Tag: employeeengagement

It’s not about the like?

It’s not about the like?
I’ve heard lots of talk recently around metrics and ROI on knowledge and collaboration tools. Many of the intranet, social media, IT, HR and marketing people I speak to are still looking for metrics that will provide some of the traditional measurements around attraction, attention and adoption, such as downloads, unique users, popular pages etc. In the new world of social, open and collaborative business should we be looking at ‘likes’, ‘favourites’ or user comments?
For me it has to be more than just a ‘like’ or thumbs up but something deeper about exploring the depth of connection to people and content that has been developed.

In many ways the measurement still produced for various stakeholder dashboards has not changed for many years. We still see the benchmark of activity as something which should be measured. The value of the activity is something which stakeholders rarely asked for.To measure the value of the relationships and transparency created by the individuals, groups and communities residing on collaborative or social platforms we still need to conduct a lot of manual digging to find measurement around such artifacts as:

• Social Knowledge – this can be defined in many ways such as assets being shared around a community (and beyond) and related practices emerge.

• Relationship development – the ability to create new relationships and networks that previously didn’t exists

• Number of relationships created by individuals and their depth – look at followers and participation in threads

• Discovery of communities – have members joined communities outside their ‘physical’ or existing network

• What collaborative activities are emerging

• What threads, replies, comments or connections contain referrers to potential collaborators

• What threads contain creative or innovative ideas

• Are members sharing personal stories and how much emotional support is provided

The various web metric packages and social business tool reports do not provide this type of information and much of it will be antidotal evidence. Social analytics are poor within most social tools (it will be a major revenue stream for a vendor that can start to provide some of the softer metrics that articulate quality and not just quantity).

Over the years I’ve reported on numerous ROI and metrics to various groups of stakeholders. My top 3 in no particular order are:

  1. Creating an online community platform saw a 25% increase in the production of material for clients – by providing a collaboration platform for an existing professional service group their monthly ‘physical’ were supported by an online community platform. It enabled the sourcing of wider expertise (from across the country) that resulted in a 25% increase in the production of thought leadership material to be issues to clients (you could argue if that was a good thing but that is missing the point).
  2. IA change resulted in senior managers saving an hour per month searching for documents – by conducting user research into how audit managers worked a change of IA and navigation within their community site saw, on average, senior managers save 1 hour per month in sourcing the relevant methodology documentation required, enabling greater time to be spent on finding and minding clients
  3. Developing the online community sees a rise in employee satisfaction scores – a large customer service group within a global organisation were given access to form their own online community. With good strategy, governance and stewardship the community thrived. In annual employee satisfaction surveys the groups average % score increased significantly (I’m sure there were many other factors involved by why spoil a good tale) and was over 20% higher than other similar customer service groups. In some areas a 1% rise in employee satisfaction equates to £2m extra revenue – so you can work out the potential benefit!

On the downside my most disappointing metrics was reporting the drop in homepage visit after an expensive rebranding exercise on our intranet homepage but that did reflect an increasing trend in the value of the homepage becoming diminished

My favourite ‘metric’ as such involves a community set up to bring two very diverse groups together, to collaborate in reporting common faults and reporting back workarounds and fixes. I am hard pressed to call it a community as neither group had any previous interaction (which was part of the issue) and I do preach that unless a conversation is already taking place in the physical world it is hard to develop this online.

One group was a skilled manual workforce based across the UK. The other group dealt with customer service and could be located across the global. With governance and steward in place the volume of activity began to increase.

When it came to the assessment report the ‘metric’ I took most pride in was not the volume of activity nor the number of cases solved but the anecdotal evidence from both sides of the fence that the visibility and transparency created through the forum had begun to create a greater appreciation from each group, an understanding of the issues each face and how to work with them.

You could then spend months evaluating how much benefit this continuing of connections could save the organisation but sometimes the user comments mean so much more than a hard metric.

Pandaemonium

Pandaemonium
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I’m currently reading ‘Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers’ (by Humphrey Jennings, co-founder of the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s)  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contemporary-Observers…

It fascinates me to compare the benefits and dangers of the industrial revolution with today’s digital revolution.

Pandaemonium collects texts taken from letters, diaries, literature, scientific journals and reports of the time, and traces the development of the machine age in Britain. Covering the years between 1660 and 1886, it offers a rich tapestry of human experience, from eyewitness reports of the Luddite Riots and the Peterloo Massacre to more intimate accounts of child labour, Utopian communities, the desecration of the natural world, ground-breaking scientific experiments, and the coming of the railways. Pandomonium was originally published in 1985, and in 2012 it was the inspiration behind Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony for the London Olympic Games.

Interestingly (for me anyway) is the book is divided into 4 sections:

 Observations and reports

  • Exploitation
  • Revolution
  • Confusion

I spend much of my time looking at how organisations introduce and sustain knowledge sharing, collaboration and communication technology and associated behaviours.  

