Changing the conversation

One of the key challenges many companies have to face when deploying social collaboration and KM platforms is facing the new realism of becoming ‘stewards’ rather than ‘moderators’ of the environment. Rather than monitoring behaviours, those responsible for stewardship of the platform (whether Enterprise or local community managers) need to understand how to influence rather than control behaviours (comments).

Removing and banning members is the last straw and will also certainly lose any goodwill in changing behaviours in an organisations that have attempted to spread a collaborative culture whilst dealing with legacies of failed online forums or procedures that conflict with a desire to get people collaborating.

You can influence what people say (more possible than most realise) and there are several methods to achieve this. The most common is to showcase the behaviour you want. People broadly do what they see others doing. If they see petty fights, personal attacks, and more they’re going to engage in them. If they see thoughtful, constructive, debates they’re more likely to participate in them.

You can indoctrinate members by recruiting advocates that understand and embrace the philosophy and ‘culture’ of the community and are willing to influence others as they join. Third, easiest, is to prime behaviour immediately prior to posting comments through stage management. This works well in the conceptual and embryonic stages but you need the advocates to eventually perform this as part of their ‘community duties’.

One good piece of collateral its worth producing is a guide for ‘managers’ to ‘deal with conversations’. These are some good community guidelines on how to deal with certain behaviours and how to respond. At one of my clients we developed a 7 step guide to dealing with ‘risky’ conversations that was sent to many of the ‘manager’ grades and developed a group for managers to seek guidance and support in dealing with issues. Coaching internal communicators is also key as they begin to see the possibilities and the dangers of very reactive platforms.

I’ll be eager to garner any insights from members what collateral has been produced to help companies deal with the changing conversational behaviours within companies that have deployed platforms such as Yammer?

What goes where?

Employees are faced with a range of tools to communicate, collaboration, share and network. Simply deploying new tools just confuses an already overworked organisation.

To expect many to understand what tool should be used in which context is foolish. One of the most important documents you can produce in the early days of a collaboration tool deployment is guidance to participants about what goes where.

This could be dressed up as a content strategy document, outlining where implicit and explicit knowledge / content should be stored or a straightforward guide on which tool to use when. Just map out some business scenarios and give people ‘guidance’ on which tool can be used to accomplish the task most efficiently.

Get this document into the environment early and it will save you lots of time answering questions from confused new adopters of the collaboration platform.

Freedom or control?

In every collaboration transformation project you reach a certain stage when the discussion / debate turns to the amount of control and governance you should introduce. If the platform has very little engagement or traction then this argument doesn’t surface much so if you are faced with it you must be doing something right!

My firm belief is that if we want to make collaboration work inside the organisation and exploit the ‘implicit’ knowledge that eludes companies we need to provide ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘control’.

The more control and process you put into these systems the less people want to contribute. You can create a wonderful centrally structured system with only certain groups allowed a presence or a written business case before something is created but I will guarantee you are creating conversation graveyards because it’s just too much hard work to share and collaborate.

This doesn’t mean we have a ‘free-for-all’. Each Country / Function will have the ability to develop their ‘structured’ area when they see a need. Here you can create moderated conversations and more formality but this shouldn’t be at the cost of people or communities that are ‘not near the centre’ and want to share and collaborate – or in essence just make it easier to connect.

This ‘stewardship’ (use cases, guiding early adopters etc onto the platform) allows people to see how they can begin to use collaboration platforms in a business context (and much of the coaching material should focus on behaviours to encourage collaboration), provide guidance and best practice on developing groups / communities and give then the freedom to build relationships, networks and communities. The ones that begin to provide value will soon come to the attention of the more ‘structured’ areas. The ones that provide no value will lose appeal and fade away.

The Darwin effect will take place. Groups will develop and you will get some duplication but that ‘duplication’ will soon be whittled out of the ‘network’ as people will gravitate to the networks and communities that give them most value. It is highly unlikely that 2 identical communities will exist for a period of time without coming to the attention of each other. They can then generally determine the future existence of their groups / content / networks and certainly doesn’t need a central structure to play ‘judge and jury’ on this.

Rather than look through a list of every group that has been people will begin to change their behaviour and use search more to find suitable content or groups to join. This has been my experience in previous organisations (all have been highly regulated and dealing with delicate subject matters) Give people a degree of ‘stewardship’ so they feel ‘safe’ and confident to share and collaborate. Create a rigid control and you continue the development of conversational graveyards.

Air cover for the community

7 step guide to dealing with ‘risky’ conversations ….

1. Have your community guidelines in place. These may be for the whole organisation or a particular set for an explicit community. These are supported by the general social media and overall HR guidelines within the organisation. Managers were asked to refer their members to these guidelines on various occasions when things got ‘tasty.’

2. Send a private message to the individuals or group who may be causing trouble, reminding them of the guidelines.

3. Follow up with another private message if it persists. Also contact advocates of the community and ask them to step in both privately and within the conversation thread.

