The Content-Community Social Media Model

When I was blogging this post - the model popped into my head - but only in the past few days was when I started thinking how businesses can use social media that it formed into something like a model.

The Content-Community Matrix to using social media

I like to call it my "Content - Community" model.

• Content is text, photos, videos as well as reactions to that content. The reactions can be in the form of comments, votes (up or down) or ratings. 
• Community is a shared identity between a group of people who may or may not know each other. And conversations can be of various types as I showed in this model earlier

Clay Shirky in his book "Here comes everybody" says that every webpage has a latent community - as the people who share the interest in that content.
What is needed is to tap that community and to bring them together.
The model is a simple 2x2 matrix with the horizontal axis denoting community and the vertical axis denoting content.
A business (or non-profit) or government can use these four approaches as a starting point and have different kind of social conversations.

1. Low Content and Low Community - Obviously these are not very social. Typically static webpages which offer no commenting or curation facilities would fall in this category.
2. High Content and Low Community - Big example - wikipedia.org. Other examples would be website like Quora.com, a discussion board like Pagalguy.com, an ideation platform like Dell's Ideastorm.com in which people either ask questions or submit ideas and then vote them up or down is heavy on content and focused on solving issues. Community takes a backseat in these platforms. What is the key to success is defining clearly what issues will be addressed. Social commerce platforms and services like Flickr.com and Slideshare.net  would also be examples of this category.
3. High Community and Low Content - The assumption in these communities is that the shared interests and self-identity of the community will need trigger more and more content in the future. If an organization is investing in such a social site then they need to seed it with some initial content and guide the community and help then create more content.
4. High Community and High Content - These are full featured community platforms with content creation platforms. I would typically classify "social" intranets with extranets - with activity streams, wikis, rich profiles in this category. These would also be the category where category 3 could develop into after a period of time.

 Some thoughts to keep in mind: these categories are not watertight. Over a period of time, for example, category 2 would develop a core community of people who interact and converse with each other. category 3 would slowly develop into category 4 too.
You might ask where does a facebook.com or Twitter.com or Foursquare.com fit here? Note that they are social networks, not online communities - and the difference is crucial. As Lithium's Michael Wu (see his 4 posts about it) states we have a social graph and we are members of various communities - for example I am simultaneously a member of communities like my alumni groups, HR professionals, KM enthusiast, Social Media explorer, Comic Book lover, foodie and Enterprise 2.0. These are where I build strong or weak ties.

How Companies are using Talent Analytics

Interesting article in the HBR on how organizations are using analytics to use employee data to better performance. Here are some examples:

What’s driving this shift to analytics? Certainly, companies today want more from their talent. That’s why some are reinventing a whole range of people practices: Netflix has tossed aside traditional HR absence policies, and Best Buy’s corporate office eschews standard work schedules. Analytics takes the guesswork out of fresh management approaches. At the same time, voluminous “digital trails” of data from knowledge management systems and social networks are now available for analysis. The public relations firm Ketchum, for example, analyzed personal networks in its London office to learn how easily information flowed across teams. Cognizant, a U.S.-based professional services firm with many employees in India, analyzed social media contributions, particularly blogs. It found that bloggers were more engaged and satisfied than others and performed about 10% better, on average.

Here’s how other organizations use analytics to improve their management of human capital:

•    Almost every company we’ve studied says it values employee engagement, but some—including Starbucks, Limited Brands, and Best Buy—can precisely identify the value of a 0.1% increase in engagement among employees at a particular store. At Best Buy, for example, that value is more than $100,000 in the store’s annual operating income.

•    Many companies favor job candidates with stellar academic records from prestigious schools—but AT&T and Google have established through quantitative analysis that a demonstrated ability to take initiative is a far better predictor of high performance on the job.

•    Employee attrition can be less of a problem when managers see it coming. Sprint has identified the factors that best foretell which employees will leave after a relatively short time. (Hint: Don’t expect a long tenure from someone who hasn’t signed up for the retirement program.)

•    Professional sports teams, with their outsize expenditures on talent, have been leading users of analytics. To protect its investments, the soccer team AC Milan created its own biomedical research unit. Drawing on some 60,000 data points for each player, the unit helps the team gauge players’ health and fitness and make contract decisions.

