Chapter 2
Paving Online Community Roads
By enabling connections among employees, organizations can more
easily offer customized work arrangements, establish virtual teams,
bring new employees up to speed quickly, improve collaboration,
and increase retention with people who hadn’t felt a strong sense of belonging in the past.
—Patricia Romeo
D Street Leader, Deloitte
Patricia Romeo didn’t expect that when she joined Deloitte,* an organization whose primary assets are its people, she’d find herself missing the camaraderie, the shoptalk, and the chatter that sometimes frustrated and distracted her in previous jobs. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, often working from a home office, Romeo missed the buzz.1
Apparently other Deloitte employees missed it too, because when Romeo began to investigate, she learned that thousands of people at the company were using social networking tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn to socialize and connect. Leaders in the organization were beginning to worry that these connections going on outside the firm’s
*As used in this book, “Deloitte” means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. firewall were putting Deloitte’s intellectual property in the wild for others to see. For an organization that prides itself on intellectual capital, this was alarming; yet the leaders could see that employees were enthusiastic about this new way to work together. And contrary to some managers’ fears, it helped rather than hindered productivity.
We start this chapter on online communities with the example of Deloitte because it’s not a high-tech Silicon Valley company where you’d expect to see digital-age practices. However, it has challenges typical of many companies today—distributed teams and divisions that feel disconnected, intellectual capital that needs to be selectively shared among employees, and a work-force that is growing steadily younger and expects work to be tech enabled.
People at Deloitte with a natural need to connect had found Internet tools that were free, easy to use, and increasingly popular. On their own, employees were creating ad hoc communities to work faster, tap into other people’s knowledge, and connect with colleagues no matter where in the world they were working. Meanwhile, Deloitte was missing out on putting these powerful tools to work for the company’s benefit.
People at Deloitte with a natural need to connect had found Internet tools that were free, easy to use, and increasingly popular. On their own, employees were creating ad hoc communities to work faster, tap into other people’s knowledge, and connect with colleagues no matter where in the world they were working. Meanwhile, Deloitte was missing out on putting these powerful tools to work for the company’s benefit.
Years before, Deloitte conducted extensive research about the workplace of the future. They conducted a seven-year study of demographic shifts and workforce attitude trends. They realized that “organizations of all shapes and sizes have much to learn if we are to attract and keep the talent we need to succeed. And, by the way, it’s not all about the Millennials . . . it’s really about everyone in the workforce.” When these new challenges arose, they pointed out that there were practical ways for Deloitte to adjust their practices that would benefit everyone.2
The centerpiece of Deloitte’s workplace of the future is an online community inside the organization’s firewall, now led by Romeo. The virtual space is named “D Street” because on the main street of any town around the world, people already know the norms and conventions and can use this metaphor for being together online.
With the support of leadership and the work of the information technology, communications, and knowledge management groups, the alpha version of D Street was rolled out to 1,500 employees in mid 2007. Within months usage had surged, and it was rolled out to the rest of the organization.
The CEO of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, David Williams, articulates his vision and strategy in a D Street blog.
Chet Wood, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Tax LLP, says that, “Through D Street, 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.”3
People say they visit D Street because it makes a large organization feel smaller; they can learn about people when working with them remotely; and they can glean a little about people’s likes, dislikes, hobbies, and interests as a way to help build rapport. With the virtual networking capabilities, they can feel like part of something larger than themselves or their immediate team.
The terms online community and social network are used here to define something similar. In years past, a space such as Facebook was called an online community or a web community; today spaces like D Street are often called social networks. Technically speaking, online communities allow anyone within the space access to anyone else in the space. A social network requires a connection (someone in your network) who can pave the way for you to meet someone else.
Community Capabilities
A core capability of any online community is its member profiles. Viewing a person’s profile should essentially provide the same feel as visiting his or her office—complete with pictures of the kids on the desk and certifications and awards on the walls.
