The power of 3

Over the last few years it’s been pleasing to see how some of the collaboration software vendors have been changing their tune over how to successfully adopt their technologies.

If you compare the early adoption collateral for Jive, Yammer (O365), Chatter (insert numerous names here) and look at the adoption approaches they now recommend – built around behavioural change, habit formal and other techniques from neuroscience and related disciplines – those of us from the ‘people’ side of technology feel more comfortable than ever in championing the mantra that good adoption of collaborative technologies is more about psychology than technology.

Using the ‘power of 3’ psychological approach here is my take on the ‘do’s and don’ts of adoption broken down into 3

DON’T

Don’t focus on technology / product names and keep use of traditional corporate channels to a minimum
Hierarchy won’t be effective – no ‘trickle-down’ effect in most organisations. Leadership support is important but it must be active (role modelling not just telling)
Don’t tell people the whole story, show then everything at once, or provide just one approach / route for success

Focus on behaviours and scenarios with short bite size coaching and messaging (power of 3)
Create a bottom up / ‘word of mouth’ approach, developing social learning, role models (doing rather than telling) and nudge rather than command
Work on volume (light lots of little fires – develop use cases, nurture advocates, present at meetings) and then focus energy on those that catch fire and show potential to grow)

Finding the right trigger for success

I’ve just been reading some conversations in one of the Linkedin Change Management groups I belong to. The conversation is around why organisations are still struggling to get Yammer adopted.

It still amazes me that in 2016 many organisations are struggling to get value from social software despite a reliable ‘recipe’ now being known.

All consultancies both large and small have a framework which is pitched to potential clients that will deliver various degrees of success – but success nevertheless.

Any programme / project manager with an element of common sense could also scan the internet and get a reliable formula to get those engagement / value rates above 55-60% (70% looks to be the saturation point) rather than languishing in the 20%.

Many of the previous comments have articulated the recipe for success, or lack of it, such as… ‘not aligning to business strategy, little governance, poor planning, wrong use cases at the wrong time, treating change like a IT change programme rather than behavioural change etc. etc. etc.

A couple of areas I would raise which compounds the agony of low adoption / value:

Few of the owners of these platforms appear to be appraised on garnering value. As long as it ‘works’ from a technical perspective the responsibility appears to stop there.

Also too many project managers run traditional change programmes which deliver the rational reason to use the platform, tell them what to do, the how and why. Few look to go further and try to deliver the emotional reasons, activate leaders, shift mind-sets and behaviours or align the formal organisation. And very, very few actually work on finding the ‘triggers’ that will give people the motivation to change.

However, I know Microsoft (and others) are realising that they need to ‘raise their gam’ in terms of preaching ‘change management’ as a key element of garnering business value. Also how that change management is delivered (more open, transparent, inclusive, cross boundary etc.) is also something that needs to be promoted further.

Becoming a social leader

Trying to get leaders to understand the potential and value of creating an open and collaborative business can sometimes be a hard sell. One of the key milestones is to get them embracing and supporting the deployment of tools and associated behavioural change required to utilise the investment.

Key elements when approaching leaders should include:

Explain the key elements of open / social working
• Outline the need to appeal to individual’s ‘intrinsic motivators’
• Provide practical examples of individuals becoming more effective and engaged
• Guide them on how to develop and spread the habit via doing
• Explain how they would “contribute to people in their organisations to deepen the relationship”?And also why should they?
• Don’t replicate a process. It has to replace it or be something new.

Using the ‘seeing is believing’ mantra here are some tips to get your leader involved. O365 is used in this examples but this would apply to most collaboration and open business technologies.

1- Explain to them the overall benefits, ideally linking to the overall strategy. Normally the benefits would include:

o Enables ‘new ways of working’ by providing:
 Access everywhere, anytime
 Transparent and open working
o Builds a connected organisation enhancing business agility
o Increases employee engagement
o Improves team collaboration
o Enables external collaborative working

2- Set out the benefits for the leader (try to understand what would be key motivations prior to the session). These could be:

• Build a personal brand across the organisation
• Network across silos
• Increase engagements and receive feedback
• Access and share documents easier
• Network / collaborate externally
• Manage meetings and reporting more effectively
• Build a connected organisation by increasing participation in Townhall events

3 – Getting the leaders started

• Update their Profile with skills and experiences and explain the benefits.
• Profiles and reputations develop fast in the online world. Yammer offers Leaders new ways to promote their views and skills
• Leaders will emerge that may otherwise have been hidden in dark corners
• Yammer gives everyone the chance to share their views in an open forum
• Contributions are a lot more transparent and the Personal Brands Leaders create allow leadership potential to be spotted
• Smart Leaders and Talent teams embrace this opportunity.