 

Thoughts on Social HR

I have earlier blogged about how HR can use social media to become HR 2.0 or to build talent communities, but when my twitter buddies @prem_k and @sameerpatel were discussing "social" everything including "social HR" I realised that there are more implications of social HR than I have earlier articulated.
So how is it different?
What I had blogged about earlier was how HR departments and professionals could leverage social media to achieve their goals.
But with "Social HR" I am potentially thinking a very disruptive thought.
Can employees and HR professionals and management folks together work together using social media - to do work that was only done by HR people?
Let's think about the aspects of HR work and what can be made "social"

• Recruitment: How about talent show where prospective candidates perform tasks and are voted up or down by current employees - and final selection of the finalists by the hiring managers. These tasks could be results or the process of doing the role itself. It could be text based, photographic or video based too. These folks can be pre-screened based on their interests and participation on the company's external communities. Of course some roles would be more suited to this than others.
• Compensation & Benefits: How about a Quora like internal question and answer site that helps users to resolve each others queries on how to craft their own "cafeteria compensation" plan. And a group voting site on rewards and recognition for fellow employees.
• HR Processes: This has been done. Dell employees use an internal platform to give ideas to improve systems and processes.
• Employee Engagement: We all know that an internal corporate social network can leverage connections that exist between employees and also help in serendipitous discovery of new knowledge and innovation by getting people to collaborate and discover new people whom they might not ever have met face to face. Here's a short 5 slide presentation I put together to help illustrate my point

Social Employee engagement - Using social media tools for Employee Engagement and HR

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

• Learning & Development: Employee engagement and collaboration helps people to learn from fellow employees. These tools can also be used by trainers to add more to the classroom and create a community of learners who can continue to share experiences and be a support group as they implement learnings in their workplace

So are you ready for the social HR?
I thought so :-)

HR Examiner Sponsor's the HR Professional's Network

Note: I had earlier posted that I was fearing that I'd have to shut down the HR Professionals' network (which now has more than 1400 members) that was hosted on Ning - since Ning was moving to a fully paid model.

Thankfully now I have some great news to share. John Sumser, the Founder, Author and Editor-in-Chief, of HR Examiner contacted me and readily agreed to help. So now the HR professionals' network is proud to be sponsored by HRExaminer.com

HRExaminer.com is a new magazine focused on the people, technology, ideas and careers of
senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital. The company is located in Bodega Bay, California.

You can read more about HRExaminer in the manifesto or subscribe to their email updates or RSS feed.

I would recommend you to read the latest weekly magazine, HRExaminer v1.33 September 17, 2010

7 lessons of online community building

Caroline Dangson (@cdangson) of the Dachis Group shares her experience in trying to build an online community for a client in her post titled Planning a Community Is Like Planning a Wedding

To avoid turning into bridezilla before launching an online community, I offer 7 lessons learned from my experience so far.

1. Meet with Compliance and Legal during the initial planning stages to provide context around the project, give notice about content approvals, find out if training is available (goodwill effort that goes a long way) and if Terms of Service language exists for social media sites
2. Conduct interviews with other groups inside and outside the organization that interact with your target audience (PR, Customer Service)
3. Don’t assume that Facebook-like features will be supported by every community platform
4. Allow for plenty of time to receive approval of a new community manager position and to find the right candidate
5. Avoid ghost-written blog posts (they are awkward and no one wants to endorse before the community is launched anyway)
6. Allow at least a week for website quality assurance testing (you may need more time depending on how many people need to be involved and their responsiveness)
7. Schedule time to pre-seed the community site with user-generated content before launch to kick-start sharing activities

SuccessFactors Goes Social

I have always thought that the folks at SuccessFators, a HRMS, got social media marketing. They've had an external facing blog for a long time and have also linked to this blog in the past :-)

So was quite interested to see that they had acquired CubeTree. More and more traditional ERP systems are going to go the social way methinks.

As I have said before - ERP is the interpretation of business processes while enterprise social networking is an interpretation of business relationships. Both need each other to be organizationally relevant. My view is that we'll see a lot more ERP and social networking providers to connect and build partnerships - or to buy out the complementary offering.

See related story here: SuccessFactors Adds Social Features to Business Drivers

SuccessFactors recently hopped on the social train via their recent acquisition of CubeTree, which adds free collaboration capabilities to its SaaS BizX Suite of business applications.

We covered a bit of CubeTree back the spring of 2009 when enterprise collaboration was on its way to becoming an official buzz term. With features like microblogging, wikis and profiles in the CubeTree arsenal, the company was winning the hearts of people like investor Mitch Kapor, who said: “At work, e-mail and IM are still the dominant online communications media. I believe that is destined to change with products like CubeTree, which help companies create enterprise social networks. I invested in CubeTree because I believe that social networking technology will be at the heart of the next generation of enterprise collaboration.”

