CHAPTER 5

Analyze Insights and Returns

SIMON TERRY KNEW THAT as a banker, and in his role as CEO of HICAPS, a healthcare-focused division of National Australian Bank (NAB), decisions and investments were made on measurement, evaluation, and ensuring risks were outweighed by returns. When a team member of NAB created a way for people across the 40,000-person organization to work together more effectively, he knew he’d need to quantify this, too. The priority was to increase collaboration, supporting the NAB transformational and cultural goals that were already in place.

He admits now that he supported the project out of self-interest and knew it would be easy enough to measure success. Many of his roles in NAB involved collaboration across silos. The organization needed to be able to do that more easily. As CEO, he spent part of his day answering emails from people across the parent company’s network. Most of these questions were fairly general, needing answers that many different people could have answered, and the answers to which should be easily found online if the right systems were in place. He wanted his time back and hoped the new tools would do just that.

At first he moved the inquiries from his inbox to the social network’s update box so everyone could see his answers to the questions. Then he noticed people on his team began doing the same. Soon questions were being posted to the network, not sent to him directly, and people across the organization were answering them without him. His first goal had been achieved.

What had taken hours every week now took only minutes each day. Some days that time was then spent proactively answering questions people hadn’t yet asked, but that he thought needed to be addressed. Other days, people who didn’t even know one another were launching into broad and deep conversations that resulted in creating new services his division could offer and novel ways to work between teams that were making huge leaps in productivity.

Their initial system had not cost his department anything and was clearly delivering benefits to the whole organization. His getting peace of mind from the return of lost time had been enough justification for the investment of the people needed to set up the environment.

After two years into their journey, a general manager of the technology group socially shared that the system’s license was up for renewal, but the institutional immune system didn’t want to pay. Terry shared this news with the now-thriving online community and within days received 191 replies. People began adding into the system ways to measure and prove the value of how they were now working.

Another employee introduced the practice of tagging any business improvement posted in their network with the hashtag #wins. All the posts tagged that way were then curated so they could add up the money saved, the new business initiated, and the processes that could be measured, which Terry and the other sponsors of the collaboration could then share with the GM.

That led to adding additional hashtags for the four transformational goals of the larger organizations: #customerexperience, #increasemarketshare, #continuousimprovement, and #leadership. As people improved in any of these areas, they shared the wins and documented the successes. When it was time for the leaders of the community to report to the NAB leadership on how Terry’s organization had made progress—and to make the case that the license fee was nominal in comparison to the organization’s gains—the network compiled a report full of examples and real-time practices that could be used by other parts of the business.

Social media is about time and value. Put in the time, see the value. See value, you put in the time.
—Jane Hart

The group executive for people and communications surprised Terry by telling him the report was unnecessary, as he had followed the conversation as it unfolded and had a strong sense of the value the division was providing the organization overall. The social learning journey had brought everyone along.¹

Look Back to Look Forward

Organizations invest time and money in the collaborative approaches that foster social learning for many reasons, as we’ve outlined in this book. The most common reasons we hear are related to addressing what’s broken in the culture, namely stringent policies that restrict people from working across departments.

By adopting new practices, leaders hope to increase the amount and quality of knowledge sharing across the organization so that people can make better decisions, and to create an atmosphere where people build trust, increasing their desire to do good work. Everyone seems to believe that changing the fundamental conversation in the workplace helps employees find meaning in what they do and satisfaction in their time on the job.

Where does this fit with leaders who want to know if this engaged approach contributes to the bottom line? Where do we look to find new approaches that will make a bigger difference? How do we decide if and when one of the tools should be ditched altogether?

Do these changes somehow provide sustainable strategic advantage? If not, what can we do to the social tools or the organizational culture to make them effective? If so, how can we make sure we increase their benefit?

Specifically as it relates to learning, there are direct and indirect ways to gauge the amount, type, and quality of learning happening between people, especially using social software. The question becomes: Should that be your aim? Is that really what’s important for you to understand? Is that the most useful thing for leaders in your organization to know?

Quantifying conversation can be equally misguided. Counting how much is said would be no more valuable than measuring how much students in a class weigh as a true signal of effectiveness.² Sure, it’s evidence of something, but it doesn’t provide value.

Too often, people are so fearful of assessment or so stuck in their ways they don’t realize there are alternatives to the traditional metrics that have been used for eons in business and education. Many people still only know a few evaluation methods and choose which ones to use based on their convenience.³ “I only have a few minutes at the end of this program to see if it was helpful so I’ll pass out a simple form,” is only effective if you’re assessing people’s interest in giving you feedback or capturing anecdotal evidence they may have remembered by the time it’s over.

One human resources executive we spoke to while writing this book said that he doesn’t want the rest of the organization to know all the workforce data and analytical tools he has access to, for fear people will task his department with doing even more than his meager staff can manage. He added that the vendors who give him access to this data assume he’s going to do something useful with it, but his peers at the executive table give the impression it’s the last thing on their minds.

Understanding and using analysis to make smart decisions requires focusing on what you aim to accomplish and the myriad factors that led to where you’ve arrived. Based on this leader, and the many others we spoke with, who either don’t know how to quantify the people factor in their organization, or don’t even believe it’s possible, we realized there’s a fundamental disconnect—perhaps several—between new social and collaborative practices, and the leaders who are interested in measuring their value.

People who tell us there is “no way to measure this stuff,” because it seems too tacit and ephemeral, may not have taken the time or known where to look for ways to analyze this newly surfaced value in their organizations. For those at the beginning of the journey, we also want to remind them there are many ways to analyze what’s ahead.

Most leaders are far more interested in understanding what elements are critical to deliver in line with their business strategy, as well as identifying their organization’s largest challenges and risks. “The value an organization places on social initiatives will largely be based on its expectations,” says Joel Postman, author of SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. Learning and talent management are factors, as is collaboration itself, yet those are means to a more critical end.

Look first at your goals, then look underneath them. As it relates to learning, is what people are learning reliably and sustainably advancing organizational goals, especially in economic terms? Are you more interested in changing opinions, behaviors, relationships, capabilities, or something else? Is what people are learning advancing the organization’s position, long-term success, and the impact you can have on the world?

When an organization supports working in social ways, it is challenging old assumptions about how work gets done, how people work together, and how learning happens. It would seem incongruous not to also challenge staid practices in our search for understanding what worked, what didn’t and, most importantly, what didn’t work this time but could with a few changes along the way.

Almost everyone we spoke with about quantifying collaboration was adamant that we remind readers that correlation does not imply causation.

“Linear evaluation is focused on providing cause and effect for the sake of attribution—specifically showing when certain influencers cause specific outcomes—not to measure what we’ve done and how well we’ve done it,” says Natalie S. Burke, CEO of CommonHealth ACTION. “Theories of change indicate that the purpose of evaluation is to show that people’s lives or organizations have improved, that they are better than they were before, and that we know why.

“Too often people seek to evaluate if A leads to B, when in fact we should be evaluating the interaction of A, B, Q, R, and M. Understanding their interplay helps us to understand the role of each variable, in relation to others. If we don’t approach evaluation like this, acknowledging complexity, we risk attributing change to all the wrong things or failing to give credit to the right things.⁴

“Think of it like this: I could say that the reason a duck can fly is that it flaps its wings. If it was really that simple, that linear, how can I explain the fact that a chicken can’t when making the same motions? Clearly it takes more to fly than flapping wings,” says Burke. “The same applies to change whether within a society or an organization. Evaluation and the analysis that goes along with it don’t have to be complex, but they can’t be overly simplistic either.”

The best way to increase the likelihood of change in social groups is to increase the number of connections people have. That drives the speed at which new ideas can spread.
—Stowe Boyd

Rarely do people ask if the underlying purpose of evaluation is because the people funding the project want proof their contribution provided value or because they merely want the accompanying recognition.

“If that’s the case we should just thank them rather than initiate a complicated and likely-not-very-accurate evaluation process,” Burke says. “So much of bringing people to work together in new ways—the types of work that lead to significant change—requires many things to work well together and there need to be conscious efforts to remove constraints to collaboration, evaluation being one of them. The work of change is like soup, and you can’t credit its flavor to one ingredient.”

Attribution can be very powerful as it relates to getting funding and securing the support of leadership. Burke adds, “If you’re being asked to evaluate your success you need to know what ‘they’ [the funders, the stakeholders, the decision-makers] really want to know. Is it about learning, understanding, impacting, and improving or is it about giving credit where they believe it is due.”⁵

The simplest way to quantify your efforts is to position your costs against your savings, in a similar way to how Simon Terry did this at NAB. Terry calculated the cost savings from how he had adjusted his work, and deducted out the price of the technical systems. In addition to that, he worked with the people in the network themselves to capture the dollars saved and earned as a result of many people working and learning together.

“Too often people seek to evaluate if A leads to B, when in fact we should be evaluating the interaction of A, B, Q, R, and M.”

—Natalie Burke

As Ben Brooks, business coach and former corporate senior vice president of human capital, says, “Make sure that the ratio works. Prove that the risk is greatly outweighed by the reward.”⁶

If what gets measured gets done, as Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, then we also need to be careful about focusing too much on the wrong things because we’ve decided to measure them.

