AI models now reflecting the real working world! How many colleagues have you encountered who never admit they don’t know something?
Future AI models might just mirror this behaviour, offering you options for short, direct answers or responses more laborious than a Monday morning meeting.
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?
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.
It still does amaze me that Deloitte (see below) and Gartner (“80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits”) still have the ammunition to produce these reports.
Social Business tools have been around long enough for a successful best practice approach to be evolved. The focus should be away from traditional IT implementations onto good strategy, governance (or stewardship) and transformation that will lead to most organisations that want to become social businesses achieving success.
The strategy needs to ensure the capabilities, deployment and utilisation of both technology and people align with the overall goals of the business.
The governance / stewardship needs to ensure the technology deployed is sustainable and the quality content filtered through the technology can surface above the redundant noise that will occur in many organisation and can be utilised to assist in achieving the overall goals of the business.
The transformation needs to ensure people and their communities / networks have an understanding of how, what and when to share and collaborate to help meet the goals of the business.
But I guess most organisations are treating the tools similar to their approaches to knowledge management initiatives of the past. Build it and they will come. They focus on the technology (plugging it in) rather than the transformation needed to change people’s behaviours to adapt and cultivate new skills that are enabled by the technology.
I fear in 5 years the Gartner’s and Deloitte’s of this world will still be producing the same old reports.
It’s important to embed yammer into your ways of working. We want to avoid you thinking ‘I need to do my work and then visit yammer.’
To succeed we need to think about ‘I need to do my work and yammer is assisting me in achieving what I need to do.’
It’s easy to get lost and caught up in all the ‘noise’ that takes place (alerts, notifications, new groups being formed, people joining). To avoid this spend 1 minute per month (it should take no more than that) to revisit your notifications to ensure you have a frequency of notifications that suit you. Also be choosey about who and what groups you follow. If you have the time do this on a weekly basis.
On a general principle I try to keep the number of people I follow down to 50 and ensure I belong to no more than 20 groups. The content and people will eventually find you so don’t feel the need to follow everyone or every group. If someone is not active or providing you valuable contributions then don’t follow them. If there is no activity within the group then drop out of it.
This will soon reduce lots of the noise you may get lost in.
One of the key themes (or attitudes as I would like to call it) of the business change project team, involved in putting one of the world’s largest airlines into the Cloud (O365), was to look at changing the normal business model and, in essence, changing the way we worked.
An excellent example of this was the way we recruited the advocates (called Mercury Heroes) for the programme who would spread the message, coach their colleagues and be general role models in changing the way people worked through using collaborative tools.
The normal approach would have been to reach out to leadership with a request for nominees. If we were lucky we would get the ‘normal suspects’ who would be involved in every other programme and dutifully attend induction and go through the standard actions. This was not a model for us to follow!
Instead we began to practice what we preached and started to use the power of Yammer. With an agreed set of principles and objectives (but no core job description) we by-passed the traditional middle management (general road blockers with this sort of activity) and reached out to active users on Yammer (going where the energy was) to become advocates. These people were already changing the way they worked by using Yammer and we deliberately avoided the traditional ‘floor walkers’ that IT departments would generally use for the role. It didn’t matter if you were of a management grade or role within a department – we wanted people that had a desire for change rather than a knowledge or technology.
I should add we tactically deployed Yammer as the first of O365 as:
1 – it was simpler but
2 – it was one of the ‘game changers’ that would teach us so much about behaviours in a short space of time, enable us to deal with lots of leadership concern early and, if we got it right, provide us with ready made advocate and communications channels for the remaining roll-out.
The strategy was to go for numbers. Not dissuade people with a rigid job description or time commitment but giving them a set of principles and objectives and asking them to ‘do what they can, when they can’. The assumption was to have such a large volume of advocates that it didn’t matter if we have gaps in coverage or people away during certain activities – we had the numbers to cover.
We provided a core toolkit and built a coaching programme for them and there were some prescriptive elements around Outlook coaching, but in essence we began using the power of social networking to spread the message and the coaching. Heroes were asked to deal with any permission issues from their management.
Microsoft challenged us to get 350 advocates for the beginning of the roll-out programme. Within 6 weeks we had over 900.
Some of the initial success stories include:
Over 400 Mercury Heroes attended physical and online Yammer coaching sessions in November with the challenge to recruit colleagues and join a group or discussion in Yammer. From the 8 weeks leading up to Christmas over 1000 new people were joining Yammer each week (with engagement levels at over 50%).
Volunteers for use cases, testing, focus groups for SharePoint, OneDrive etc were recruited within minutes rather than days or weeks in normal programmes.
There was some resistance to the ‘social approach’ we took and in some areas we needed to be more prescriptive (interestingly many of these were IT related departments) but the approach got us 90% plus of the advocates we needed.
As the whole campaign was based on behavioural change and new ways of working (not the tools or IT deployment) the intention is not to stand the Mercury Heroes down once the roll-out is complete but to use them as a legacy for collaboration (and others projects) within the airline.
