risks, and miss countless opportunities for improvement. We believe true transformation starts with people, and people can't bring their best work to the table when they're busy managing impressions and fearing what might happen if they speak up.

The Contrast Between Safe and Unsafe Environments

To make this idea more concrete, let's look at what work actually feels like day-to-day in these two different settings. The table below gives a quick summary of the behaviours you'd typically see.

Psychological Safety at a Glance

Characteristic Psychologically Safe Environment Psychologically Unsafe Environment
Mistakes Seen as a chance to learn and improve. A source of blame and finger-pointing.
Feedback Frequent, specific, and focused on the work. Rare, often personal, and delivered poorly.
Speaking Up Team members feel able to challenge ideas openly. People stay quiet, waiting for the leader's opinion.
Asking Questions Encouraged as a way to clarify and learn. Discouraged, seen as a sign of incompetence.
Risk-Taking Calculated risks and new ideas are supported. Sticking to the status quo is the safest bet.

The difference between these two columns ultimately determines whether your organisation is capable of learning and adapting, or if it's stuck in place.

An unsafe environment breeds a culture of fear and silence, which is a direct blocker to operational sustainability and growth. On the other hand, a safe environment is where your team’s collective intelligence is unlocked, not suppressed.

The Reality in UK Workplaces

The need for this shift is urgent. Psychological safety in UK workplaces is still a major concern. Recent research shows that just over half of UK employees feel they can genuinely speak up, challenge how things are done, and innovate without fear. This means nearly half the workforce might be holding back valuable input, stifling creativity and overall effectiveness. You can learn more about these findings on psychological safety and its measurement.

This lack of safety isn't just a "people problem", it's a business problem. It correlates strongly with increased safety incidents, higher absenteeism, and costly employee turnover—all of which directly hit your bottom line.

Fostering psychological safety isn't a 'nice-to-have' perk. It's a critical asset for building a more open, capable, and resilient organisation. It's the foundation you need for sharper decisions and sustainable impact.