Douglas Merrill, former CIO and vice president of engineering at Google, warns that while we should ask ourselves how to measure everything, we should also be careful about what we measure because people will work toward showing progress, regardless of whether or not it’s productive. Measuring the wrong things can take away from focusing on what we really need and want from people.⁷

We also need to make sure what we choose to measure is grounded in sound and enduring principles. INSEAD associate professor of organizational behavior, Gianpiero Petriglieri, points out that while managers are inheriting scientists’ love of data, “data without a good theory makes us more clueless.”⁸

Andi Campbell at LAZ Parking says, “The more I coach, the less I need to provide structure because my team is motivated to perform at their best when they’re responsible for, or at least participating in, setting the expectations. They’re naturally aligning with the business, they’re making good decisions, they’re staying at our company, and the result of their work is a growing talent pipeline for our new locations.”

In other words, the real benefit of analysis comes from relating experiences to outcome—more sales, fewer complaints, stronger leaders, and happier employees.

It’s taken me years to really understand but organizational culture is the output of a good system … not an input to change/manage.
—Rachel Happe

“In some ways, our capitalistic system encourages decision because the forces applying pressures to achieve revenue and growth are rewarded more strongly than those encouraging ethical behavior. This may be a bit extreme, and your company is most likely a highly ethical one, but these pressures are very real, and even the most ethical people sometimes show very poor judgment when they are pushed hard to deliver difficult bottom-line results,” says Joel Postman.⁹

“This is unfamiliar territory,” some may protest as they do questionable things. “We’re on the frontier of communications. The rules are being written as we speak.” Nice try. Social approaches and new media do not require new morality. Most of us know right from wrong, and methods you haven’t used within the workplace before don’t release you from your responsibility for ethical behavior.

When metrics that are already used in the workplace link directly to your efforts, evaluation is easy. Revenue or time-to-quota clearly indicate the success of working in a social way. If you close a sale because of an exchange you have online or save a million dollars because a colleague suggests a simple hack that negates the need for even spending that money, few question the investment.

Unfortunately, not every program aligns easily with company metrics. Leaders may be skeptical when you claim business results amid many variables affecting success.

For these investments, you need to embrace a measurement toolbox that keeps pace with new approaches, one that looks beyond the business impact of past programs and can apply statistical certainty to the success of future programs.

“Think of it like this: I could say that the reason a duck can fly is that it flaps its wings. If it was really that simple, that linear, how can I explain the fact that a chicken can’t when making the same motions?”

—Natalie Burke

Use Lightweight Analysis

Today, most large organizations rely on heavyweight applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), to collect and manage the critical business information that drives their daily operations.

As business evolves, organizations need to consider if lighter-weight approaches and applications might be used to get at the nature of change itself, and provide meaningful data to leaders more interested in in-the-moment insight than cumbersome, static reports.

Terri Griffith, management professor at Santa Clara University and author of The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive, suggests organizations use lightweight experiments rather than all-or-nothing approaches to catalyze change in organizations.¹⁰

“Taking small steps is more important than ever, given the pace of the world around us. Find fast and inexpensive ways to test the leap-of-faith assumptions underlying the adjustments you want to make,” Griffith says.

Have half of your teams try one form of flexible work scheduling and the other half another so you can learn from both. Use a crowdfunding campaign to test the market for a new product. Griffith cautions, “Steer clear of surveys, you don’t want to base your change on someone giving you an answer they think you want to hear. Instead, measure behaviors like prepayments, performance, or repeat business.”

There are many ways to measure changes that benefit you and your organization, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and within each of these the approach to gathering information varies, too. Just make sure first you know the real reason you’re evaluating your work. What you are seeking to learn should dictate the type of measure you look for.

To help you quantify your work, we’ve created a compendium of approaches that get at the heart of people going further together.

Analysis 1: Perspective

What if you could get a sense of how the people in your organization felt about the company, each other, your customers and suppliers? What if you could better understand not merely what they felt, but how deeply they felt and how well they understood their perspective?

While employees and the press might like to believe that senior leaders of large organizations know all that’s going on in their ranks, that’s often far from reality. Spending time in meetings, focused on strategy and market share, leaves little time to get a read on what employees are thinking and feeling—about your organization and their work in general. For many years this disconnect was dismissed as the cost of doing business, yet we can all see the inherent risks. This may be acceptable for today’s leaders, who don’t understand the power of the tools available to them, but does anyone believe that will continue to be true in five years?

“Taking small steps is more important than ever, given the pace of the world around us. Find fast and inexpensive ways to test the leap-of-faith assumptions underlying the adjustments you want to make.”

—Terri Griffith

Ronald Burt, University of Chicago sociologist and author of Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital, the seminal book on social capital, points out that people continue to work the way they learned in legacy organizations, in yesterday’s organizational silos. He points out, “We are capable of coordinating across scattered markets of human endeavor. We are not yet competent in how to take advantage of the capability.”

These are not new challenges, yet we have arrived at a time when they can be solved immediately. In many cases, the most senior leaders (as well as people in all levels and roles) can learn what their colleagues are doing and thinking with the click of a few buttons. This is now possible because people are sharing with the express hope they will be heard and understood by those who manage their organizations. Even when they’re not sharing their views and experiences, they are frequently leaving behind breadcrumbs that can be decoded and acted on.

Analytics

While organizational functions including marketing, supply chain, and finance are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of analytics to inform decision making, and are seeing clear benefits in terms of business outcomes, many human resources organizations haven’t been as proactive, even as the people side of business increases in importance each year.

Because human capital is the source of a company’s intangibles, human capital management and analytics are essential competencies that all companies need. For instance, over the last 30 years, the role of intangibles, the source of creating organizational value, has increased sixfold.¹¹ Using analytics to extract and apply insights about the workforce is one of the biggest opportunities for any organization.

Marketing creates the brand, Support keeps the brand alive.
—Nenshad Bardoliwalla

There’s already ample evidence that those organizations using analytics to understand and assist people in their work outperform organizations that don’t. McBassi & Company has created a simple analysis to assess how your company stacks up in terms of your need to focus more on analytics.¹²

Priorities

When the CEO of a multinational company looked casually through several blog posts about a company event where he’d just spoken, one post about the lack of women on the stage caught his eye. He commented that other speakers had been invited, and that he appreciated the perspective. It was his first public comment, and he was surprised how easy it was to weigh in.

Within 24 hours, his comment had received dozens of additional responses, pointing out other incidents of easy-to-overlook sexism in public positions, and that the absence of women seems discontinuous with the organization’s stated goals.

He’d asked repeatedly for feedback through the usual means for years, yet had never realized how important this was to his employees. Even if he had received considerable feedback through those channels, yet chose to ignore it as some believed, he now had firsthand stories and the voices of his employees—publicly stated and difficult to ignore—to consider as he made decisions going forward.

The data points he received were also quantifiable; within a week there were over 80 comments. Groups had begun to form that were curating lists of women within the company’s ranks who would be great speakers, and who should be noticed not because of how loudly they’d been leading but because they were making a difference in their employees’ lives.

Within just a week, this senior leader heard perspectives and priorities he hadn’t for a long while, despite thinking he had been asking all along.

Attitude

For organizations looking for quantitative measures of the loyalty of their workforce, sentiment analysis measures how people feel about something: happy or disgruntled, committed or apathetic, trusting or not trusting. These emotions lead to the amount of time people are willing to devote to their jobs, their commitment to making good decisions on their employer’s behalf, and the likelihood they’ll stay or leave.

Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to determine if people are communicating in either positive or negative ways related to a particular subject, person, organization, or brand. Lillian Lee, professor at Cornell, often credited with creating sentiment analysis, points out that when people are somehow connected, they may be more likely to hold similar opinions and attitudes, so there is value in looking at the sentiment held across groups.¹³

Also known as opinion mining, for years vendors have offered marketing organizations services that monitor public sources of opinion such as what is posted on Twitter, written in blogs, and commented in articles in order to provide insight on how public opinion is trending on a specific topic.

These same types of tools are available to assess sentiment inside organizations too, tracking what’s termed employee voice. Rich textual data can be mined to better understand the opinions and sentiment of employees for the benefit of the organization. These tools are designed to understand employee chatter. They can aggregate and analyze data from internal and external social media sources, while respecting employee privacy.¹⁴

Should you be measuring people’s attitudes about their jobs, your organization, its leaders, or even your competition? Only if you’re going to do something about what you learn.¹⁵ The larger question is whether you’re looking for a change, presumably progress from negative to positive in what you’re doing.

Most organizations still have an outdated and overly centralized model for working, and it’s turned out to be a very difficult habit to break.
—Dion Hinchcliffe

With this information, you can systematically build and strengthen trust and foster an environment where people feel cared for and engage in reciprocity.