Just saw this from Ragan and it shows how enterprise social networking tools can be used to engage all areas of the business and gain valuable insights.
http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/How_Yammer_connected_Air_Canadas_employees_47932.aspx
For too long we have focused on so called ‘knowledge workers’ as the major users and contributors of the social networking but, if cultivated correctly it can benefit every level and both management and workers.
There have always been fears about giving people voices in organisations but enterprise social networks have been successfully been deployed in unionised environments with more benefits than detractions.
From my own experiences one factor I believe that helps in this deployment are meetings and processes around ‘contingency planning’, from incidents at airports and in the sky, media breaches and industrial relations. We mapped out processes for each scenario that we highlighted to leadership as appropriate. These eased a number of fears.
Also it was vital to show that this environment benefited everybody, giving workers a voice and also providing insights for leadership. One of the ways of achieving this was the development of advocates in crucial areas of the business, whether they be union activities that could spread the benefits of a tool that gives people and voice and begins to make the whole organisation more transparent and democratic, or leaders within departments that saw how much value they could get by receiving immediate insights into products, processes etc.
This is not achieved through guidelines and corporate missives by but meeting and talking to people (lots of them) and spreading the word. Its people and not technology we engage with so it’s very ‘old school’ in terms of building this network – not just face-to-face but individual conversations via Yammer, email, face-to-face etc.
One of the signals that I believe this was successful was an occurrence when a new member made a post about ‘how much money had the company wasted on this Facebook gimmick’. Before any of the core team could respond a large number of users from all levels of the business came on to defend the platform and giving real life examples of how Yammer helped them as individuals, as teams and as an organisations.
I think once you get people thinking the platform is their voice and not a corporate tool then you can sit back and pat yourself on the back (only for a few minutes though).
Just a quick brain muse here about why collaboration initiatives fail in organisations. Here’s my take on it:
Organisation Context
People Context
Please chip in if you feel I’ve left anything out and we can start to build a comprehensive list.
It may be confirming the obvious (although not for many companies who just deploy technology and hope for the best) but advocacy programs have significant impact on engagement rates.
One of the three key findings in the 2014 CR State of Community Management research was that community advocacy and leadership programs are a key element of the most successful communities – they correlate with engagement, ability to measure value and executive participation. These programs require an investment in community management resources and processes to scale from informal programs to structured programs to multi-tiered leadership initiatives.
Only 33% of communities without any leadership opportunities are able to measure value – that rate more than doubles to 71% for those with formal advocacy programs.
One of the key themes (or attitudes as I would like to call it) of a recent business change project team, involved in putting a large world famous brand into the Cloud (Office 365), was to look at changing the normal business model and, in essence, changing the way we worked.
An excellent example of this was the way we recruited the advocates (called Heroes) for the programme who would spread the message, coach their colleagues and be general role models in changing the way people worked through using collaborative tools.
The normal approach would have been to reach out to leadership with a request for nominees. If we were lucky we would get the ‘normal suspects’ who would be involved in every other programme and dutifully attend induction and go through the standard actions. This was not a model for us to follow!
Instead we began to practice what we preached and started to use the power of Yammer. With an agreed set of principles and objectives (but no core job description) we by-passed the traditional middle management (general road blockers with this sort of activity) and reached out to active users on Yammer (going where the energy was) to become advocates. These people were already changing the way they worked by using Yammer and we deliberately avoided the traditional ‘floor walkers’ that IT departments would generally use for the role. It didn’t matter if you were of a management grade or role within a department – we wanted people that had a desire for change rather than a knowledge or technology.
The strategy was to go for numbers. Not dissuade people with a rigid job description or time commitment but giving them a set of principles and objectives and asking them to ‘do what they can, when they can’. The assumption was to have such a large volume of advocates that it didn’t matter if we have gaps in coverage or people away during certain activities – we had the numbers to cover.
We provided a core toolkit and built a coaching programme for them and there were some prescriptive elements around Outlook coaching, but in essence we began using the power of social networking to spread the message and the coaching. Heroes were asked to deal with any permission issues from their management.
Microsoft challenged us to get 350 advocates for the beginning of the roll-out programme. Within 6 weeks we had over 500 and when I left the project we had over 1200 Heroes (from an initial roll-out audience of 48,000).
Some of the initial success stories include:
Over 400 Heroes attended physical and online Yammer coaching sessions in November with the challenge to recruit colleagues and join a group or discussion in Yammer. From the 8 weeks leading up to Christmas over 1000 new people were joining Yammer each week (with engagement levels at over 50%).
Volunteers for use cases, testing, focus groups for SharePoint, OneDrive etc were recruited within minutes rather than days or weeks in normal programmes.
There was some resistance to the ‘social approach’ we took and in some areas we needed to be more prescriptive (interestingly many of these were IT related departments) but the approach got us 90% plus of the advocates we needed.
As the whole campaign was based on behavioural change and new ways of working (not the tools or IT deployment) the intention was not to stand the Heroes down once the roll-out was complete but to use them as a legacy for collaboration (and others projects) within the company.
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.
Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 