Rachel Happe, principal at The Community Roundtable, a peer network for community managers and social media practitioners, reinforces this point, “Communities are fundamentally about relationships of learning from peers so online communities must be created around individuals. The greater their ability to share themselves—both professionally and personally—through profiles and content tools, the greater the potential of the community to foster connections that result in business outcomes.”4
To avoid asking for information the organization already has, profiles are pre-populated with basic details, including name, job title, and contact information from Deloitte’s databases. In net vernacular, D Street is a mashup that takes existing data and combines it with employee-generated content.
D Street Profiles: An Example from Deloitte’s Virtual Community |
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each person’s geography, tenure, contact information, function, and industryProfiles are enhanced by their searchability. Because they include the industry and sector each person focuses on, they provide a way for people to quickly find a French-speaking health specialist or a Spanish-speaking logistician. Employees can personalize their profiles with photographs and supplement them with links to their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. A profile can even include content a person has written if it’s in the organization’s knowledge management system. This feature has led to an uptick in people sharing content with the knowledge management team.
D Street also enables people to introduce colleagues to one another, list external social network memberships, and write blogs. They can leave comments and search for others who share their interests. For example, an employee who searches on “Enterprise 2.0” will find other people interested in that topic as well as information about how to connect. If people want to connect with parents of twins or a Hispanic employee network in the Midwest, they can do that with a few keystrokes.
New hires can easily find five people who went to the same college they did, three who worked for the same company, and two who grew up in their small town. Whenever someone with a similar history joins the organization, he or she can get an alert. With the ability to make these kinds of connections, cold and impersonal quickly turns warm and welcoming.
Communities Face Forward
A research program at IBM’s Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations, further supported by work done between The Network Roundtable led by Rob Cross at the University of Virginia and Bill Kahn of Boston University, consistently found that better-connected people enjoy substantial performance, learning, and decision-making benefits. The research showed that people use communities to find others who provide resources, career development, personal support, and context. The depth and breadth of these relationships, whether they are serendipitous or planned, predicts performance, innovation, employee commitment, and job satisfaction.5
Jamie Pappas, community manager for EMC’s internal online community, EMC|ONE, says that her favorite part of the job is “connecting people who might have never crossed paths, let alone learned valuable lessons from each other, exchanging information that makes their lives easier and enabling them to enjoy more of the things they are passionate about.”6
Community, the place where we live, work, and do things with other people, is a concept most of us learned and put into use when we were very young. Coming from two Latin words meaning “with gifts,” the term community suggests a general sense of reciprocity, altruism, and benefit that comes from doing something together. The old town of Mombasa, Kenya; the Green Bay Packers fans who watch games wearing cheese-wedge hats; or jugglers worldwide are all examples of communities. Each type has its own shared language, rituals, customs, and collective memory. In most cases, sharing is the norm and people choose what information they share.
Because online communities are not constrained by the need for anyone’s physical presence, we have greater flexibility with our ability to join, learn, and congregate with people who have similar interests no matter their location.
When people speak of community in today’s hustle-and-bustle world, they are usually calling up a hope of reviving the closer bonds among people that seemed to occur in ages past. Don Cohen and Larry Prusak, authors of In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, point out that when we talk about community in business, we nod to the reality that companies and the individuals who run them don’t exist in a social vacuum devoid of ties, histories, loyalties, and values that might influence their actions. There is also a similarity between the way people have learned in communities throughout time and how people in organizations learn.7
Because online communities are not constrained by the need for anyone’s physical presence, we have greater flexibility with our ability to join, learn, and congregate with people who have similar interests no matter their location.
As such, community can be a value itself; a joining together that offers the benefits of belonging, commitment, mutuality, and trust. These are environments where people are free to learn.
We’ve been working side by side with people since sandbox days, but there were limits to how much and how far we could share. Some of us went to schools where talking to each other was discouraged. Some of us went to work for bosses who made it clear that talking to co-workers was not real work. And most of us were on our own when it came to learning on the job.