Empathy

At the 2014 World Economic Forum, a British bank CEO asked, “We all know it’s important to be empathic, but how do I galvanize 48,000 people in my UK operations—most of whom think that empathy is for wimps?”¹⁶

As public calls for companies to engage in authentic dialogue grow louder, the desire to change is hampered by the fear of appearing weak and vulnerable, meaning most businesses still suffer from an empathy deficit. “Enlightened companies are increasingly aware that delivering empathy for their customers, employees, and the public is a powerful tool for improving profits, but attempts to implement empathy programs are frequently hamstrung by the common misconception of it as ‘wishy-washy’, ‘touchy-feely’, and overtly feminine,” writes Belinda Parmar in the Harvard Business Review. “So empathy is de-prioritized, and relegated to the status of yet another HR initiative that looks good in the company newsletter. It is seen as a soft and frilly add-on rather than as a core tool.”

Parmar, CEO of the consultancy Lady Geek, author of The Empathy Era: Women, Business and the New Pathway to Profit, and a 2014 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, has created a way to measure an organization’s empathy with the Empathy Quotient, inspired by Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathizing-Systemizing model.¹⁷ The EQ combines customer, employee, and social media data streams to generate company ranking. Parmar is able to show with this methodology that empathy is a tangible quality that can be assessed, measuring how much empathy a company is delivering and where its greatest empathy deficits lie.

With this data, you can embed empathetic practices into the entire organization. Parmar notes, “There is nothing soft about it. It is a hard skill that should be required from the boardroom to the shop floor.”¹⁸ What if something similar were done inside your organization, looking at how internal messages are spread, demonstrating employee empathy?

Deb Schultz, Internet industry veteran and co-founder of YxYY, points out that if people talked to us in real life like marketers (or oftentimes our employers) do, we’d punch them in the face. Not much empathy there.

Emotional intelligence and empathy pay. L’Oréal sales people selected based upon their empathizing skills sold almost $100,000 more per year than colleagues hired based on the company’s previous criteria, and had 6 percent less turnover during their first year.¹⁹ Waiters who are better at showing empathy earn nearly 20 percent more in tips. Even debt collectors with empathy skills recovered twice as much debt.²⁰

Paul Fabretti, global director of social media for Microsoft CAS, puts it this way, “Trust, empathy, and honesty are the keys to make social work.”²¹

Simon Sinek, author of Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t and Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, says, “There is a pattern that exists in organizations that achieve the greatest success…. the ones with the highest loyalty and lowest churn and the ability to weather nearly every storm or challenge. These exceptional organizations all have cultures in which the leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organization can achieve this is with empathy.”²²

René Schuster, former CEO of Telefónica Deutschland, implemented a Germany-wide empathy-training program to coincide with making their retail outlets more appealing. This led to an increase in customer satisfaction of 6 percent within six weeks among both men and women.²³

Nike talks about “lessons shared” rather than “lessons learned.”
—Larry Hawes

Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School and author of the book The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, says organizations are becoming vehicles for creating complete and meaningful experiences.²⁴ This includes being able to listen and empathize. In this type of organization, building platforms for learning and creation will be particularly important.

Schultz says it’s all about getting in touch with our humanness and remember the people behind the data we’re collecting. “Why is it when we enter our cubes we forget how to be people? I blame the lighting!” The human factor, she points out, is what endures, while technological innovation is constantly shifting. “Technology changes, humans don’t.”²⁵

Patterns

Social messages give the organization what data scientists call “unstructured data,” meaning they travel with almost no metadata that relates them with other messages. Structured data is like data from a spreadsheet or from a database that allows it to be analyzed because of the additional detail it travels with.

Rachel Shadoan, data visualizer and design ethnographer at Akashic Labs, likens unstructured data to a pile of silverware at a flea market. If you to pull all of the salad forks from the pile, it would take a while because you need to pick up each piece of silverware to determine whether it’s the type of fork you’re looking for. If it’s not, you need to place it in a different pile.²⁶

“There is nothing soft about [empathy]. It is a hard skill that should be required from the boardroom to the shop floor.”

—Belinda Parmar

New artificial intelligence technologies, including IBM Watson, are masterful at taking in both structured and unstructured data and delivering insights leaders had never even looked for—let alone seen—before.

For example, what would happen if organizations could identify their most valuable employees who were giving all the signals indicating they were about to leave? They could do whatever they could to retain those employees before it was too late. Organizations could use similar strategies with their employees that companies like your mobile carrier have been using for years, making changes in what they offer in order to keep from losing your business.

Universities, using the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework, an analytics collaborative taking the guesswork out of student success, have shown that even educational institutions, and the students they support, can benefit from looking at data patterns in new ways.²⁷ By analyzing both structured and unstructured data, organizational leaders now have the opportunity to understand patterns that would not have been visible or clear in years past.

Analysis 2: Engagement

How important is it to you to have a large majority of your organization fully engaged in the work they do, and keenly aware of your organization’s vision and mission?

Employee engagement is the most widely evaluated human capital measure in most organizations. It analyzes the degree to which people participate in the organization and engage with one another. The results have been tied to performance outcomes for over a decade. The Gallup organization has shown organizational engagement is at an all-time low, and that the cost of a disengaged workforce can be catastrophic.²⁸ It’s estimated that in the aggregate, disengagement at work costs U.S. businesses about $300 billion a year in lost productivity.²⁹

TELUS credits their social initiatives with raising their engagement results from 56 percent engaged to 88 percent engaged over five years. Roche attributes their rising scores to an increased focus on both learning from one another and including patients and partners in their development process.

Keep moving by being open to new ideas and new paths for the community to take.
—Kelly Smith

A study of 65 firms in different industries found that the top 25 percent on an engagement index had greater profitability, and more than double the shareholder value compared to the bottom 25 percent.³⁰ Engaged employees are more likely to be productive,³¹ associated with higher performance,³² stay with their current employer,³³ and interact positively with clients.³⁴

Rather than simply share high-level findings with colleagues, use the social network to share actual survey performance data, framed by the highest correlated drivers of colleague engagement. At one company, posting the engagement data resulted in over 33,000 visits to the site, with colleagues sharing ideas about how they could improve engagement, creating an appetite for more enterprise social media to enable collaboration.

Online Participation

Another way to gauge engagement, specifically as it relates to people participating in your social network, is through the dashboards most social tools offer to administrators that track online participation. It’s fairly simple to ascertain things like number of visits to a site, growth in that number over time, and the number of people who subscribe to particular news feeds. You can also track the number of times a video has been viewed, the number of comments on a blog post, and the number of members and amount of discussion with the company’s online communities. In many cases, there are dashboards built into the administrative functions of each social application that will provide data in an aggregated form. It can be manually gathered as well.

While it’s easy to dismiss this data as not useful in the big scheme of things, it can provide indicators to your vibrancy, adoption, and capacity to let people know what you’re doing.

Some leaders are cautious not to report on these sorts of measures for fear the numbers may dip, but ebbs and flows should be expected. What’s more useful is to notice if participation has dropped too soon to get traction or is changing for reasons that can be addressed and turned around.

What if a special committee of members of the community met periodically to discuss how they would know if their network was “healthy,” and the conditions they felt were essential for the network to achieve its long-term goals? They could identify several, all of them measurable:

• The number of participants is growing.

• An increasing proportion of members are actively involved.

• People are engaging in multiple kinds of activities.

• There are increasing levels of participation in the stewardship and management of the network.

• Membership is increasingly diverse.

• People are coming together in different combinations.

• People are making and taking advantage of both strong and weak ties.

Some of these indicators are about the network’s connectivity, but others are about its usefulness to members and its attractiveness to nonmembers.

Generative Production

The word generative means to be capable of producing or creating. However, according to Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant, authors of the books Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World and When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business, “the word generative is not about a single act of production or the creation of a single thing. Being generative implies an ongoing capacity to generate and produce and create. Being generative is ultimately a sustainable capacity, not a one-off event. It is perpetual, like a species’ ability to propagate and sustain life.”

Once embraced, constraints are no longer constraints.
—Dibyendu De

As the self-centered and two-dimensional understanding of growth as “more of everything” embodying an eternal good starts to fail, organizations are looking at ways to measure their ability to generate, produce, and create value that can change along various dimensions over time. To be more generative is to be “more inclusive, valuing different voices, more internally and externally collaborative, with system and process and technologies that allow for ideas and innovation.” When people in our organizations improve their relationship-building abilities and begin to bake in both inter- and intrapersonal skills, accomplishing more—generating more—in better ways, generative becomes second nature.

Notter and Grant have created a series of worksheets leaders can use to analyze their generative capacity and the dimensions along which they ought to improve. The 20-question worksheet includes things like:

• Do you really see different people making decisions?

• Do people in your organization argue about which department owns certain processes?

• How much do you include people outside organizational lines in your process?

• How well do people build relationships, including their skill in doing that using social media tools?

These are the types of qualities to look for in cultures that value inclusion, whose processes involve collaboration, whose tools are humanizing, and who are increasing their capacity to generate more (not necessarily quantity, rather quality, “more and better”).³⁵

Breadth and Depth

David Birnbaum, vice president of learning at CENTURY 21 Real Estate, points out, “You can build it, but they may not come. For an organization made up primarily of independent contractors—in our case CENTURY 21 realtors—it’s very important to know people are accessing and participating in our social portal. We can’t mandate they come, yet we use the portal for key communication and training so it’s important we provide reasons for them to want to come. There needs to be real business value.”