Could he have been more right? Today, enterprise-level companies like Salesforce.com have seemingly put all of their eggs in the social media basket, and are doing quite well.

Presently, CubeTree offers even more social features than before, including:

Status Updates

Like Twitter, CubeTree's status updates are public, 140 characters messages that tell your co-workers what's up:
cubetree_status_update.jpg

Comments

Activities within the CubeTree system generate feed items that can be commented on by colleagues, just like a Facebook wall generates links to activities you perform on linked sites like YouTube and Flickr:
cubetree_comments.jpg

Feed Filtering

Also like Facebook, CubeTree Uusers can choose who they want to follow, as well as which types of feed items they want to receive. If there are particular feed items a user does not want to receive from people they follow, there is a setting to filter them out.

Further, you can integrate third-party applications like Twitter and Google Docs so that your co-workers know what you're up to not only at work, but everywhere else, too.

SuccessFactors + CubeTree

SuccessFactors provides what they call "Business Execution Software" (BizX), which aims to help organizations maximize business results. With the CubeTree integraion, the BizX sweet now offers all of the CubeTree social goodness mentioned above, as well as:

Automatic Synchronization: Employees can start collaborating immediately without waiting for colleagues to accept invitations; automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users; increases the findability of relevant colleagues to follow and build robust social graphs

Single Sign-On: Employees sign in only once to access their BizX dashboard, social networking and collaboration capabilities

Global Cloud Infrastructure: The enterprise social and collaboration capabilities from CubeTree will run in SuccessFactors’ global cloud computing infrastructure

“Poor communication gets in the way of execution,” said Dmitri Krakovsky, vice president of global product management, SuccessFactors. “With activity feeds and collaboration features incorporated into our Business Execution Suite, we help solve this information flow problem and fundamentally change the way companies work. When every person across the company can share and collaborate with one another, that’s when real work gets done.”

Driving Enterprise 2.0 behavior change

Interesting Australian article on why the implementation of enterprise social networking tools might not be so easy as people flocking to Twitter and Facebook. Not every blog has its day

Still trying to get your employees to embrace the company wiki and other recent collaboration tools? Sorry, the world has moved on.

Four years since the birth of "Enterprise 2.0", many wikis have been abandoned, as companies find it takes more to enthuse staff to share than just building a platform and expecting them to come.

In theory, the wikis, blogs and instant messages were a perfect match for Web 2.0 services mushrooming outside the enterprise.

In practice, many companies assumed all they had to do was implement the technology, convince the boss to blog, send an email around to let everyone know and the rest would follow.

"It's not turning out the way they might have planned," says the research director at consulting firm Ovum, Steve Hodgkinson.

"There's a raft of wikis that have gone stale. Some ended up in just another cluttered environment, some got good reaction but weren't particularly useful, so fizzled out. It was not as easy as companies thought. It's interesting because it exposes people's collaborative tendencies or lack thereof."

Hodgkinson and his colleague, principal analyst Richard Edwards, have been studying enterprise collaboration behaviour and conclude that companies need to rethink their strategies.

They say there is hard work involved in fostering collaboration.

Companies that have gleaned the most from the technology have managed it actively through training, monitoring user behaviour and constant adjustment.

The innovation manager of Deloitte Australia, Simon Townsend, says it's important to go where users want to go.

Deloitte has 4500 staff in Australia and several internal collaboration tools, among them a wikiblog that did not pay dividends for staff and was abandoned.

Edwards says the time has come for companies to stop locking down computers and observe which social technologies are preferred and engaged by employees.

"We need to focus on the human being part of the equation," he says.

"Every corporate employee is a consumer. We need to remind IT and senior managers [of that] every day because what they enjoy using outside they'll use inside."

Social Business Does Not Need Hyperbole

Oliver Marks writing in his ZDNet column The Socialist Revolution is Coming! takes Jive to task for their hyperbole - and urges them to focus on basic benefits that people and organizations will get by using these tools. From his article:

It’s this type of vendor hyperbole and the proselytizing tone of some of the missionaries seeking to convert adopters to their faith that’s increasingly grating the nerves of people running previous generations of ‘old’ management and associated technologies.

There’s no question that there is immense value in the intelligent deployment of the new generation of collaborative software, which is currently festooned with all manner of confusing ’social’ buzzwords and diagrams by interested parties as it comes of age. The challenge is in filtering out all the ‘glib or foolish talk’ both about it …and also the fact that it can in some cases enable it and associated inefficiency, moving ‘water cooler’ social conversations and undercurrents into an online social milieu in businesses.