Local area networks opened an era for communication software such as email, instant messaging, and Lotus Notes databases. We were still separated by walls, but we began reaching beyond them to share what we were doing, ask questions, post details, and mingle our ideas online.
These tools became the means by which people started contributing to a body of knowledge. Few of us had the time to write or post to a knowledge management system about all that we were doing, and when we did it was hard for others to access, let alone use.
Out of these challenges grew the idea of turning everything into objects, bits, or clusters of information that could be reused to build something else. With standardized shapes and sizes, you can assemble almost anything you need.
Yet this still left out tacit knowledge—things that are hard to communicate by writing and speaking but can be learned by watching others and actually doing them. What people crave is the opportunity to learn from one another, side by side, gaining both hard facts and in-context wisdom. What else could account for the sustained use of classroom learning decades beyond a time when people realized its inherent limits? We value an opportunity to see we are not alone; there are people we can lean on, learn from, interact with, and rely on to help us.
In a landmark study, Richard J. Light of the Harvard Graduate School of Education discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. People who studied in groups, even once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.8
The demographics research at Deloitte uncovered something similar: People who could look to other people online for support felt more connected than their nonconnected counterparts, stayed with their employer longer, and produced stronger results.9 The creators of Deloitte’s D Street recognized the benefits of nurturing a culture of reciprocal learning.
Make a Case for Online Communities
Online communities can bridge the gap between the climate you have at work today and the one you want to foster—one in which people want to learn from each other because they trust one another. They want to hear from people like them, facing the same decisions, the same challenges, and the same options. As Babe Ruth once said, “You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” The way the team plays collectively determines its success.
Rather than use online communities to duplicate programs and processes that work, look at your organization’s weaknesses. According to Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, online communities are most useful when they address failures in the operation of offline communities.10
Although what follows isn’t a complete list of challenges that individuals and organizations want to overcome, it represents some of the most common concerns they face.
Put Knowledge to Use
Sabre Holdings, the company that owns Travelocity and several other global travel reservation systems, created an internal online community—SabreTown—that facilitates learning and communication in ways that address many of the issues holding other companies back.
“The goal was to provide an internal tool for professional networking so that employees could connect quickly and easily,” says Erik Johnson, general manager of the software underpinning SabreTown. At the time the networking tool was created, Sabre Holdings had 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.11
To use SabreTown, 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.
“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,” explains Johnson.
SabreTown 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. Johnson attributes the site’s success partly to the fact that management ceded control over its use to line employees. He says, “A big benefit for us is that SabreTown is effectively creating a massive knowledge base that employees willingly populate with their own information.”
“The more you can know about the people you work with, and what they value and don’t value,” says Ric Merrifield, Microsoft business scientist and author of Rethink, “the easier it is to get targeted and tailored messages to them, providing them something valuable.”12
Stay Current, Be Aware
A common measure of employee satisfaction is to what extent people feel they know what’s going on in the company. This is partly a measure of how well leadership communicates. It is also representative of how much information is shared among employees, and that’s a slippery slope. We all want to keep up with work going on around us, but few of us have time to learn from other people at work, let alone share what we are doing ourselves.
This is where online communities play a growing role. Their search tools help you find people you want to learn from and send you automatic updates when their work overlaps with yours. Microsharing, blogs, and even profiles can provide quick ways to update others and be updated in real time, giving these communities a sense of immediacy you don’t get even with email. Online communities create ambient awareness, which is what social scientists call this sort of incessant online contact. It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his or her mood through actions—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye.
Clive Thompson, science, technology, and culture writer for Wired and The New York Times Magazine, calls this “the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update—each individual bit of social information—is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your colleagues’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. The ambient information becomes ‘a type of ESP,’ an invisible dimension floating over us.13
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus refers to “algorithmic authority,” meaning that if many people are pointing to the same thing at the same time, it’s probably worth paying attention to.14
Does constant updating sound like a bunch of busybodies with nothing better to do? Paula Thornton, an enterprise 2.0 architect and designer points out, “In the machine world no one would imagine doing away with the conveyor belt. Updates are the conveyor belts of information in a service organization.”15
That conveyer belt of information should be interesting to any organization with a large distributed workforce because it supports the dynamics, efficiency, and agility of a small company. It raises awareness of others within an organization and, with this, opportunities for learning, collaboration, and innovation.
