We’ve all heard it a million times — CEOs or other executives declaring, “People are your greatest asset.” But are they really?

No, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article. Your biggest asset is not individual employees but, instead, how companies empower their people. A company’s greatest asset is how it empowers people to form meaningful communities around achieving objectives that drive the business forward.

Mass collaboration, the article states, leads to more effective empowerment, “which typically equals more productive work.”

We all know the standard ways companies empower employees, whether through incentives, authority, or processes. But social media offers a new, powerful way to empower employees: it gives them individual autonomy.

Social media also has the unique ability to empower people to collaborate and rally around goals and objectives. Anyone can jump in on their coworkers’ goals and offer advice, expertise, a second opinion or encouragement.

When we designed our new Social Goals 2.0 feature, which we released yesterday, we built it to empower the next generation of employees — a generation who live and work in today’s fast-moving, real-time world. Social Goals 2.0 empowers each individual employee by letting them set their own goals, as well as the measurable key results that drive their goals forward. Since the feature is social and rapid, mass collaboration happens instantly — just like work.

Want to learn more about Social Goals 2.0? Click here.

Read the full Harvard Business Review article here.