4 – Spend 5 minutes building or expanding their network on Yammer

• Guide them on how to ‘follow’ people and join ‘groups’.
• Ask them to pick a few key words around topics which reflect their role and aspirations within the company (don’t just follow the people you already know) and use the ‘search’ option to explore what people and groups have similar interests.
• Begin following and see the value it may begin to bring.
• Don’t suggest they select hundreds or they will be ‘drowned in the noise’.

5 – Explain the power of ‘liking posts’

• Leaders should be taught the power of liking posts.
• A ‘like’ from a Leader has a big impact and is a good way to drive colleague engagement and motivate action all in one second.
• Encourage Leaders to use the ‘like’ option but also to be aware of the impact that ‘like’ can have if it’s not actually genuine.
• Before they know it a whole new process could be accidentally developed.

6 – Get them to join conversations and ask them to assess what benefit this has brought them over a period of a few weeks.

• Leaders’ reactions to posts shape how people perceive them as leaders
• What’s key is to teach Leaders how to handle conversation well and to do so publicly
• Over zealous comments or poor ends up sending a much louder message than simply responding in a well thought through manner

7- More things to remember

• At the outset it’s too easy for leaders to say it’s not for me. You want colleagues to make an informed choice knowing what is on offer before they decide not to use it, not to decide against it because it’s a big unknown quantity.
• If they are resistance or believe they need ‘training’ before they use it then offer them this through beginners coaching sessions
• It’s a self-updating skill set once they are on the bandwagon but at the start you don’t want to leave good talent behind. Everyone should be given equal opportunity to shine.

8 – Next steps

Once they are confident and comfortable with this way of open working then get them to expand. The next steps will be:

• Running a crowdsourcing session ‘ Yamjam to increase participation and innovation
• Hold ‘Town Hall’ events to increase engagement
• Sharing a vision for a better future and they ask their people to co-create this together in open innovation forums.
• Get them to ask colleagues to combine our strengths and spend more time collaborating around that which we wished to accomplish, rather than that which we wished to avoid, what’s possible?
• They co-design what is next.

Engagement is ‘nice’ but democracy provides the value

I sense we are still in the early stages of how ‘social ways of working’ can create value. Communications, engagement and knowledge sharing are early ‘adopters’ of ‘social’ but the internal audience’s affection with tools may eventually fade and move on to alternative channels. The real value from these ‘social’ tools comes when we explore how to utilise them for innovation, crowdsourcing, validation and creating more open, transparent and democratic structures within organisations.

By using collaboration and open business tools like Jive and O365 (Yammer) the chance to develop new ways of working is immense. Rapid validation of innovation and and organisational structures are enticing but the opportunity to bring democratic approaches into areas such as product development, strategy and governance can truly change the way colleagues, suppliers, customers and leaders can develop organisations for the future rather than bleak rigid corporations built on ‘war-like’ structures and sound bites.

Movement of the People

Is it me but do all the major issues over the summer appear to deal with ‘movement’ (or maybe transportation)? The news agenda is full of items around the movement of:

People (across borders, cities and the basic A-B of getting from work to home – or maybe the issues of why many people still do this as networks, drones and live video streaming becomes more common).
Identities – easily replaced, replicated or stolen
Data – see above
Finance – across borders and laws
Goods – whether physical or how they will be replaced by 3D printing

Maybe how we fuse the physical and digital worlds will be the key to dealing with the issue of movement over the next 5 years?

Nudge the network

If you do have a spare 30 minutes I would recommend reading the Behavioural Insights Team Update report.

Click to access BIT_Update-Report-Final-2013-2015.pdf

As more enterprise tools such as O365 / Yammer and Jive the old traditional methods of IT adoption fail (if they ever succeeded) and that’s where the digital transformation agenda takes over. IMO any deployment of collaboration tools need to look at behvaioural insights, nudging the network and behavioural economics to ensure success adoption.

Stick to the recipe for Enterprise Social Software success

When I look at reasons given by organisations for the failure of their Enterprise Social Software project to deliver any success or value (whether this is adoption or return on investment or engagement) I still hear the same issues around poor adoption, cultural issues specific to the organisation, change management, alignment to business needs etc. You could date stamp this as ‘2010’ and the issues haven’t changed.

It still amazes me that in 2015 organisations are struggling to get value from social software despite a reliable ‘recipe’ now being known.

All consultancies both large and small have a framework which is pitched to potential clients that will deliver various degrees of success – but success nevertheless.