Online spaces rich in ambient information increase the quantity of tacit knowledge shared because they make you aware of what people are doing in a way that was not possible before.
Contribute to the Conversation
It takes new employees, on average, nine months to feel they know enough about their jobs and their new organization to be willing to contribute in a collaborative way. By that time, many of their best insights as newcomers (having what Buddhists call the “Beginner’s Mind”) and their practical experience from having worked elsewhere are far from fresh.
What about people who are wicked smart and do great work, but just aren’t inclined to share what they know or what they’re working on? Think of the increased brainshare if they had a venue they felt comfortable contributing to.
Online exchanges give employees an opportunity to increase their visibility in the company and allow management to identify talent they might never have been aware of.
Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton created hello.bah.com, an internal portal with online community capabilities, to enable employees to blog, participate in wikis, locate mentors, build their brands as subject matter experts, network with colleagues in offices across the United States—and have fun in the process. Because many of the firm’s employees do not work full time from a Booz Allen office, the online space is all about connection, says associate Megan Murray. “Hello.bah.com removes geographic boundaries, which is especially important to new hires and those working on client sites. It takes connections within the firm and makes them visible, so you can find good information quickly and hit the ground running on your first day.”16
Best Buy’s internal community, BlueShirt Nation, was first envisioned as a site to harvest marketing ideas from people who work in their stores. “The promise of being able to go out and tap into 140,000 employees and use computer magic to do it was really attractive to us,” said Gary Koelling, who heads the online space.17 Once employees were connected, the site began filling with ideas and discussions that reached far beyond marketing. For instance, when one employee posted his thoughts on why it would be beneficial for all full-time employees to have email access, it sparked a conversation that eventually led to a shift in policy to enable just that. Loop Marketplace is a location on the site where employees can post ideas and management can harvest them.
Online communities prompt real-time dialogue between employees and management, adding a degree of transparency to an organization that couldn’t have existed before. It allows employees to actively take responsibility for shaping or re-shaping their organization.
Create Opportunities to Reflect
Social media, by its nature and even its name, implies an outward connection. Look out. Look up. Look around. What about looking in? Online communities offer intrapersonal benefits for those paying attention to what they can learn about themselves.
Although the public visibility of an online community can be unsettling, there is a very positive result of incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the people we spoke with about their social media use described an unexpected side effect of self-discovery. Stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Zen concept of mindfulness.
Having an online audience for self-reflection can prompt people to work harder at it and describe it more accurately in more interesting ways—the status update as a literary form.
Laura Fitton, founder of oneforty and co-author of Twitter for Dummies, points out that her constant status updating has even made her “a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. “It drags you out of your own head,” she says.18 In an age of virtual awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly will be yourself.
Who do you influence? Look through the people who have written in your guest book or chosen to follow what you’re writing, and you’ll begin to get a picture of who takes an interest in the areas you focus on. Someone you have admired for a long time may be looking at what you do; someone you’d never considered talking with about a topic near to your heart might be chiming in when you don’t expect it.
Someone who follows you may consistently ask you to clarify or dig deeper into theory when you explain something. This may help improve your writing or steer your work to be more practical.
Establish Trust
Trust in any relationship, organizational or personal, is only earned over time through actions. People require some level of trust before they are willing or able to learn something from another person. Each of us seeks ways to determine if we can trust the people we work with enough to count on what they share.
Online community fosters relationships with people across multiple service lines, geographic locations, and affiliations. You can build and earn trust with people you may not have encountered before.
Sociologists have researched trust in communities extensively. They have identified that ongoing positive interaction, getting a sense of someone’s “identity,” and noting people’s opinions of others are keys to gaining trust.