4. Post a general announcement to the community reminding them of the guidelines

5. Step in as the ‘steward’, point them out in front of the community and explain to the whole community what is wrong. Keep conversation respectful and avoid emotion or being pulled into the conversation

6. Suspend them from the community for a certain period (through a private message)

7. Ban them – there may be some initial noise but make the community aware of what is happening. Transparency is always good.

It’s important to get manager level folk and internal communications onboard with the guidelines and have plenty of process and governance when HR / Risk come knocking asking for conversations to be closed down.

One of my proudest moments around these guidelines (sad I know that I can feel proud around guidelines) was a conversation which ‘suggested’ special treatment for certain people in getting flight upgrades. It also dug up some legacy industrial relations battles between pilots and cabin crew. We were pressured by many in HR to ‘close’ the conversation but we knew that if we did, the whole message around changing to a more collaborative culture would be lost as people would see the same old tactics of the company deleting any items that it didn’t like.

There were comments on the thread asking why the conversation wasn’t being deleted and many on the conversation (now involving hundreds) were waiting for just such an event.

In the past the company stepped in as a ‘parent’ and deleted items before the various groups within the community learnt to deal with the situation themselves. In essence they didn’t have to grow up. But we told various Risk and HR managers that when the participants realised no-one as going to step-in (unless they breached a guideline or company policy) they would need to resolve the matter themselves and progress far quicker than any coaching or manual could teach them. We had reached ‘step 5’ of the guide and with the help of advocates on both sides the conversation started to turn and developed into a beautiful knowing sharing piece around the process of flight upgrades and weight / balance of aircraft etc.

Through later fact finding with internal communications and manager level folk the ‘flight deck friends’ conversation promoted the realisation among many managers that steering and nurturing the conversation and its participants is far better than hitting the ‘delete’ button and losing the audiences desire to share and engage.

Employees don’t like their social intranet, study says

http://www.ragan.com/InternalCommunications/Articles/Employees_dont_like_their_social_intranets_study_s_46552.aspx

I think we are now starting to see the issues companies have faced with ‘The rush to social’ or the social silo.

Every new medium or technology goes through a life cycle. Social intranets (however one defines these) will be no different. It’s part of the phases of this disruptive technology life cycle.

I suspect many of the social intranet are at an early stage of the cycle. One of the main issues I have found is to few companies have enough evidence why they should replace some core needs which I suspect the current intranet has not addressed. For many in the workforce, collaboration often means more work, not less work. Connectivity results in more interactions, some less meaningful than others. Increase in effort often shifts the status quo resulting in internal resistance.

There must also be some choice in the user experience.
Time and time, people want to use the tool they are most comfortable with. For example, activity streams make sense for some employees who are used to high frequency, always on, information flows. However, those accustomed to using email as a task list and structured approach to filing information will find discomfort with activity streams.

Companies that were early adopters of social tools have already begun to see signs of duplication of effort and worries over the governance model. Some of the issues being raised are familiar concerns with early intranet developments of the 90s.

The social intranets that receive harsh criticism from many users will look to blame intranet maangers or IT. But if you don’t have sound governance, you are going nowhere fast. The most important element for an effective governance model – nay the intranet as a whole – is the strength and level of engagement of the end owners. People are the primary catalyst of intranet success.

If the governance is in place, then valued, relevant content can’t help but flow from it. It won’t happen overnight, and does require oversight and enforcement, and an effective user experience to support it, but strong content will surge from the right team (and governance model).

A realistic perspective on enterprise activity streams

From ‘Snippets’

The multiple personality of enterprise activity streams

Why do we follow people on activity stream sites like Facebook…cause we like hearing what they are up to…further to this we can converse with them…and even ask questions and share with people.

Most of the time we know what we are in for…we get updates about their life: experiences, they share articles, pictures, etc…

So what about enterprise activity streams?

I don’t quite think we know what we are in for

ie. we are gonna get updates about their daily work that may pollute our streams

Let me explain…

I’m John (Collaboration Lead)

I follow Jason (Project Manager)

I follow Jason as he shares great articles on managing complex projects, and I also follow him to hear about his experiences.

But that’s just one dimension of what Jason posts about…

Jason’s posts are not just sharing and reflective, he also posts about the here and now of his work. He is a member of many online groups where they communicate about their tasks, and all these posts land in my activity stream. He @mentions alot with other people about things that are very detailed to his task at hand…he is, as we say “working out loud”.

Now I know this is what it’s meant to be about ie. ambient awareness (I know what Jason is up to)…but after a while the intricacies of his work don’t interest me, and become noise in my activity stream.

So I want to follow Jason, the guy who shares research and writes reflective posts on experiences…but I don’t want to follow Jason, the guy who does his “to and fro” work in the activity stream.

What do you think?

Mark Tilbury – digital workplace specialist

Working smarter in the digital workplace

Category: Governance

What goes where?

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