In a fast moving space there is still plenty of room for innovation and new entrants: Moxie have enhanced their credible previous collaboration product with a user experience interface by Design and Innovation Consulting Firm IDEO that incorporates sophisticated customer interaction management.

Many larger players are now incorporating the ground breaking thinking the early adopters of Web 2.0 software in business entrepreneurs offered in the early days, with Saba Software combining learning, people management and collaboration technologies ‘to deliver solutions that help mobilize and engage people to drive new strategies and initiatives, align and connect people to accelerate the flow of business, and cultivate individual and collective know-how to achieve exceptional results‘.

‘In context suites’, where users are exposed to tools in the flow of their work- such as Salesforce have attempted with their Twitter style Chatter application, and Saba’s collaboration suite or Successfactors incorporation of recent acquisition Cubetree into their workflows - are a sure coming of age sign for enabling collaborative thinking.

From the perspective of my company the Sovos Group the challenges of getting the slumbering masses of disinterested employees, some of whom are now alarmed by their prospects for survival under Socialism 2.0, the Social Media business and associated adoption missionaries in their place of work, remain the same.

Regardless of whether you as an employee are in a giant corporation with layers of SAP, Oracle, Saba and Jive, or you’re working in a small entity or department, you are typically looking for ways to get your job done more efficiently and to get recognition from your peers and superiors. Most people work to live, rather than live to work, and aren’t thrilled with the prospect of blurring their social life with their business life, as some proponents of the 24/7 social lifestyle suggest.

Tools that simplify life, enhance efficiency, make information and connections easier to find if needed are generally welcomed by all - it will be a shame if the shrill cacophony around all things ’social’ this summer prejudices or confuses those who are irritated by it before they’ve even designed and found ways to deploy and enjoy these powerful new ways to work.

Leveraging Social Media Tools for Learning

Image by cdorobek via Flickr
As a person who's passionate about learning - as well as a social media enthusiast - I have blogged and talked about how social tools could be used for learning within organizations.

So I was quite excited to get a copy of Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham's book "The New Social Learning". Marcia is a Partner at the Altimeter Group and Tony is the CEO of the American Society of Training and Development.


The book is a great collection of leading edge organizations that are experimenting successfully with various social technologies (like internal social networking, microsharing, video-tagging, communities of practice) to enable their employees to learn and connect with each other.


The first good news is that you don't need to be a tech organization to deploy social tools to enable people to learn from each other. The examples in the book range from organizations like the CIA to Booz to Wells Fargo to Coca Cola.

The second good news is that deploying these tools does not mean a lot of expense unlike the earlier investments into technology that enabled learning like LMSs and e-learning content.

The third good news is that trainers can breathe easy. They are not going to be redundant anytime soon - but if they leverage these tools they can help their learners learn better and faster.






What I liked about the book is that it takes each argument that organizations would take against implementing social media tools - and gives reasons why it would work. This is a great resource for HR and learning people who are looking to be change agents. It has tonnes of tips on how to leverage social media for in-person events like conferences and classroom events.

The book also looks at the underlying reasons why social technologies are being adopted - and how organizations have a choice to either get in their employees' way or to use it. There's an appendix on governance which looks at organizations like IBM and how they put in systems and processes that help them become a "social business"

Where I think this book could have been better would be by including a chapter on non-social media savvy HR and L&D people on introduction to how they can use each tool for their own growth and learning. Maybe there's another book idea there?

That aside, this is a must read book for anyone who is working in the areas of employee learning and wants to build a more open and collaborative learning organization.
You can see the book's website here and keep up with it on Twitter at @newsociallearn

Business benefits of Enterprise 2.0 #e20

If you're still not convinced why organizations should use social technologies within, then you should read this. A study done by the Aberdeen Group that's up at the Socialtext blog: Embrace Social Software and Improve Business Performance

The report surveyed 300 enterprises, and broke them down into three categories based on the maturity and sophistication of their social software adoption (best-in-class, industry average and laggard). I encourage anyone considering the benefits of social software to read the entire report, but here’s a few highlights:

1. Companies that widely harnessed social software (best-in-class) took on average 11 hours to bring a response team together for a key business threat, while industry average companies took 113 hours and laggards 105.
2. Best in class companies took five months to complete key strategic projects, while industry average companies took 8 months and laggards a staggering 14 months.
3. Best-in-class companies saw a 36 percent decrease in time to enact key business changes based on customer feedback, while laggards experienced a 17 percent increase.