Getting to know one another before meeting face to face fosters authenticity and gives trust a head start. It’s as if we’ve known the person for a long time and can jump right into working with them, learning from them, and getting on with whatever we got together to do. Quick and constant updates that create ambient awareness accumulate over time, and we begin to trust and show we’re trustworthy.
Online community fosters relationships with people across multiple service lines, geographic locations, and affiliations. You can build and earn trust with people you may not have encountered before.
Trusting people also helps us work with them across the miles. People at IBM, Deloitte, and practically every organization we spoke with talked of the ease with which people join virtual teams where they can create a baseline of comfort with other people on the team before they begin their work.
Building trust increases group efficiency and enables conflict resolution. Cliff Figallo, author of Hosting Web Communities: Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty, and Maintaining a Competitive Edge, said it beautifully, “Trust is the social lubricant that makes community possible.”19 And it allows learning to happen in communities.
Trust in a relationship determines in large part how effectively you can learn from a person. In a trusting relationship, you’re likely to listen to and believe what the other person is saying; that is, we trust his or her competence and will allow him or her to influence our thinking. Trusted relationships also give us the freedom to ask questions that reveal our lack of knowledge because we trust the person’s goodwill toward us. More than just a nicety, building trust in networks has a great deal to do with our individual ability to learn and the ability of an entire organization to learn and improve.
Inform Decisions
Good decisions are the heart and soul of any successful, fast-moving enterprise, and the more informed the decision, the better it is likely to be. Although most people say they want input from co-workers prior to making a decision, often it’s just too hard to do in a timely manner. Real-time input on decisions is yet another way that online communities facilitate what people learn. Being able to access tacit knowledge from a wide range of people in the enterprise and beyond allows us to solicit opinions; ask questions; get pointers to more information; and see referrals, testimonials, benchmarking, and updates that relate to what we need to decide.
In an IBM case study, Robin Spencer, senior research fellow at Pfizer, says that her company’s online community allows it to reach across organizational silos and leverage more organizational wisdom than previously possible. It means Pfizer now drives faster and better decisions and shortens time to market, which helps keep the company at the forefront of its changing industry.20
Pfizer’s social media efforts began with managers asking permission to talk to researchers on teams other than their own. This created an atmosphere of permission where it’s assumed to be OK to reach out and ask.
The community becomes a hub for the viral distribution of knowledge. You can see how many of your colleagues recommended a research source or a video from a conference on the other side of the world, or who have simply joined a conversation. And in turn they are benchmarking against one another to determine if the actions they are taking are the right ones and if their decisions are well informed.
Pfizer also created “challenges,” social jam sessions in which hundreds or even thousands of researchers weigh in on issues. Spencer emphasized that in addition to harnessing all the research stored in people’s memories, the method also shoots problems “sideways through organizational silos,” which previously were not sharing knowledge effectively.
Learn New Technology
It sometimes seems like keeping up with new technology is a full-time job. No sooner have we mastered some software application than a new version comes out, pushing us behind the curve. Organizations face this problem on a huge scale as work becomes more virtual all the time and the supporting technology multiplies like fruit flies.
Too often organizations take a “not on our dime” approach to helping employees learn to use new tools. “Want to learn all this new-fangled stuff? That’s what weekends are for!”
Yet, research into experiential learning shows there is no better way to learn how to do something than by doing it. If you know the people in your organization are going to need to be proficient in working online and collaborating with co-workers in more virtual ways, there is no better place to learn how than by working there now. As a new and emerging set of tools, social networking requires a degree of experimentation. People have to try different approaches, see what feels comfortable to them, and get a return that encourages them to continue.
A customer can form impressions of the company from a phone call, a website, a retail counter, a reservation agent, or any number of other experiences. Kate Frohling, senior vice president of brand management at Wells Fargo, says, “To make employees not just advocates for the corporate culture, but to help them all speak with ‘our voice,’ it’s essential to make customer conversations part of Wells Fargo’s training. The customer’s experience is our top priority, and we want it to be consistent.”21
This includes familiarity with the digital tools that employees will be using with customers. Blogging, emailing, tweeting, texting, and using an internal social networking site are part of Wells Fargo’s employee training programs.