Every software vendor has similar material that it will tell clients prior to any adoption programme how to get success (actually an interesting exercise would be to look at how the vendors have changed their ‘tune’ from 2008 onwards by looking at how their client adoption material has changed from ‘just plug it in’ to more strategic thinking).

I would also suggest that the vast majority of organisations that deploy Enterprise Social Software have an understanding or at least an awareness of what needs to be done – and I speak from a perspective or having sat on both sides of the table (industry and consultancy) and I would estimate that 90% plus of people I have dealt understand this.

But despite all this material a large majority of organisations appear to ignore the recipe.

I’m trying to find a simple analogy to compare this with so let’s try cooking.

If I were a chef (the ‘sponsor’ of the deployment) and I wanted to make a paella (deploying the tool) and I have a known recipe on how to make paella (the vendors material, consultants material, freely available material online etc.); then why do I think my paella will turn out fine if I refuse to use some key ingredients like the correct rice, saffron, paprika, wine etc. (change management, governance, use cases etc.)?

Some may be down to cost; some may be lack of knowledge – but wouldn’t you look at the recipe before you start!; some may be down to stubbornness (you deployed other tools before and your way has always worked) but I believe in many cases it’s down to the simple fact that most sponsors are purely concerned with plugging it and making sure it works from a technical perspective – and not appraised on the engagement or value it brings. No different to a chef not being appraised on how good the paella is but the fact they have served up a plate of rice that is dressed up as paella but has none of the taste.

Unless the success criteria is driven by engagement and value – which often happens a number of months into the adoption phase then organisations will continue to cite the same issues with their Enterprise Social Software.

The vendors realised their business model needs to change – not so much about selling licences every 5 years but seeing their software being adopted, adapted to working ways and providing value.

Few areas of an organisation focus on how engaged their workforce is with the ‘service’ provided but this will change. It will eventually filter down to project teams that are built to deploy social software.

In my ideal future world deployments will focus on behavioural change rather than just technology change in order for social software to be a success.

A project team for future deployments will have a very different line-up. The focus won’t be around IT Project Managers or business analysts but instead recruit business psychologists, community developers and social network analysts to ensure social software success.

We all love a good story

Storytelling can be a powerful tool when you want to explain how collaboration tools can help colleagues.

Stories are one of the most powerful emotional currencies we possess. They move people to feel, and they move people to act.

At work, stories take the form of narratives, conversations and anecdotes that connect us with the narrator and the subjects and broaden our pool of knowledge. When you share a story, you will spark a story or idea.

We use stories to make sense of our environment. They make us care. They provide a shared context for mutual understanding of events and issues that impact us. And they inspire us to change our point of view.

Ideally a good story around working with collaboration tools should communicate some form of causal resolution of a problem and also have the addition of meaning and significance for the audience.

When I speak to people around the capabilities of collaboration tools I generally don’t talk about what each feature or button does but how the enabling tool (and associated behaviour coaching) has changed the way people have solved an issue; or created innovation; or developed new engagement channels.

My favourite stories of how these type of tools have helped include:

Solving departure delays at Istanbul airport
Ensured passengers flying into Heathrow received their ‘Bloody Mary’s’ just the way they like them
Helping sped up the alterations to passenger wash bags
Safety lessons from drilling rigs were shared across an organisation within hours
How a banana ice cream maker could peel a thousand bananas at the same time

Obviously these lose much of their currency once taken outside the context of that particular sector so it’s beneficial to begin building a library of wins / case studies as soon as possible. They don’t need to be too details – just a good story. .

Often a new manager or colleague won’t know how these tools and behaviours may have made a difference, but peers and other leaders may have a rich store of anecdotes and memories to make the use meaningful.

Avoid the usual suspects

Transformation programmes are changing dramatically in the digital age.

The main theme of traditional deployments of tools was that change programmes were slow (cascaded from the top, filtering slowly down), soloed (by geographies, levels and departments) and exclusive (owned by leaders and nominated change agents).

In the digital era change is now fast-paced (focused on habit-forming to kick-start new behaviours), focused around behaviours not technology and inclusive (allows everyone’s input to be seen and for social learning to happen).

One of the key changes is the advocacy network that can be built. Forget reaching out to management and asking for the ‘usual suspects’ – the same folk that get volunteered for most change programmes. Use digital and networking technologies to create a broad number of advocates.

It doesn’t matter about the time commitment. Ask then to do what they can when they can. In the digital age getting volume at the ground level is important. Avoid traditional messages on the intranet and focus on getting role models, word of mouth and great use cases. This will spread the transformation far quicker than going through traditional and failing channels.

Working smarter in the digital workplace

Menu