In addition to measuring “adoption from all of our agents, we also measure by segment, subset, and target groups. That’s so we can understand the needs and priorities of agents in the luxury market, for instance,” says Birnbaum. “By being able to look at who is contributing, and what they are contributing, we know more about how broad and deep our reach is.”

In addition to raw numbers, Birnbaum says, “We also track the amount of content shared. If we see a handful of regular contributors, but way more are logging in but not commenting, or rating other people’s content, we can create approaches to incentivize more people to contribute their own self-generated content.”

“Periodically we send out a survey asking the predicted value from participating in the portal,” Birnbaum says. A recent survey showed a high correlation to both investments in time and job impact. When asked to rate whether the time I spent using the portal was a worthwhile investment, 86 percent of respondents said yes. To answer the question, “I have applied knowledge acquired through the portal back on the job,” 90 percent of participants said yes. Ninety-three percent also said they trusted the credibility of the shared content on the portal.³⁶

Social learning still often requires priming of pumps to get the collaboration/discussion going.
—Craig Wiggins

Better Choices

Another measure is the opportunity cost of doing something that is no longer working or could have been stopped before it’s started. For every program you create without gleaning useful insight from the people in your organization, there is an increasing likelihood their needs won’t be met. Collaborative approaches provide a way to educate program development and can give you an indication of what people are neglecting as a result of being forced into outmoded and cumbersome ways to work.

Analysis 3: Connectedness

Do you want to be sure the people in your organization know each other or, at least, have a method by which they can know what skills and knowledge everyone brings to the table?

The connections people make across social networks and online communities seem important, but where’s the proof? Some comes through the change that can span boundaries across those networks. Promising analysis approaches are illuminating the hidden social networks that existed even before organizations began adopting their online counterparts, giving leaders insight into how to accelerate change beyond formal vertical channels. The boxes and lines of organizational charts often mask how work actually gets done.

Information Flow

Organizational network analysis (ONA) is an analytical technique for mapping the relationships that run through all organizations. By investigating the structures and patterns associated with the flow of communications between people within organizations, ONA tools can show the informal connections within a traditional organizational structure that facilitate getting work done.

“These networks are often not part of the formal structure but grow out of the many collaborations and social interactions that occur daily within the organizational system and between members of the system and those outside it,” says Rob Cross, associate professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.

“This method allows management to build upon, instead of ignore, the knowledge flows and exchanges that were already in place and growing,” says Valdis Krebs, data scientist and software developer focused on social and organizational network analysis. ONA shows the “relationships, knowledge exchanges, and information flows that have already emerged around any capability, skill, interest, or process in an organization.”³⁷

Many different measures can be assessed on a network, including the strength of the relationship between individuals, the frequency or significance of formal and informal communications, or even the “energizing” or “de-energizing” influence one person has on another. A change in flows can also indicate if people are able to access the data they need to make informed decisions.

Cross, the researcher who formalized the term ONA, found that energizing relationships was the only consistent factor that determined who would connect to each other for the purpose of obtaining or sharing information.³⁸

Energy, when examined on the backdrop of an organization’s network of relationships, proved to be the most important factor for predicting information-seeking behavior. Evaluating how energy moves across an organization can show you how to enhance the information flow.³⁹

ONA data can be gathered from email, internal instant messaging applications, status updates, online forums, internal social networks, and blogs—any of the systems your organization has control over. If you use social tools across your larger enterprise ecosystem, with your partners, or even with your prospects and customers, you can track connections between people within and outside of the organization, too.

Social learning is going on around us, all the time. It’s like gravity, you only notice it when it’s NOT there.
—Jane Bozarth

According to Patti Anklam, author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World, organizational network analysis holds great potential in leadership development, innovation, knowledge management, organizational change and development, talent management, and organizational performance. It has been used to look at the flow of information for personal leadership, succession planning, expertise location, change management, mergers and acquisitions, positioning people in roles, professional network development, and team building.⁴⁰

Pathfinders

In our online culture, the need for people to know everything is less and less important, yet they can provide extra value to the organization and their colleagues if they are able to quickly direct us to the right resource. Malcolm Gladwell calls these people mavens. Libraries call them docents. Ronald Burt calls them brokers. Every one of us benefits from knowing one or several.

Pathfinders are people who are able to help us understand or identify an appropriate problem-solving approach and the information to back up our decisions. By using curation tools and attention analysis, we can ascertain how they are helping other people to learn.

You can look at the value of what you have learned from them by asking: Have my behaviors changed as a result of my interactions with this person? Have my behaviors changed with respect to other people as a result?

Pathfinders span boundaries and the gaps that exist between separate parts of any organization. “They are go-betweens, trusted negotiators, and guides for those who wish to collaborate with others outside their own function, geography, level, or group. They are the perfect people to engage in order to insure that issues of an interdependent nature are attended to and addressed,” noted Rob Cross, Chris Ernst, and Bill Pasmore in research they did specifically on boundary spanning.⁴¹

Analysis 4: Fiscal Fitness

Do you fear that being social brings no real benefit to your organization? Are you afraid there’s no way to measure the value many assure you is there?

Stuck in our number-driven organizations, the most commonly asked question we hear is whether there is a way to prove social networks result in net profits to the organization. There is.

Financial Gains

Surprising to many, it’s easy to point out how these systems generate revenue. Adopt an organization-wide practice of using the hashtag #moneymade whenever someone posts to the network a company win as a result of a connection made or information shared that leads to a sale. Use a tag like #moneysaved for similar instances of company money not being spent because people were able to find alternative approaches.

At the end of the month, add up all of the instances in which these tags were used to easily show the socially created, bottom-line financial gains.

Here’s how this has worked: A large travel company aimed to provide an internal tool for professional networking so that employees could connect quickly and easily. They had recently grown from a small U.S. operation into one with 10,000 employees in 59 countries, many telecommuting and beginning to feel disconnected from colleagues and information.

Employees complete a profile of their interests and expertise. When someone posts a question to an online bulletin board, the system’s predictive modeling software automatically sends it to the 15 people whose expertise is most relevant to the question. The more people who complete profiles, and the more questions that are asked and answered, the better the inference engine is able to assign questions appropriately.

… Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

“You have a greater chance of getting a useful answer if your question is directed not just to the people you already know, but to the people who have the most relevant knowledge,” the manager of the network explained.

The online community is credited with substantial savings for the company. It identified $500,000 in direct savings the first year, but based on anecdotal results, that figure doesn’t come close to representing the total savings. They attribute the site’s success partly to the fact that management ceded control over its use to line employees. The network is effectively creating a massive knowledge base that employees willingly populate with their own information.

ROI

Sanofi calculates the return on their investment regularly. Although they had almost no outlay of funds at the beginning (less than $2,000, mostly for giving out books—Simon Sinek’s Start with Why), driven by a dogged pursuit of finding no-cost ways to collaborate, they show a return on investment regularly, far exceeding any costs incurred.

For instance, a new hire took the initiative to change her workflow at the call center (part of a six-month training before people are assigned to the field). The change doubled the number of calls she could make in a day with no loss of quality. Her new workflow approach is now the standard. No cost. No project team. The focus on new ways to work allows people to take initiative in their corner of the business.

Another example at Sanofi was to reduce the duration of the senior management team weekly meeting from two hours to one hour because people could update one another in the flow of work throughout the week. With 10 people in that group, the approximately 500 hours a year saved equaled approximately one-quarter of a full-time position. These are senior director- and vice president-level salaries.

All they had to do was offload most roundtable topics, information sharing, and nonurgent matters from the weekly meeting to Connect-M, their collaborative platform. These created more useful discussion during the meeting because simple updates were already done and people could focus on the topics themselves.

Benchmarking

As with almost any business processes, you can use various performance metrics to compare your work against industry practices from other companies. Many organizations provide resources to do this.

The Community Roundtable uses their Community Maturity Model (CMM) to help organizations understand, plan for, and assess the performance of community and social business initiatives. Their clients use the CMM both as a community management checklist and as an organizational road map. Internally, The Community Roundtable uses the model to organize their research, curated content, and training services so clients can easily connect the dots and implement the research and content in their strategic planning.

First published in 2009, the CMM is widely used to:

• evaluate and assess organizations’ social and community efforts through gap analysis.

• understand the expertise and skill sets required for successful community development.

• develop a road map to advance community efforts in their organization.

• educate and manage expectations of executives, advocates, and colleagues.

• create training for those tasked with working on social strategy and community management.⁴²

The Social Media in the Large Enterprise (SMiLE) index is a comprehensive and accurate analysis focused on the use of social tools within organizations.⁴³ Free to use, it is part of the Engage for Success movement, committed to the idea that there is a better way to work. Their Social Media and Digital Engagement Network is dedicated to applying new social enterprise tools in the quest for building employee engagement.⁴⁴ 

As Clark Quinn, author of Revolutionize Learning & Development, points out, “We need to measure ourselves by our contributions to the organization and its endeavors. Benchmarking ourselves on efficiency makes sense after we have impact, but not before.”⁴⁵

With benchmarking models and indexes springing up regularly, you can find ones that suit your needs as you go further down the social path.