To get as many people as possible ready for social media tools, the consumer innovation team at Humana created a series of self-guided training modules for employees to learn about various social media tools without becoming overwhelmed. People can spend a little time each day to get up to speed and gain a sense of how these resources can help them. “LinkedIn in 15 Minutes a Day,” for instance, gives employees a chance to learn enough to test it on their own. Other 15-minute courses introduce the basics of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. The team has also created modules on subjects such as RSS feeds and readers, blogging, search engine optimization, and social marketing campaigns. They post these modules in an online community-like space called the Social Media Commons, designed specifically as a place where people can practice and learn.
Respond to Critics
One of the largest roadblocks to getting started with online communities is those who think they are not a good idea. Here are the most common objections we hear and ways we believe you can address them.
Our Management Team Will Never Sign Off on This
Few people agree to new things they don’t understand or see value in. Consider going through the list of challenges presented earlier in the chapter, pull out those you know your organization needs to fix most, and frame your case by explaining how an online community could help meet those goals.
A customer can form impressions of the company from a phone call, a website, a retail counter, a reservation agent, or any number of other experiences. To make employees not just advocates for the corporate culture, but to help them speak with your voice, make customer conversations part of your training.
People you work with may already see benefit in such a community but don’t know how to proceed. By explaining your interest, you might open the door to getting started.
A corporate study from the Society for New Communication Research, called the “Tribalization of Business,” found that the greatest obstacles to making a community work were not about technology or getting funding, but about getting people involved in the community (51 percent), finding enough time to manage the community (45 percent), and attracting people to the community (34 percent).22 Management was not cited as an obstacle. Just 9 percent of the respondents said that their management was unwilling to share with community members or support the initiative.
Lois Kelly, a Beeline Labs partner and one of the Tribalization report researchers, pointed out that a common fear—losing control—“may not be as big an issue as [people] think. Clearly the bigger challenge is focusing the community around a purpose that people want to contribute to and be involved with—and devoting the right resources to promote and support the community.”
People Will Waste Precious Time, Which Isn’t Good for Business or the Bottom Line
In tough economic times, some people seem to become critical of every activity, even those generating the energy required for success. In large part, innovation and learning comes from the little moments between the activities we’ve previously thought of as the “real” work.
When people accuse social media tools of causing productivity problems, do a quick reality check with them about the methods people around your organization use to communicate, collaborate, and learn today. Detractors will probably find they are fundamentally social.
Time spent in online communities needs to be managed, but the same could be said about time on the telephone, using email, or in meetings. The challenge may be more about how to address some people’s compulsion to constantly look busy rather than get their work done.
In our research, we saw time and again that the earliest adopters of social media tools are technically savvy people who were already having these conversations, just not as easily or with such strong results. They were the ones on their phones, on email discussion lists, in bulletin boards, or talking it up with the people in their physical proximity.
Social media, including online communities, didn’t spawn this behavior. People seeking the next great aha weren’t the wallflowers who kept to themselves. They were social enough already to know they did their best when engaged with other people.
If someone has an addiction to being online, he or she is likely to be a poor performer because of that addictive trait. In general though, even a little leisure browsing has been shown to help sharpen workers’ concentration because they have had some downtime to relax and broaden their thinking.
Josh Bancroft, technology evangelist and blogger at Intel, tells of an experience when one of the people he worked with needed to accomplish a task. To do so, she needed to use a piece of software no one in her group had ever heard of, let alone knew enough about to use. It would have taken months to learn the software and complete the task. Instead, she searched the organization’s internal wiki system and found someone who had done a project using the software. She contacted that person and asked for help. Within a matter of weeks the project was done.23 How many wiki pages was the efficiency gain worth? Add up not only the time saved by one person, but also the advantages of a quicker time to market for this project.