So what's stopping your organization to embrace social tools and change into an Organization 2.0 ?

5 Skills for Online Community Managers

Image via Wikipedia
Online communities about which I have blogged often - are virtual places where people who share similar interests congregate and share information and connect with each other. They are distinct from "social networks" which are the relationships that you have with people you know or you get to know.

To think about it - online communities are like "Pages" on facebook (like this blog's page on Facebook, or the HR Professional's community) while a social network is what you see when you log into your Facebook account.

I first came across online communities long back. In 1999, I joined Satyam Computer Services and was soon part of the Knowledge Management team. One of the terms in vogue in KM circles around the world those days was "Communities of Practice", and we had created some communities using rudimentary bulletin board technology. These were organised around specific technologies which were the subject matter around which people would post queries and reply to others' questions.


Over the years I came across many other examples of such communities - both within organizations - like Hewlett Packard - and externally like Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms community or plain email listservs.

I have created some communities and have been sometimes an active and sometimes a passive  member of various communities.

Based on my understanding - here's what competencies the person managing the community needs to have:

1. Depth of knowledge in the subject of the community - This is what I'd put in the top of the list. Knowledge of the subject would make him/her credible and that would be the main asset to seed and grow the community.
2. Passion about sharing knowledge - A community may have lots of different objectives - but the primary behaviour that makes it successful is a small group of people incredibly passionate about sharing their knowledge with others. In the core of this group and probably the initiator and instigator in chief has to be the community manager.
3. Comfort with asking for help - As a community grows the conversations will get more and more complex and sometimes even the dedicated group may be at a loss. This is when the community manager (or someone else too) needs to go out of the community - find an expert, and bring them into the community to join the conversation. 
4. Comfort with technologies - Let's face it, online and virtual communities reside in cyberspace (whether within the company or externally) and knowledge of the tools and latest development in that space would be expected by the person who manages the community. If the community runs on a self-developed platform then relationship with the tech group that developed it is critical. If it runs on an white label platform like Jive or Lithium - then connections with the vendors' troubleshooters is important. The last thing you'd want is the community to be offline
5. The ability to showcase results and tell the story - For hard headed business folks online communities can seem to be very fluffy and a drain on resources, so an ability to showcase examples and results is important. It ensures the "mainstream" organization seeing real business value.

So those are the 5 skills that I think a community manager should have.

What do you think? Would you like to add any more?

Thoughts on the future of Human Resources

Image by Will Lion via Flickr[Originally written 4 years ago ]

Some years ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great sales people was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying "Sales folks who have worked in the consumer facing industry which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!". Talk about specialization.

As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.

HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, specially those skills of Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset.

An "internal service provider" mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A "partner" approach however, also needs inernal strength to sometimes say "no" to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.

Why is there such a need and challenge on HR and recruitment ?

The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turn-around times.

Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom-line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.

And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.
What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?

HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.

HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.

HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.

HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"
Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.
Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.

HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]

It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.

Enterprise 2.0 - Corporate Social Networking in India

Image via CrunchBase

An interesting article on how IT firms in India like Cognizant, TCS, Wipro are using inhouse social networking platforms to retain GenNext. I have posted earlier that there is a generational change coming which is driving these changes - one must realise two things:

1. It's not just a generational thing - sure the young have more comfort with such technologies - but it's wrong to say that such tools are focused only for them
2. The benefits of social networking is not just higher engagement - collaboration leads to business benefits - like reducing time to market and impacting productivity if used in a strategic way - and not just left to be "emergent"

An excerpt from the article:

Top tech firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries, which is already considered hygiene by new recruits. Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and the site records over six million page views every month.
“That’s how close you can get a Facebook to the business processes,” said Malcolm Frank, senior vice-president and Cognizant’s chief strategist. “The millennial actually have a completely different expectation in terms of how they work, they love to have virtual experiences,” added Frank.
From the time a new customer project is kicked off, to when it’s actually delivered, Cognizant 2.0 glues the entire workflow together, across varied skills, geographies and business units. “The work flow is not a boring experience, it’s so much refreshing,” agrees Pendse.
For Cognizant as an organisation, the system helps it not only knit the project groups together, but also reduce the entire time taken to identify who can do a particular project better than the rest.
“It’s like a Google search—we put the skill set required, and it throws up different project teams and individuals with prior experience in dealing with such situations,” says Frank. Some 7,000 projects are already registered in the system, and employees have shared around 200,000 posts about these projects.
At TCS, the country’s biggest software exporter, nearly one third of its over 1,50,000-strong workforce is actively participating in the company’s social media platforms already. TCS uses wikis, or personalised, websites that bring together specialised communities, apart from other tools to help its employees collaborate better. While Justask enables employees to ask questions openly, Ideamax encourages employees to share their ideas about a particular technology or a process.