If we get adoption and adaption right these are disruptive technologies that can assist in changing the nature of the way colleagues engage, communicate, share, learn, nurture and collaborate with each other.

If we get adoption and adaption wrong organisations, and the people / networks within them, go through the trials and pains articulated in the chapter titles above (quick reality check – I’m not comparing the suffering of the industrial revolution with that of an employee who can’t work out the # function on their enterprise social network).

We have seen the observations and reports of how a more open and transparent environment can enhance both employees and organisations.

We are at the exploitation stage where there is a mad rush to social without the analysis or change management processes needed to create the value.

We will soon have the revolution as organisations and employees fight, struggle, resist or forge ahead in the use and value of this new way of working. Many organisations will embrace, while many will fail to get value and asset it’s the technology and / or culture that is the issue.

For those that forge ahead confusion will be created if we lose interest in the on-going stewardship of these tools and behaviours and at worst we see employees burdened with another deafening channel in an already noisy eco-system or technology.

Stick to the recipe for Enterprise Social Software success

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.

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.

Making the same mistake

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Every day I see a greater digital divide within companies. I recently worked on a collaboration project that involved both groups of apprentices / graduates and those that are more used to faxes than Facebook. It made me realise we are making the same mistakes with collaboration tools (open, social, transparent working etc.) as we did with email and Knowledge Management tools of the 1990s.

 

Apprentices and graduates ‘just get it’ in terms of understanding how to use technology to connect them to people and content, regardless of interface. Forget about corporate emails – they just don’t want to bother about desktops or email clients. But reach out to them on mobile day or night and they will respond. They see the value of making connections online and how to use the open and social tools to network within organisations. They expect good technology and connectivity and if the company can’t provide it they will use their own. If they can’t be provided with spaces to connect and network they will develop their own.

 

Other groups within the company needed far greater training, floor walking and hand holding to understand the potential and possibilities of the value of connecting and collaborating. With good content strategies, knowledge and people management, stewardship and governance many of these issues are overcome but what struck me was the change in approach needed by those responsible for implementation and success of collaborative working.

  

I’m old enough to remember the only ‘IT’ training you received was how to use the fax machine, the photocopy and the phone handset. When email arrived it was similar with one approach to training and ‘after school’ extra training for those that were slow on the uptake. The training provided showed us how to use the new tool. When you asked the trainer what to use it for that was a very different matter.

  

As we move towards more open, transparent and social ways of working within organisations I do fear we are making the same mistakes we made with email and Knowledge Management. We can introduce the tools and technology, show them how to use it but not guide people on what to share.

  

Too many times I have seen organisations deploy the technology, train people how to use it but give them no further guidance on how to work more transparently, open and socially. Hence we get the situation that the tools are not used, or maybe worst they are used to create additional noise but no value. If we thing email and various KM document coffins are bad enough imagine a screen full of irrelevant activity streams, notifications, thousands of 2 people communities (if you can have a community of 2) and invites to connect and follow with thousands of people you have never heard of and frankly don’t need to connect to every within your organisation.

 

To bridge this digital divide within organisations we need to ensure that these collaborative, open, social tools have sufficient strategy, governance and stewardship around them, aligned with a good content or knowledge strategy for the user groups so they have an understanding of what will provide value to themselves, their communities and their company. Once this is in place we can then worry about the floor walking and handholding from a technology level.

Socially redundant

 

 

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I’ve been following with interest the situation with HMV and the job losses announced live on Twitter.  It highlights some of the issues companies and employees face when becoming more of an open, transparent or social organisation.

The press is filled with stories of industrial relation being conducted via social media channels. As organisations begin to ask more of employees to collaborate, share knowledge and generally become a louder voice within the workplace it also requires the organisation to accept that the channels used for collaboration and knowledge sharing can also be used for employees to discuss the decisions and actions that effect their family and livelihood.

How companies, or maybe that should be individuals within companies, handle the situation reflects a great deal on how much they understand or fear the power of technology that enables employees becoming more engaged or vocal within open, transparent and social businesses. In some ways it shows how far an organisation has come in bridging the digital divide that exists within many companies.

A few years ago I worked for an organisation that trumpeted to clients the value and expertise of its staff. We had developed an active knowledge and collaboration programme, based around communities and the value of collectively working towards solutions for our clients. Our intranet platform was full of articles of people related initiatives involving collective innovation. The firm then announced there were to be redundancies. It happens and this article is not discussing the merits or dilemma of redundancies but how digital savvy companies deal with it. Rather than continue the open, community based approached being developed the response from leadership was to remove ‘people related’ and ‘success’ stories from the intranet and close down any form of online discussion around the events. I appreciate there are certain legal requirements and obligations that need to be met but to completely ignore this channel was paramount to dismissing this as an essential source of news and discussion.  So we had the situation where staff could read about events on external news and social sites but could find nothing within the intranet environment.  For a channel that was being promoted as a source for company news, collaboration and knowledge sharing the effect was dramatic. Over the next few months we saw contributions and engagement on our communities drop dramatically. I fear it will be many years before this organisation understands the possibility that these types of collaborative workplace technologies can provide in changing the way people work.