Many employees have already integrated technology into their lives. Their ability to connect serves them and their employers well. While their colleagues waste time in meetings or engage in long phone conversations, they sum things up in quick messages over their microsharing system.
Many employees have already integrated technology into their lives. Their ability to connect serves them and their employers well. While their colleagues waste time in meetings or engage in long phone conversations, they sum things up in quick messages over their microsharing system. And given their networks of online connections, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn’t have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.
Do people fulfill their work objectives or not? Are they getting their jobs done? If so, why should anyone care if they’re spending time in the online community? By being there, they create relationships and create their own place in the company. By getting to know other people in the company, they’re getting to know the company better.
Employees Will Give Away Company Secrets
People form their own communities with or without organizational support. It’s hard to monitor and control information and content that employees put out on the Internet, but it doesn’t mean they’re not doing it.
If you create a space for people to work in, learn from, and engage with, you provide them a viable way to work that doesn’t involve going around the system.
Many organizational leaders we spoke with said their employees became more efficient and easier to monitor (and influence) when there was a private forum for sharing ideas, information, and work tasks. These spaces brought people together, and they began to work more as a unit without any suggestive pushing from management.
Most companies track how many people use the communities and how often and which sub-sites and topics get the most traffic. This allows site managers to make improvements based on real behavior. At the Intercontinental Hotel Group, for example, the Leaders Lounge is constantly tweaked—based on actual usage—to replace content created by the learning team with content generated by the managers using the site.
Some People Will Just Lurk
It’s OK if some people just lurk. The silent majority who rarely make the time to post can still gain tremendous value from the breadth of the organization they can glimpse online. They can learn from those participating more actively. In communities with tools that automatically recommend content based on what others read, lurkers become contributors without even having to chime in.
Recommendations
Now it’s your turn to listen, watch, and learn from your physical community and consider if people will be willing to take some of their work online.
Jamie Pappas at EMC offers the following recommendations to anyone interested in deploying social media for their organization.24
Look Inward
Although many organizations have begun to adopt outward-facing social media strategies, putting social capabilities on their externally facing websites, there are advantages to beginning inside first. EMC|ONE was launched to drive employee proficiency with social media tools and provide EMC employees an introduction to a new way of working. Available to all EMC employees, contractors, and vendors who have signed a nondisclosure agreement with EMC, it provides a place to understand and become comfortable with social media tools and terminology among friends and colleagues. EMC did this before launching external communities so that people inside the company would be prepared for that next level of engagement with business partners, prospects, and customers.
Differentiate Benefits
You can’t sell the same value proposition to every group. What works for telemarketing is not likely to work for programming. Take time to understand the group you’re talking to and adapt the message, making it relevant to them. Don’t just say social media is great. Tell people how it benefits them, how it can broaden their unique networks and enable them to do new things. Tailoring your message to your audience is at the heart of enabling them to see value in the new tools and the new ways of working being proposed.
Welcome Everyone
With social media tools, each person has an opportunity to provide his or her distinctive perspective on a broad range of topics. Everyone in an organization, regardless of role, title, or focus, can contribute insights to the conversation. The more people that come together, the more information is shared, the more ideas are generated, and the better informed people’s decisions can be. All of this discussing and collaborating together leads to an invaluable online, searchable resource for everyone who participates.
“I cannot think of a time during my 20 years at EMC when I felt more informed, involved, and confident in myself and the business before EMC|ONE.” |
—John Walton, Symmetrix Engineer and EMC Fellow25 |
Be Aware That It’s Not All Business
Organizations often want to offer their employees a community or social media toolset but don’t want the conversations to wander off specific business themes. As social creatures, people thrive on meaningful connections with other people. Although most conversations should have a professional focus, connections across topics build relationships and trust sometimes more effectively than sticking solely to job-related areas. Pappas shares, “In EMC|ONE, the restaurant recommendations wiki is one of our most popular and serves to bring people together cross-departmentally and cross-geographically who would not have otherwise had an opportunity to connect. It serves as an excellent icebreaker and provides employees an opportunity to share their unique perspectives in a way that is not intimidating, especially for those new to the organization. People begin their relationship by sharing a recommendation, and the interaction ultimately facilitates their ability to learn about other perspectives and talents across the organization from other contributors. It has also become a hot resource for the sales people visiting headquarters, as it provides them with a starting point for where to dine or take customers, partners, or prospects who visit EMC.”