Read my earlier post on the Social Business Employer manifesto - to think about it in a strategic manner. Also go through my presentation for a detailed explanation

The social business employee manifesto

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Future of Work? (customerthink.com)
• Ex-Wipro CEO Vivek Paul enters the Enterprise 2.0 space (gautamblogs.com)
• Leveraging Social Media for Organizational Learning and Development (gautamblogs.com)

Social Media Competencies Grid

My ex-colleague Gaurav Mishra has come up with a framework which he calls the social media competencies grid using which B Schools (and training groups within social media firms) can train people in social media skills.

You can see it here

As I told Gaurav, I would not call the second grid as a grid of competencies - but rather a grid of tools. Competencies (putting my HR hat on) - is a combination of Knowledge Skills and Attitudes/Attribute
So for example community basic competencies would be :Knowing features of wordpress and buddypress, being able to invite and grow membership of the community leveraging social advertising, and doing it without being considered spam
Advanced competencies would be: growing a Ning (or any web based tool) community of more than 1000 members, sparking discussions, tracking engagement metrics, like comments on forum, quality of discussions, returning members - eventually driving traffic back to brand/organization/non-profit website
Pro/expert competencies would be: use lithium, jive to develop multiple communities, manage several community managers, look at analytics and give strategic ideas on potential new communities, track impact and ROI etc
What do you think?

Taking Work Home

DNA India the newspaper recently had a survey on the quality of work life that people in Mumbai have and found that a lot of people were unable to disconnect from work issues even after reaching home.
They approached me to ask me the reasons why this could be the case and what people should do if they don't want to.
Here's the image from the newspaper

What do you think? Why do people take work home?
Let me know by leaving your thoughts in the comments 

Over Communicating to Employees and Living without Email

One area that is rarely talked about in this breathless conversation about social networks and how easy it is to communicate between organizations and their consumers is the impact it is having on the people who actually do that communication with customers, influencers and prospective consumers: the employees.

This interesting post Technology’s Unintended Consequence: The Elusive Worker spells out the challenges that employees are facing in this new world:

Making matters more complicated, workers are processing more messages than ever before. Messages are bombarding workers via email, phone, instant message, Facebook, Twitter and Yammer, among other — not to mention standard face-to-face interactions and ambient office chatter. An incomplete tally of my own direct, inbound messages in the past 24 hours registered at over 500. Not 500 ambient messages, but 500 messages specifically intended to receive my full attention. I’m not sure how I do it.

The importance of message-filtering goes without saying. If you can’t instinctively surface the needles from the haystack, you’ll have a hard time surviving in this clutter-filled information age. Indeed, humans need better filtering tools to create more sense and productivity. Progress has been slow there, so our brains continue to adapt and cope on their own.

But the other side of the coin is getting through the noise, connecting through the filters, and ensuring your message is really understood by your colleagues. The glut of information has created a poverty of focused attention. The ratio of communication to comprehension is going down.

And it reminded me of my friend Luis Suarez (@elsua) who has been evangelising living a life with little or no email - and relying on other sources - think social networking tools within and without the enterprise to get information without being bombarded by email. As he says in this Mashable article:

“As a remote employee, I’m wanted to prove to everyone that I could keep working for the company without using e-mail, relying almost … exclusively on social software tools to communicate daily with my team members.”

His plan was to show his coworkers just how dependent they really were on e-mail, emphasizing how many times a day they were compelled to check it, and proving that it was no longer a productivity tool, but a procrastinator’s best friend.

He acknowledges that times have changed. Ten years ago, e-mail was absolutely necessary for business interactions. Yet in the last two and a half years, he’s advocated for social software to replace e-mail as the go-to communication method.

Rather than restricting file and data sharing conversations to personal inboxes, Suarez persuades employees to first share data more openly behind company firewalls, and then as they ease into the concept (and if it’s relevant), share it on wider social services.

“I’ve kept track of progress,” he says. “I’ve gone from 30 to 40 e-mails a day to an average of just 17 per week. Most of those are one-on-one private conversations, for which e-mail is still probably the best tool for anything sensitive or confidential.”