Opportunity

With help from Global Action Plan, British-based O2 determined the financial benefits of their Think Big program.⁴⁶ For every £1 that O2 invests in engaging their people in Think Big to deliver sustainability benefits, they deliver £1.40 back to the business.

Increased productivity reduced absenteeism, and decreased employee turnover delivered financial benefits for O2.⁴⁷ In addition, participation in the Think Big program was seen by both employees and managers as a significant development opportunity for employees, agreeing that Think Big offered a better development opportunity than traditional training options.

Of those people actively involved in Think Big: 64 percent of participants reported increased sense of motivation; 59 percent of participants reported increased confidence; 87 percent of participants reported being more positive about O2 as a brand, and; 60 percent of participants reported being more positive about O2 as an employer.

In addition: 88 percent of managers saw better team cohesion; 67 percent of managers saw higher productivity; 73 percent of managers stated their people were more motivated after being involved, and; 88 percent of managers said their people’s confidence had risen.

They also calculated the direct business savings that resulted from employee engagement on sustainability. Financial savings included reducing waste to the landfill, which saved £6,400; water usage, which was reduced by 4 percent in 2012; and recycling 300,000 mobile phones, thanks to their call center and store staff, raising over £750,000.

To improve their model, Global Action Plan extends their research to other organizations. Developing the knowledge is the first step to improving the way that organizations engage with both their employees and sustainability.⁴⁸

Reward-Risk Ratio

When we’re embarking on something new, it’s easy to think about why it won’t work and what could go wrong. It’s important to consider the risks, and assess their likelihood.

There’s nothing wrong with risk management or attempting to mitigate unknowns. But nothing great was ever created without a degree of uncertainty. Venturing into new territory is worth the risk whenever the potential or upside is great, even if something does go wrong.

“If leaders in Silicon Valley had the risk appetite of your average HR or L&D professional,” says Ben Brooks, “they would have never launched the iPhone, Instagram, or Uber. There were and still are many potential things that could go wrong with these innovations, but their upside potential has changed the way we work and live.” 

If you keep waiting until you’re an expert to put things out, your inactivity will kill innovation.
—Justin Mezzell

It’s easy for people to scrutinize what could go wrong, but difficult to reach for what will go right. “Like an effective lobbyist championing positive change,” says Brooks, “you have to sell the upside potential.”

In economic terms, consider applying dollars to both the cost of dealing with likely risks, should they manifest, and the impact of the rewards should they accrue. Let’s say someone says something inflammatory on the network, even if it’s by accident—but the cost is so great to your organization you choose to fire the employee (most don’t). You could factor in the cost, including the price of severance, lost productivity, and training someone new. Those things can all be calculated.

“On the reward side,” says Brooks, “if 5,000 sales people all knew about a high-margin capability that your organization was uniquely positioned to deliver, then calculate the economic value of that, too. Include the value of exposing employees to things they never knew existed and weren’t even looking for.

“Using the same social network, where someone made a misstep, you have the potential to also generate returns. The upside potential eclipses the potential risk, and leading companies are running this calculation and moving forward.”

The worry and fear of an employee saying something inaccurate is no greater in a social network than it is in an email, on the phone with a client, or at a bar or restaurant after work. If anything, because of social pressure, people are more careful about what they say online, knowing it is available for all to see. There’s a far greater upside than there is the possibility of incurring costs. Yet seldom do we measure the benefit of clarifying misconceptions, and the value of making it possible for everyone to pay attention and be able to address them quickly and thoroughly.

Analysis 5: Impact

How do you know whether what you are doing is actually making an impact?

Many organizations view ROI as financial metrics. Amanda Slavin, CEO of CatalystCreativ, instead asks those she works with to consider a different ROI, what she calls “ripples of impact.”

These layers of impact are best described through rich stories, integrating learning with new relationships, and integrating new opportunities for growth and development that were uncovered as a result of the experiences that created the ripples.

From Action to Expression

How do you gauge if people’s opinions and attitudes are changing behaviors, creating these ripples?

British media critic Charlie Beckett writes, “It strikes me that social media embodies the connection between action and expression.” Let’s say you create a status update that announces you are changing the method used for reporting aggregate sales. “You can add a hashtag connecting you to others, and it acts as an expression of your opinion and call to action, and builds solidarity. It is democracy, efficient, and endlessly variable,” adds Beckett. “It is personal but it increases social capital for the movement.” It creates ripples of impact.

“One of the dangers of online conversation is if it remains conversation, never turning into action. Complaining is easy—much easier than getting out of your chair,” notes Clive Thompson. “But it’s always been this way.” Long before the Internet, activists worried that young people were substituting T-shirts (pre-Internet hashtags) and political buttons for taking a serious stand in making change. “Mere conversation and sloganeering have always seemed like a potentially dangerous sap” to the energy of real activism, adds Thompson.⁴⁹ Online talk may be cheap but, because it’s visible to other employees and linkable, it can catalyze multitudes.

One’s position within a community changes constantly: sometimes we make withdrawals, sometimes we deposit goodwill. We learn, we share, we inform.
—Julian Stodd

In technology, the ripple effect metric shows what impact changes to software will likely have on the rest of the system. New research incorporates what is called ant colony optimization (ACO) and its prime artifact pheromone, which has been modified to minimize ripples when cross-coding. A standard benchmark data set has been taken to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. This is promising for looking across organizations to measure their ripples of impact, too.⁵⁰

Doing Well by Being Good

In 2011, economist Laurie Bassi, with coauthors Ed Frauenheim, Dan McMurrer, and Larry Costello, created the extensively researched Good Company Index (GCI) that ranked the Fortune 100 as employers, sellers, and stewards (of the community and environment).⁵¹ Updated for 2014, the GCI now ranks almost 300 of the U.S.’s largest companies on these three criteria, with data from a wide variety of sources.

“One of the dangers of online conversation is if it remains conversation, never turning into action. Complaining is easy—much easier than getting out of your chair.”

—Clive Thompson

Through this research they revealed that better-ranked companies in the same industry outperform their competitors. In other words, “in the new social marketplace, businesses that succeed will be those that prove themselves worthy of trust,” says Daniel Pink. It shows that the convergence of social, economic, and political forces have ushered in a new era in business, in which good corporate behavior is no longer optional, but the key to success. The analysis shows that better-ranked companies in the same industry consistently outperform their competitors, sounding a warning that bad companies will wither while worthy ones will thrive.

Higher scores on the index predict better stock performance: companies with significantly better GCI grades than their competitors in the same industry outperformed their competitors by an average of 30 percentage points over the two-year period following the initial assignment of grades.⁵²

In the years since, Bassi, McMurrer, and their team at McBassi & Company have launched a self-assessment that in just a few minutes can quickly assess your own organization (anonymously) and how well it meets Good Company standards.⁵³ At the end of the survey, you get a Quick Grade (from A to F) on how your company ranks as a Good Company, based on how you respond.

Analysis 6: Influence

Do you want to understand the ways collaboration and communication change measures of authority and the effect it has on who is seen to provide real value?

Jay Deragon, co-author of The Emergence of the Relationship Economy: The New Order of Things to Come, wrote on his blog, “People learn from people and subsequently are avoiding influence from institutions…. Conversations [between] people, one to one to millions, have become the power of influence.” Ed Keller and Jon Berry’s 2003 book conveyed the same with their title, The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy.

Small bits of learning happen ALL the time in tech.
—Gina Minks

One of the ways we see people analyze what’s going on in their social networks is through who has and who builds influence in the organization.

Sway

A study from Deloitte Australia investigated the ways people derive influence from their position in the company hierarchy and their activity in D Street, their online social network.

They measured if people in higher positions in the hierarchy derived more influence from their position and if more active participants (measured by number of messages posted) derive more influence than those who were less active. Influence is measured as the average number of replies someone elicits for each message they post. The assumption is that it is a sign of influence when people are able to get more responses to their messages from the community.

They split the 110,000 messages in the dataset into three time periods with equal number of messages to capture any changes in the measurements and to see if influence in the network changes as the community emerges, grows, and matures.⁵⁴

What they learned was that the formal influence people derive from their position in the organization is present only in the early stages of the organization’s social shift. It disappears in later periods.

They also found the social approach afforded people an opportunity to move into positions of informal influence by way of their contributions to the network—more active people were more influential. This influence was strongest in the early stages, meaning that early adopters moved into influential positions initially. While still present in later stages, the influence diminishes.

They also learned the community became more egalitarian over time. Both forms of influence, formal and informal, diminish or disappear over time, which means that the social network produces more egalitarian and inclusive communication structures as the community matures.

While very imbalanced early, all hierarchical levels become more equally involved with the social network over time, and communication across hierarchical levels intensifies.⁵⁵

As working socially becomes more commonplace, there is a growing network effect of staggering proportion that can be achieved through influence.

From this you can build simple models defining influencers, as people whose social messages are frequently repeated by others.