Do Important Work
Burt Kaliski, director of EMC’s Innovation Network, and his team started planning for the company’s annual Innovation Conference by brainstorming ideas about the focus of the event on EMC|ONE. As that was settled, the team moved on to posting and refining event details. Then they launched their innovation submission process on EMC|ONE and received more than 900 submissions from passionate EMC employees all over the world who felt so comfortable in the community that they were even eager to post their submissions on the site for others to review, comment on, and provide suggestions.26
Listen and Prepare for Possible Objections and Concerns
You will not convince anyone to join the online community by ignoring or dismissing critics. By listening, you may find opportunities for improvements, further exploration, or even education on misinformation or lack of knowledge or understanding. If you can anticipate and think of a response to some of the objections ahead of time, you may be able to keep the conversation on point, and it will help you to illustrate the benefits for that group with meaningful examples and case studies.
Share the Love
The atmosphere of any community provides much of what new members need to know about what they can expect there. If there are too many rules, people are discouraged from participating or they fear their participation won’t be accepted because it’s not sanctioned content. If there are no guidelines, people are discouraged because they don’t know what is considered fair game. But, if you have a community with open-minded and welcoming members, others will feel comfortable jumping in and contributing their own insights.
Encourage Champions
Some people will naturally become advocates of the online community and social media initiatives in your organization. Welcome these people and make it easy for them to share their knowledge, experiences, and expertise with others. EMC|ONE has a voluntary mentor program that encourages people to add their names to a list of people whom anyone can contact for assistance, advice, or brainstorming. Champions have emerged from all parts of the organization, so they have the diversity of experience to share what works and what doesn’t in different parts of the company and with customers, partners, and the larger ecosystem the organization serves.
The open and real-time nature of social media tools makes it essential to embed education into the roadmap of launching an enterprise initiative. If organizations want people to use social media responsibly and on behalf of the organization, they must set forth what they consider to be the “rules of engagement” and highlight examples of how people use the tools in alignment with the strategy. EMC has created a robust set of frequently asked questions, tutorials, best-practice guides, and 101 introductory modules that serve as a starting point and lay the framework for employees to feel a bit more comfortable engaging. EMC has also included social media awareness and best practices in its new hire training, so employees are aware of the guidance from the outset.
Foster Teamwork
There is no magic formula for how many people, or what departments, or what levels must be involved for people to learn through social media. Be open to exploring the right mix for your organization and be open to changing that mix frequently until the team is right for your organization’s needs.
All of this makes the case that a point person (or people) coordinates the company’s social media efforts beyond the tools provided for use. It also makes the case that social media success requires a team of diverse and committed people to serve the interests of not only the individuals who use it, but also the organization as a whole.
At EMC, the Social Media Advisory Council brings together the people responsible for setting and executing the social media strategy for their organization or geography. The council comprises a cross-functional, cross-geographical team of people who meet virtually on a monthly basis to collaborate on the company’s social strategy, exchange ideas and best practices, solve challenges, and work together to increase awareness of social media in the organization.
“Embarking on a community initiative is not easy and requires patience and hard work to succeed—but it’s a worthy pursuit,” says Pappas. “Clearly define your goals and take a keen interest in the individual business needs of your audiences. Then commit to developing true partnerships with employees and stakeholders, leveraging the people who have a true passion for community and collaboration as your strongest advocates. If you do this, understanding that flexibility and change are must-have ingredients, you will find the support you need to continue to pave the road that will provide your organization with benefits you have only just begun to imagine.”