So will this be the model of employee communication of the future? For certain workers and certain workplaces I think so. And its not going to be about whether the organizations are high tech - or whether they employ more millenials, it will be dependent on whether the leadership and the management of organizations can embrace change and openness and transparency and follow these principles.

In fact it will be driven as more and more CEOs embrace social media to reach out and communicate.

What do you think?

Mailtoday article on Sex, Work and Career Success

Neha Tara Mehta of Mailtoday asked me for my views on a US survey that shows that women who sleep with their bosses gain career success.

The article can be read here

SLEEPING WITH BOSS CAN BOOST CAREER

By Neha Tara Mehta in New Delhi

US survey says 37% of office workers believe that having an affair with the boss helps in growth at work. Is it any different in India?

ITS THE most politically incorrect admission to make in the modern workplace, but a US survey has revealed that sleeping with their boss does help women climb several notches up the corporate ladder.

The New York- based Centre for Work- Life Policy has found that 37 per cent office workers said that from their experience those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost.

Whats more, no matter how high achieving the woman is, she will not reach the very top of her profession unless she finds a sponsor — read a sugar daddy who is almost always married.

In the West, the Indian publishing industrys one- time poster boy, the sacked Penguin Canada CEO and President David Davidar was led by his “ consensual flirtation” to give a $ 10,000 ( ` 4.6 lakh) raise to former colleague Lisa Rundle and the fancy title of director of digital publishing and foreign rights. When the relationship soured, Rundle filed a suit against Davidar — costing him his job.

Cases from India Inc, though, hardly ever come to light, and are discussed only around coffee machines. Says adman Prahlad Kakkar — one of the few who are willing to come on record on how between- the- sheets liaisons can have a bearing on ones raise: “ We all know that when there is some degree of smoke there has to be some fire.

When a woman sleeps with her boss, she is called a whore. When a man sleeps around, he is called a careerist.” Adds Gautam Ghosh, the HR consultant whose blog GautamGhosh.net has been ranked as one of the top 25 HR blogs by HRWorld: “ As a society, we are non- confrontationist. We would rather speak about something in hushed tones or gossip about an affair involving a celebrity.” In the West, politicians are much more flamboyant than their Indian counterparts about their peccadilloes with women who are then rewarded with plum positions.

In 2009, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconis wife Veronica Lario wrote an open letter condemning her husband for his choice of young inexperienced candidates to represent his party.

And in France, young female ministers picked by Nicolas Sarkozy go by the name Sarkozettes. Its not very different back home. Political greenhorns have made it to the Rajya Sabha, become chief ministers and even proxy- chief ministers through their liaisons with powerful men, but remain a subject to be discussed only in hushed tones.

The US survey has further revealed that 34 per cent women in executive positions said they knew of female colleagues who had slept with the boss, and even at the director level, 15 per cent of the women admitted to having had a fling.

Writer and former hotelier Advaita Kala points out that the findings could be explained by the the emergence of the raunch culture, as described by Ariel Levy in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs . Levy has written about the rejection of feminist principles and the unabashed use of sexuality to get ahead. “ There is some truth to women not being apologetic about being viewed as the fairer sex now. But in many cases, people talking about a female colleague sleeping with the boss is just misogynistic gossip.” The phenomenon has begun to make its way into popular literature and films as well. Soap queen Ektaa Kapoors former scriptwriter Smita Jains first book, Kkrishnaas Konfessions , featured as its protagonist Krrishnaa, an ambitious scriptwriter who isnt opposed to using her sexuality to forge ahead in her career.

“ Sleeping with the boss is an extreme form of tying yourself with the right person to make progress. Men can rely on their alumni and boys clubs, but most women cant. So a lot of women seek mentors in powerful people, sometimes by using sexual favours,” Jain says.

Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar has in two of his films shown women using sexuality to climb the ladder. In a real life twist, Bhandarkar was accused of running a casting couch in 2004, when Preeti Jain filed a case against him stating that she slept with him in exchange for roles in his movies.

In 2005, actors Aman Verma and Shakti Kapoor were caught in sting operations, where they were shown seeking sexual favours from aspiring starlets.

Giving the example of a beauty queen- turned- Bollywood actress, who skipped sleeping with producers and directors but dived into bed with a top Bollywood actor, Kakkar says, “ Its important to sleep with the right person.” A smart employee, he says, wont actually sleep with the boss – but be permanently on the verge of it. “ Sleeping around is the clincher, but not the meat. You have to be really competent to rise ahead,” Kakkar adds.