Today, the Social Business Index and similar services can track your brand’s performance on the external web by scraping social sources, pulling in conversations and links, and analyzing the language of those tweets, posts, and comments.⁵⁶

Organizations with wide social networks inside their walls can also measure social influence. The question then becomes, how is this information used? Said one manager we spoke with, “When can we know who influences whom, so we know how to persuade people to work longer hours next week? That’s very different than a company I used to work for that wanted to influence its employees on who they vote for in the new political election.” And then he reflected for a minute and said, “Or is that really not that different?”

Memes

Another measure of communication impact is messaging uptake, the degree to which an organization’s messages reach people, are republished, and are evaluated. A “coverage report,” like those typically generated in public relations, can be used to assess external message pickup. What about the messages spread within an organization, though? What parts of those messages have the most impact, and which take on a life of their own? A social media version of the coverage report could be the viral video.

Leadership should not be by title but by encouragement, feedback, motivation, and follow-up.
—Kelly Smith

A meme is an independently replicating “cultural unit” that emerges over time as it passes from one person to another. Ideas, words, images and styles are just some examples that spread voice to voice, through traditional media, and can go viral over social media.

The challenge with following memes is defining what it is you’re trying to measure. Is it the cultural unit itself or how the idea that’s spreading changes the environment around it?

Clive Thompson suggests that even more useful than tracking how ideas spread is to analyze what’s not spreading. You have a big company announcement and none of your employees are talking about it through your social channels. A layoff is in the wind, and people have stopped chattering completely about new ideas and sales approaches for your upcoming products. In these cases, your social tools become instantly valuable; telling leaders there’s a big problem with your messaging or that you’re creating distractions that are negatively influencing productivity.

In what sociologists call pluralistic ignorance, whenever a small group of people underestimates how much others around them share their attitudes and beliefs, they impede social change. It’s an information problem that happens because we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s minds.

“Whenever we’re faced with a socially dicey, delicate subject—Do other people notice that the company is in trouble? How much sex are other students having?—we’re too squeamish to talk openly. Without correct information, we get it wrong…. But the converse is also true,” writes Thompson. “It turns out that you can fight pluralistic ignorance by actively improving the flow of information—and letting people know the previously invisible views and thoughts of others.”⁵⁷

Social change can snowball when people make their thoughts visible. When members of society think in public and keep in ambient contact with one another, it creates a new environment—where we’re increasingly aware of what changes might be possible.

“It turns out that you can fight pluralistic ignorance by actively improving the flow of information.”

—Clive Thompson

Analysis 7: Attention

Do you want to see how your employees can dramatically multiply the value of their own and their colleagues’ knowledge? Are people paying more attention to the right things and less attention to distracting noise?

Attention is the scarcest resource in organizations. If social systems can hone people’s attention on the most high-value information and experiences, these approaches will more than pay for their keep.⁵⁸

Trends

Likes, +1, stars, and votes all provide ways that social systems themselves prompt people to analyze the value of content and sentiment. By deeming information useful in a public way, they draw attention to content and validate its fidelity. Those ratings also contribute to people’s reputations. Sometimes they serve to elevate a person who isn’t typically thought of as a resource in a particular area, while at other times they merely confirm the reputation of someone who is thought of as a valuable contributor.

We are in an age of collective learning, we co-create it. Always have, but now it flows much faster.
—Bernd Nurnberger

Nicole Radziwill, associate professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University, points out that ratings “provide the currency of acknowledgement [helping to change people’s state] or the currency of energy [helping to inspire people and build their confidence by using the information or pointers they provide].”⁵⁹

While it’s easy to misunderstand these ratings as the measure itself (after all, we can add them up and say, “therefore this content bit is more valuable than that one”), tracking the velocity with which they get attention is valuable and oftentimes is a better indicator of what’s changing in an organization than watching what’s been liked.

Detecting changes in velocity (accelerations) can help inform you that specific information or even a particular topic is becoming important—or that an individual’s role as a resource for learning in this network is being enhanced.

When people aren’t just reading and “liking” posts, they are also talking among themselves, sharing their own stories, and doing this with increased frequency. The organization’s leaders can detect a change in behavior and shifting attention to a new area.

In what can be described as “eating their own dog food,” the people in the world who consider themselves (or are considered by others) as gamification gurus have created a leaderboard to uprate and downrate their current achievements. The leaderboard “ranks players according to their digital impact around the topic of gamification each month.”⁶⁰

Avoid Distraction

Workday distractions consume more than two hours of the average employee’s day, and focusing employee attention makes a big difference.⁶¹ Multitasking as a route to productivity isn’t as helpful as most people think. In fact, it can be an efficiency-killer, reducing productivity by up to 40 percent.⁶²

Combine multitasking with a large, dispersed workforce and you’ve got a recipe for distraction. The good news is that you can rein in these diversions and help employees get down to business with social networks.

This may seem counterintuitive, but organizations that use these systems as their prime conduit of information pour resources through a single wide and deep channel.

Think about it. For many, the inability to hone in on what’s important at work is driven by technology. In one recent study, nearly 45 percent of respondents cite interruptions like email and text messages as the culprit behind their distraction. Technology was second only to the 54 percent of respondents who indicated co-workers who want to socialize as the prime driver of their distraction. Others admitted the Internet often distracts them. Thirty-one percent of respondents said nonwork related online activities—like shopping, checking social media, and reading blogs or news articles—were responsible for their problems focusing.

When respondents knew they could find the content and the people they needed in one shared space, there was no barrier to reaching out, and that information would be available to others and the organization over time, they were far more apt to go there first, bypassing other distracting opportunities. Likewise, they may pop over to Amazon to buy a book, but they were more likely to quickly return.

Although email is an important method for certain types of communication, it creates real limitations for social learning. In 2008, Luis Suarez, then an international community manager at IBM, began a journey he dubbed, “Life Without Email.”

Social media is an ingredient, not an entree.
—Jay Baer

He argues that email is a conversation between a limited number of people; a conversation not searchable by others, and that frequently disappeared from the view of even the direct participants after a short time. Also, email between more than two people is susceptible to breaking the conversation thread when a participant fails to “reply all.”

“[Life without email is] an opportunity to renegotiate how we collaborate with our peers, customers and business partners, helping everyone understand there are better and more effective ways of collaborating. A good number of use cases would be a good start [to] reducing incoming e-mail and instead rely more on social computing tools. And the journey begins.”

Enterprise social networks, even something simple, is a better method for most internal business communication. Suarez adds, “Organizations are realizing that they can no longer ignore, nor neglect, the impact of becoming a successful social businesses … They know that to survive in the knowledge economy, they need to leap forward into the new reality of collaborating through networks, no longer the traditional top-down hierarchy.”⁶³

Focus

Another social approach to honing people’s focus is to use specific tools and analysis to understand what people are focused on. Help employees curb the distractions and sharpen their focus so they can be their best, most focused, productive selves at work and beyond.

So, what’s got employees’ attention?

For some, there are simply other issues weighing on their minds, with 22 percent of respondents in one survey saying personal stress—like worries over relationships, family, or money—is a distractor at work up to five times a day. The workplace itself is distracting for some employees. “Other employees’ conversations, outside noises, music etc. [distract me,]” said one respondent. “Cubicles are not very private, especially when they are only four feet high,” said another. “[I work in an] open office, [and] can hear everything everyone is doing,” a third said.

“[Life without email is] an opportunity to renegotiate how we collaborate with our peers, customers, and business partners, helping everyone understand there are better and more effective ways of collaborating.”

—Luis Suarez

With an overwhelming list of to-dos and deadlines, it can be difficult for employees to feel like they’re finishing meaningful projects. Support employees in tackling the top to-dos that matter each day. Not only will this facilitate productivity, but experiencing frequent feelings of daily progress in meaningful work boosts employees’ emotions, motivations, and perceptions during the workday, and their creativity over the long-term. Even small daily wins make an impact and can enhance how employees feel and perform on the job. Help employees see daily success by encouraging them to identify the day’s most important task—no matter how small—and seeing it through.⁶⁴

One study showed that contextual factors in the workplace that lead to (or away from) focus include valence and mood, online activity, time of day, time during the week, and the role of breaks.

What is the best way to support employees’ focus? Offer tools and resources that encourage all aspects of their well-being.

You’ll help them manage their stress and make healthy habits a higher priority so they can feel their best and brightest, and get down to business on the job.

Movement

Today’s employees are more productive than ever, yet between attempts to multitask, constant disruptions, technology alerts, and stress from all areas of life, they’re also having a harder time honing in on their most important priorities. With distractions consuming nearly a quarter of the average workday, and multitasking being dubbed an efficiency-killer, supporting employees’ focus is critical to driving companies forward.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives.
—Mark Zuckerberg

Research shows that moving around, literally shaking your arms, and walking increases your capacity to focus. If knowledge workers in the United States alone began moving more in their day, that could result in billions of dollars in increased productivity (not to even mention a decrease in the healthcare and workday absence costs). Social tools can be used to broadcast encouragement to get up and move, provide the impetus to do so—“We’re all gathering in the courtyard to dance,”—and can give leaders the means to see that their employees have been at their desks for hours.⁶⁵

Analysis 8: Capacity

Do you want to expand the methods you use to understand and maintain the critical skills needed for your workforce to support your current business, as well as pursue new and innovative services, products, or markets?