Moving this on a few years I had the fortune to work for a global organisation that is really trying to change the way they work. They had suffered from poor industrial relations but are determine to build relationships, engagement and communities within their workforce by using collaborative technologies, realising that embracing the open nature that technologies provide is one of the ways to prosper in the changing work of work. Rather than bury their head in the sand they are actively building and supporting internal communities, putting in place appropriate stewardship, governance, advocates and nurturing collateral to make sure this works. It won’t happen overnight and there will be hurdles along the way. But being open and transparent will ensure they have a greater chance of bridging the digital divide.

All organisations will go through good and bad times. But the consistency of relationships with their employees will ensure the continued development of collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is a significant step in creating a more open and democratic working organisation that the digital age is delivering.

 

 

Intranet Professionals

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Been following this LinkedIn discussion on Intranet Professionals with interest as it’s something I and other intranet focused people have been talking about (with little action on my part) for some time.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Why-arent-there-more-Intranet-113656.S.206734508?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=113656&item=206734508&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b-pop_ttl-hdp&ut=3yZGP7ilLlJ5A1

I believe there are two major issues that are barriers to seeing greater number of ‘intranet professionals’ or defining this as a skill set.

Firstly the lack of a recognised qualification still hinders the role. HR, Marketing, Communications and these types of roles have all formed, for want of a better word, institutes that begin to define qualifications. It’s something I have pondered upon for many years (in 2010 we held the Intranet Career Path discussion at IBF 24) but I still struggle to define what we would include within this type of qualification. The demands of linking ‘people to people’ and ‘people to content’ internally changes so rapidly that developing modules would be hard. I also sense that intranet professionals are more ‘artisans’ than ‘workers’ as they are on the innovative edge of changing the way organisations work. It’s true that many intranet managers need to conduct many roles not just within the intranet field, but even in large organisations that have dedicated intranet teams it would be brave to suggest they are not innovative or creative in the practice of changing the way organisations work. Unfortunately I sense this may be to the detriment of the profession as many organisations still struggle in how they organise and departmentalise innovation.

Secondly the career path is still not mapped out. If someone was looking to become a CKO, CIO, CTO (even CDO – Chief Digital Officer) they would need a lot more on their CV than just ‘intranet’. For other areas this may not be the case. While it’s not a burden it certainly would struggle to get you a seat at the top table by just running successful intranet programmes.

 

 

 

From ‘Social’ to ‘Open’

Love the blog posts from Luis Suarez and this one is no exception as he challenges the terminology of using ‘social business’ and also where the next level of sponsorship will come for the tools and methodologies used to make the workplace a more ‘social’ (‘open’) place to work.

http://www.elsua.net/2013/01/08/social-business-in-2013-an-opportunity-open-business/

I agree ‘social’ still struggles to hit the right targets. Terms such as ‘social intranets’ and ‘social business’ may be used within the industry but to the people that sign the cheques and deploy the campaigns within the business it sits on the shelf with other terms such as ‘user generated content’ and ‘semantic web’ – people just don’t care how they are bracketed.

I like the term ‘open business’ and steers closely to my belief that the tools that enable greater engagement, collaboration and knowledge sharing within organisations that will lead to greater innovation for the company and a more democratic and inspiring place for employees to work and develop work / life balance. My only concern is the Risk and Compliance people in organisations may raise a concern if they hear of becoming an ‘open business’.

In terms of sponsor these type of tools currently IT and CIO (if there is one) have ownership or responsibility for much of the deployment. A savvy CIO will see how they can become a perfect fit for them to go beyond IT, step up, and take an enterprise-wide view.

A CFO may also become a good sponsor. Now, this is less obvious. Why get the numbers person on board here? Well, collaboration is first and foremost about creating economic value; it’s a strategic search for good cross-company projects. Many CFOs also oversee the strategy department, so why not add cross-company strategic activities to the portfolio?

I would steer away from Internal Communication, Brand or Marketing if you are looking for the social (open) tools to untap hidden expertise, knowledge or innovation. In most companies the more traditional Marketing and Communication roles have other priorities and agendas that don’t sit well with this type of tool. For example, Marketing may be extremely pleased if the social tool is fully brand compliant and has all the latest corporate messages. But that may turn users off in drove as the goal will be to create relationships and networks that create new value.

The head of HR should be a perfect fit for new streams of sponsorship and potential adoption campaigns. Good collaboration requires the right incentives, performance evaluations, promotion criteria, and people development. So it’s only natural for the head of HR to take on the role; that entails going beyond HR issues and working with others, such as the CIO, to craft a holistic solution to disengaged employees.