Tag: community

Facebook at Work or O365

Facebook at Work or O365

Anyone who is involved in discussions with colleagues over Facebook at Work (I imagine many of you are the same ones that deal with the Slack discussions) here is an informative article around progress on the product.

http://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/a-facebook-at-work-progress-report-whats-changed-and-where-it-fits/?utm_source=cmswire.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cm&utm_content=MW-160914-1000&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0dObU9UTmxOakF6WW1aayIsInQiOiJ5bFwvWXJlajBLdVhjU1FSWXBCVTFPSlhYY0RqekVhMDRob0N1TUZUMkxKdm1haU55Ymt4RGN3bHZzNmY3d3IzbHF5dEpkODN1cXNUT0NMWDhSRU9FTWQ0TzhwM1wvekpEWWV1YVN4SUZ0U2QwPSJ9

I echo the authors comments around building relationships and community as a driving force for new ways of and Facebook at Work does have nice features.

However, no communities or relationships within an organisation sit in isolation from the way work gets done or linked to its strategy, processes, workflows, campaigns or initiatives. You could spend time integrating Facebook at Work with search but eventually you will need to leave Facebook at Work to deal with the outcomes of the communities and relationships.

The benefit of O365 is the increasingly ‘seamless integration’ with other capabilities that may be needed as a result of the community outcomes. For example, files uploaded on Yammer will be hosted on SharePoint. Conversation on Yammer could bleed into a Skype Teams call. Videos displayed on Yammer will play through Stream. There is linkage to Office apps, O365 Groups etc. All activity will be understood and surfaced via Delve. The need to leave O365 becomes increasingly unlikely within the collaborative process.

The compelling narrative behind O365 will be the seamless integration with the way people collaborate, not just building community and relationships, but in group work, file sharing, communicating and other collaborative activities.

One things I strongly agree with thought is “It’s not the tool but the people and programming that make enterprise social a success.”

My bias comes from a people centric perspective (rather than document or process centric) so I’ll be interested to hear other folks opinions, especially if you have been involved in a Facebook at Work trial.

Changing the conversation

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?

The value of a Use Case in introducing social collaboration tools

The value of a Use Case in introducing social collaboration tools

One of the most powerful tactics in introducing collaboration tools within an organisation is the use cases. Get your use cases right – built around existing processes, current challenges and business priorities and you begin to plant the initial seeds of success. Don’t stop at a small number of use cases but get as many as possible lined up to run over a number of ‘waves’ (don’t do everything at once) that can take a number of months to bleed into the environment. The value of this approach includes:

  • Explores potential without too much commitment on resource (don’t run long requirement gathering sessions that turn the business off but short focused trials – not every use case is suitable of the environment)
  • Makes people feel ‘safe’ – sense of validation
  • Provides many with an understanding of what can be achieved (‘art of the possible’)
  • Begins to role model behaviours and best practice (openness)
  • The expected goals may not be the final value but getting people on-board and participating will allow them to understand how they get value. Remember any project team won’t know most of the answers so let the business ‘explore’.

Changing the business model for advocay programmes

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.

 

Air cover for the community

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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.