Key to workforce understanding is analyzing and coordinating your people’s availability, their current knowledge, their interest in doing new things, and how they can improve their skills.

Worker Availability

Perhaps you’re looking to staff a team for a new project your company was awarded. Maybe someone’s sick the very day their presence is needed most of all. Deloitte uses D-Street, their social platform, as a means to both locate people with the set of skills someone needs, and a way for employees to switch organizations because they can look inside various departments, getting a sense of the pace and rhythm of their work.⁶⁶

Because online community profiles include the industry and sector each person focuses on, they provide a way for others to quickly find a French-speaking health specialist or a Spanish-speaking logistician within moments.

Deloitte, IBM, TELUS, and practically every organization we spoke with talked of the ease with which people now join teams because they can create a baseline of comfort with other people on the team, through the social platform, before they begin their work. As experienced team members retire, there is a shortage of people with long-term institutional knowledge to replace them.

It means that as the next generation of workers is coming into the workforce, their networking, multiprocessing skills, and a global mindedness, serves them and the people they’ll be working with well. Constant experience in the connected world has had a profound impact on their approach to problem solving, collaboration, and focusing together.

Kevyn Renner, retired technology executive at Chevron, uses the analogy of the kaleidoscope to describe the many perspectives that people experience when working in these new ways. It fits with organizations’ mandate to have the right people in the right place with the right talent, so they can get work done in a timely and reliable way.⁶⁷

Just realize that there’s a downside of using social means to identify availability in that it can become a leash managers use to keep track of employees. While talking with people for this book, one senior manager confessed that she’d been considered unreliable because her director kept tabs on when people were active on their internal messaging platform. She kept being asked, “Are you there? Are you there?” during a conference call, only to learn that by setting her status to busy, she was being perceived as not being available for constant interaction. Not good.

Leadership

Valdis Krebs has been mapping employee networks for more than 20 years. One of the key outcomes of his process is revealing the actual leaders inside an organization and from that work he has learned there are many different kinds of leaders. He has heard descriptions including:

Social is how customers hear about you, search is how they find you, and content is how they remember you.
—Martin Jones

• I trust Luis to walk me through this career decision.

• I trust Karl’s technical advice on this algorithm.

• I trust Anne’s political take on this marketing decision.

• I trust Rita’s grasp of what our key customer wants.

• I trust Pat to guide this organization through troubled times.⁶⁸

Krebs points out that trust is key throughout. “We follow others for various reasons, some because of their knowledge, some because of their vision, some because of their personal appeal, and all for the confidence we place in them. Without confidence from others, a person cannot effectively lead.”

How can you analyze (and foster) leadership with the assistance of social tools? Alongside formal measures of leadership readiness, a social approach to learning and work can inspire everyone to become inspiring leaders, teachers who share and grow with their colleagues. By focusing on facilitating knowledge sharing and relationship development, you can invite colleagues to share their expertise and learn from one another.

One person may prefer posting a video, another a blog, and another a file that others can use and adapt for their own work. Each of these builds trust because they show what people care about, what’s on their minds, and that they are interested in helping others. By aiming for short, insight-rich content, alongside their own backgrounds and profiles, colleagues build strong internal relationships—across the world, across practices, and across business units, which demonstrate their leadership capacity and trustworthiness.

When Wendy Lamin, social media engagement strategist, was asked how many courses her social learning platform held, she said with enthusiasm, “None. Why would I bore my colleagues with courses? Our network is a vibrant source of insights from colleagues who have so much to teach one another.” That’s leadership.

“Why would I bore my colleagues with courses? Our network is a vibrant source of insights from colleagues who have so much to teach one another.”

—Wendy Lamin

Interests

Chet Wood, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Tax LLP, says that through D Street, the organization’s online community, “I am gaining a greater perspective on what’s on the minds of our people. It’s provided a unique platform to engage in very personal and candid dialogue.”⁶⁹

While walking the halls is no longer practical for many leaders, when people post to a collaborative space, they’re letting their voices be heard and their perspectives speak. When a leader posts his or her insights, they can get immediate feedback when people comment in response or build on what’s been said. That feedback can be invaluable and more useful than counting most anything.

Built into many systems, though, are also ways for people to quantify how many others share their interests and their perspectives. There are trending and rating measures, as well as grouping mechanisms that quantify how many people are interested in a specific topic or theme.

In 2021, informal learning and social learning will just be called learning.
—Koreen Olbrish

If, for instance, one of the purposes of your social efforts is to help your developers find one another and create a culture where technically oriented people can find others working on related topics, basic web analytics can make it simple to see how many people joined a group or clicked on a link to register as a developer. It’s also easy to see how many people downloaded a particular piece of software or a whitepaper, or subscribed to receive status updates from the developer group.

These are just a few of the many situations in which your organization may already be automatically capturing simple information about the interests of people you work with, and those who visit online, and it can be expanded to include groups who want to work on new areas and share an interest in a topic or theme.

Blurring the boundaries of the silos people work in may seem scary to those who actually believe organization charts represent how organizations function, but most employees prefer more random and serendipitous interactions.⁷⁰

Knowledge

Just as organizations keep track of an inventory of physical objects, everything from computers and paper to vehicles and chairs, many also keep an inventory of employees’ knowledge and skills. In the past, the inventory might have been compiled from college transcripts and employee resumes. Add to that certifications and badges.

Organizations also often keep lists of who-knows-what so when the organization is running low on, say, people who know how to program in C++, the stock of C++ knowledge can be replenished by hiring new people or training current employees.

Profiles can catalog the skills within your organization and can be regularly updated by employees. Expose your job classifications and skills analysis to these systems and people can even tag for themselves their areas of expertise. If one week you have 34 people who know how to program in Ruby, and the following week you have 122, you haven’t increased the size of your workforce, but you’ve been able to capture something you didn’t know before, which can be put to use if your organization gets a big contract that requires that type of programming.

But here’s the even bigger opportunity: New skills and knowledge must be applied regularly in order to add value to your organization. By knowing people’s skills considered to be their most important, you can spend your time and money more wisely to help them stay current. There’s also evidence of “forgetting curves” where cumulative operating experience actually leads to degraded performance.⁷¹

Increases in cumulative experience can have another detrimental effect. Old tacit and explicit knowledge can render an organization obsolete when it is not supplanted periodically, trapping an organization by the “innovator’s dilemma.” If all your organization knows is one way to work and has a limited breadth of skills, you’re unlikely to discover the next big thing.

Content

Differing from what your organization knows because of the people inside it, social approaches can also identify and quantify the content—the reports, notes, charts, digital media, and so on—within your walls, either stored in content management repositories or available through media-sharing tools. This material doesn’t walk out when an employee leaves but, through ratings and links, even reviews and curation, people can access that content far into the future.⁷²

Geographic Distribution

As news of a crisis unfolds, organizations have an obligation to protect their people and their assets. Trouble is, oftentimes in the event of a physical calamity, people have to quickly evacuate buildings and can’t easily work together to notify others about the situation.

Organizations are slow to change, allow time for the company and team to adjust and find balance.
—Megan Bowe

“Having a real-time map is almost as good as having your own helicopter. A live map provides immediate situational awareness, a third dimension, and additional perspective on events unfolding in time and space,” writes Patrick Meier, former head of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, a global organization that uses open-source technologies to work through crises by leveraging the power of people on the ground to in effect crowd source geolocation, creating crowdmaps.

What makes these sorts of maps so powerful is that they easily allow for micro-contribution. Because it’s easy for almost anyone to contribute a tiny bit of information, almost everyone does. In response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi’s developers instantly set up a map so people in the region could scour blogs, social sites, and regular media looking for information useful to rescue crews—like locations of people in trouble or stations with fuel and medicine. Activity skyrocketed when they set up a mobile phone number where anyone, anywhere could text in news.⁷³

Tools like this can also be used within organizations to look at what’s happening on the ground during a major incident—as well as in roles where people are geographically dispersed, such as across mines or in a search and rescue. These maps are being augmented through head-mounted cameras and wearable computers that both show others a location and what’s around them.

Analysis 9: Change

Do you want to understand your company’s culture and how social approaches help transform what you can do?

When people get a sense of how others are working (through working out loud), the story behind why changes are being made (from leaders’ videos and blog posts) along with progress (by way of status updates), behavior patterns of employees begin to change.⁷⁴

Whether small changes like shifting locations for departments, or large changes because of mergers or acquisitions, change can be hard, but it happens. The myth that 70 percent of change efforts fail is not grounded in any substantive research, and we should all help reverse the tide of this myth, urges change agent Jennifer Frahm.⁷⁵ The numbers don’t even align with most people’s experiences or instincts. Who hasn’t been part of big changes throughout their careers? Even if you’ve experienced a change initiative that didn’t go smoothly, who among us can say most failed?

Jason Little, Agile coach, points out you cannot predict the outcome of change but you can reduce the threat response (also known as change resistance) by involving people ultimately affected by the change in the design of the change itself.⁷⁶

“Rather than layer on new crosscutting structures or create ad hoc committees of people who may not be opinion leaders or have strong cross-boundary connections, change can be led by influential individuals who already occupy pivotal spots in the network,” notes Rob Cross.⁷⁷ In this way, analyzing social networks can prove invaluable.

Culture Readiness

The learning culture audit, now used in organizations around the globe, was created in 2004 to give leaders an opportunity to assess their capacity to make meaningful change through learning and discovering together. The toolset can be used with teams, divisions, or entire companies before, after, or alongside introducing social approaches, gauging where you are today and setting your sites on the culture you aspire to create.

Silos collaborate; they don’t break down.
—Miko Matsumura

The audit process illuminates why most organizational cultures at first distrust anyone very social or relationship oriented—and provides a more interpersonal direction. Over time, based on the data, the organization can then evaluate how to interact in a healthy way to get work done and make informed decisions.

The audit asks leaders to assess where their organization is currently along a continuum. For instance, on one end of the spectrum, “Everyone creates, keeps, and propagates stories of colleagues who have improved their own processes. On the other, “Everyone believes they know what to do, and they proceed on that assumption.”

Other behaviors range from whether, “Managers encourage continuous experimentation” or “Employees proceed with work only when they feel certain of the outcome.” Also, “Leadership presumes that energy comes in large part from personal learning and growing,” or “Leadership presumes that employee energy comes from corporate success and profits.”

The core audit can be downloaded online for free.⁷⁸

Transformation

It’s one thing to track how many people saw your video online. It’s another matter to look at the number and type of questions and comments prompted by each video, which may provide additional clues to how widely it was viewed and understood. The more interesting analysis is to look at what new ideas were introduced and then talked about. The conversations generated by a video are as valid a measurement of its appeal as the number of times it is viewed, and may even be more valid.

Should you create a communications plan for certain videos that includes a discussion of what viewers learned? Can you provide key messages and questions to help with the discussion? Consider soliciting feedback through a survey to gauge people’s understanding and ask whether they found certain videos useful.

The idea here was stories of transformational science. The former National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) was having problems tracking the benefits of the learning that took place when people used their high-performance computing facilities. The solution was to craft rich stories and narratives around transformational science that occurred when someone had used those computing facilities and the science that could not have been done without those facilities. The impacts were primarily ideological. People’s ingrained perceptions of scientific theories and approaches were changed by the new insights.

Analysis 10: Fill Holes

Would you like to help other people imagine the future and stimulate the exploration of topics and ideas that don’t fit into existing structures? Would you like to understand the risk of not being able to fill in those missing holes?

Imagine if you could take an X-ray of your organization to identify employees who are opinion leaders. Then imagine you could see where direction, alignment, and commitment were breaking down and where more collaboration could knit together critical groups to implement a change.

Network analysis can provide this insight and accelerate change. “We have long known that informal networks exist, but we’ve understood them mostly through intuition, which is frighteningly inaccurate,” write Rob Cross, Chris Ernst, and Bill Pasmore. “Leaders haven’t thought much about leveraging networks to advance change or performance until fairly recently.

“It serves leaders well to identify the opinion leaders who can help engage others most effectively and efficiently in a change process. Equally important is to identify those who will likely resist the change and encourage others to follow suit.”⁷⁹

Personal Network Assessment

After years working with organizations to map their networks of relationships, Cross and a team of members from the Network Roundtable and Connected Commons Consortium created the Personal Network Assessment (PNA) Workbook.

Social learning did not wait for 2.0 to exist.
—Frédéric Domon

The self-guided PNA enables people to visualize their networks, and evaluate them against the network characteristics of high performers. It also offers a comprehensive overview of how to avoid career traps, decrease network overload, take specific actions to align your network with your professional objectives, and learn on how to be an energizing force in your network.

Over the past decade, Cross and those he works with have studied the networking approaches of high performers (those in the top 20 percent of their organization’s annual performance ratings) across a wide range of companies and government agencies. This work contributes to debunking the “more-is-better theory of networking. Although hard-driving salespeople may thrive by building large, loosely connected networks, most high performers succeed by developing targeted networks that complement and extend their abilities,” says Cross.⁸⁰

A 10- to 15-minute web-based survey asks you (or those you work with) about key collaborators in individual networks and important dimensions of those relationships. For instance, are they important for information flow, decision making, best practice transfer, or career advice?

These individual networks can then be aggregated to reveal group-level collaboration patterns that show who plays highly influential roles in the inner workings of an organization—who can serve as a bridge across disparate groups, spanning boundaries. The people who often fill these roles may not be those who leaders would think to tap for facilitating change—but who should be.

Analyze Real-time Experience

The experience sampling method (ESM) was developed by social scientists in the late 1970s to capture data about people in the moment.⁸¹ For example, one study used ESM to gain insight into “by whom” and “for what” people were willing to be interrupted by a text or a phone call.⁸²

Because of the high cognitive cost of being interrupted, they wanted to be able to program a phone to ring or not based on who was calling. You’re likely to feel differently about an interruption from a friend, your child, or a telemarketer—as well as by what each was calling about. People tend to be very unreliable when answering questions like this when they’re not presented in the context in which the question is relevant.

With ESM, people are prompted at scheduled (or sometimes random) times throughout the day and asked to provide specific information about themselves right then. Though used in the past, the days of participants carrying around alarm clocks and recording their answers in notebooks are long behind us, and now ESM analysis can be conducted using apps built for mobile phones. In the interruption study, for example, participants were prompted to respond to a questionnaire every time they received a phone call and asked:

Who just called you?

Did you answer it?

Why or why not?

If it had been____________________(someone else), would you have handled this call differently?

Why?

Using automated ESM software, they were quickly able to gather over 1,200 responses in a format that was easy to analyze.

What if something like this were done in your organization every time people entered the elevator, at the end of a conference call, or at the start of a meeting?

Meetings at the WD-40 Company begin with the question, “What have I learned since I saw you last?” This practice provides participants an opportunity to consistently capture lessons learned and a simple way to observe progress.

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity, and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.
—Steve Jobs

For a short period of time, so as not to give them “one more thing to do,” consider setting your social tools to prompt participants after time online with questions, such as:

Why did you just use the system?

Were you successful?

How satisfied were you with your experience?

What did you learn?

This kind of data can be used to determine quickly why people are using the tools, if they are using the network for the reasons you deployed it, if they are having any sort of trouble, and what kind of changes could be made to improve the overall experience.

Questions Answered

Four years of double-digit growth has made training and retaining talent a priority in a mid-size investment management firm. It has also made their vice president of learning and organization development a very busy guy. Rather than create more traditional courses, he worked with the IT group to launch a company-wide, wiki-based, collaborative knowledge management tool that incorporates online forums, RSS feeds, bookmarking, tagging, and search.

With this platform, associates can ask difficult research questions and capture answers, creating new and emerging categories of relevant information. The program has increased the ability to publish and update information quickly. The robust search capabilities reduce the turnaround time for answers to research questions and leverage for future use all the information being submitted.

The system also serves as the infrastructure for one of the few new courses they’ve built, Building Change Capability, where associates can access a dedicated wiki site, blogs, and other social media tools to supplement the course materials, have ongoing conversations, and add to the course content so it gets better and more applicable over time.

Yet What About Learning?

Measuring learning, specifically, is really useful to understand what people need and are interested in across the organization. Doing so can provide an opportunity to add conversations and approaches to catalyze conversation and learning around topics that aren’t getting noticed but should. We need to expand our repertoire of approaches.

Learning is a change in state, not the increase of a stock of knowledge. By changing states we’re able to assume different roles, make different sorts of decisions, and do different work. This may or may not correspond to increasing our own internal stocks of knowledge. You could, for example, just have pointers to know where to find the information you’ll need. Social systems help us better function as pointers and can connect us with people who help us become problem-solving pathfinders.

If we can think of learning not so much as increasing our knowledge, but rather as improving our understanding of the flow of information, it then makes sense to favor people as our pointers and pathfinders to increase the depth and breadth of that flow. Having accomplished that, we’ll naturally be more open to devising metrics that recognize learning as an ever-changing perception of self, as well as others’ changing perceptions of our ability to participate in solving problems and making sense of that information.

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.
—Václav Havel

With that approach, we are also more likely to acknowledge that we flow through the learning process itself. Likewise, there is information we added to our stock of knowledge years ago that is no longer part of the flow because we’ve forgotten how to use it or it’s no longer relevant.

Using this new view, taking in more information is no longer as important as we thought it was in the past because we can all easily access it from others in the organization or the connected world around us. This has implications for whom you recruit and hire, too. Skills you didn’t know your organization possesses in-house might have been there all along and can be accessed when you need them through people who have the aptitude and wherewithal to put them into practice.

Retention loss is also actually not as detrimental because you don’t necessarily lose access to information if people aren’t employed by your organization; if people are moving outside the organization, you still have access to their information.

The implication is that successful organizational learning produces these kinds of evidence, each with potential financial impacts.

In the end, while using analytical approaches is important, it will always be even more important to understand your organization as a system, and the people who make it tick as its heart.