Author Anuja Chauhan, vicepresident and executive creative director of J. Walter Thompson, agrees sleeping around alone doesnt help in making it to the top. “ Sex may be the way up to middle management, but not to the top,” she says.

HR expert Anil Sachdev believes people using carnal means to get a career jump points to the larger issue of the lack of ethics in organisations.

“ These cases take place in organisations where leaders pay attention only to the financial aspect of success, and turn a blind eye to other attributes,” says Sachdev. “ Enlightened organisations now base 50 per cent of their performance appraisal on key result areas and the other 50 per cent to the means used to achieve the targets,” he points out.

Sleeping around to get to the top often borders on sexual harassment – something that many organisations arent equipped to deal with. “ Most HR managers arent equipped to have such conversations.They come from generic skills of recruitment and performance management,” point out Ghosh. HR heads, moreover, are often associated with business leaders, making it an intimidating task for a woman to file a complaint in quid pro quo cases.

Offices transforming into hotbeds of intrigue over suspected affairs — even when none exist — make it hard for meritorious employees to function. The US survey showed that 65 per cent of female executives suspect that salary hikes and plum assignments are being traded for sexual favours. Some 48 per cent of the men and 56 per cent of the women feel animosity towards the involved couple, leading to a drastic decline in office productivity.

This, says Sujata K, who works with the HR department of a Mumbai- based MNC, is an unfair assumption. She says, “ Im not denying that certain women do exchange favours with their bosses, but even if a woman does not do that and is successful, she is accused of having slept her way to the top.” Call it the new unwritten workplace code.

( With inputs from Sunaina Kumar in Mumbai)

 What do you think?

Another post I wrote about sex and the workplace was when I was on CNN-IBN's program Y-Not

Enterprise 2.0 news: Yammer takes on Jive, Socialtext

Leena Rao blogs on Techcrunch that Yammer 2.0 To Launch As A Powerful, Full-Fledged Social Network For The Enterprise

The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.

An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.

Yammer is also going to be upgrading content sharing by allowing users to preview information in shared links. The startup has also added a Q&A app that encourages workers to ask questions and find answers from a database, and includes a polling application. Additionally, the new version of Yammer will allow users to assign a task resulting from conversations and track its completion, and will include the ability to tag content with topics, making it easier to find conversations by subject.

Yammer's been a great success - microsharing within the enterprise having risen much faster than shared workspaces, internal blogging or wikis. So it's interesting to see how this will play out. As the article hints - it would be a great buy for an organization like Google which is seeking to both enter the social space as well as gain traction within the enterprise with Google Apps. On the other hand it would be a great buy for large traditional enterprise tech firms who want to add a social layer to focus on the Organization 2.0

Personally I think the uptake of the new features will happen gradually. Micro-sharing is faster and takes much less effort than other functionalities. What Yammer has done in its current avatar is ease acceptability of social tools within the organizations that are using it. I'd love to know how the Quora like Q&A app as well the ideas app gains traction in the organizations that use Yammer 2.0

Training and Learning using Social Technologies

There's an interesting question that is posted to Julika Barrett who works for Dell Corporation in the newly formed service division as part of an account team that supports health-care clients in its information technology (IT) needs. As a learning and development specialist, she supports the IT associates with skills development, career management, and process improvement. She has held roles designing training, implementing training programs, instructing, coordinating projects, and providing consultation in documentation and training.

Read the full interview here
Who Else Wants to Take Training & Development to “The Next Level” Like Dell?

Q. What are your thoughts on “online learning communities,” especially when proposed as a solution?

The potential is very high to capitalize on social networking. Online learning communities formalize the informal information pipeline that goes on in an organization but I have only seen aspects of these communities in action.

For example, I have seen in companies that employees share ideas and solutions to problems by blogging, Skyping, and texting. Online training, through synchronous web meetings, provided opportunities for networking, problem-solving, and collaboration that transfer back to the workplace.

I still would like to see a plan with a vision of what an organization can become using social networking. These communication tools take time to use and for people to gain confidence in connecting. In a reactive environment, social networking becomes more of a distraction than a positive strategy.
Q. Change is definitely a process. What should corporate trainers expect in the 21st century?

Eventually, we go back to basics—what do we need to do and what do we need to know in order to make it happen. We, as learning professionals, need to develop 360-degree vision, to understand what has passed in an organization, what an organization strives to be, and what we need to do now to get there. We can have the best tools and technology possible, but their use still depend upon solid instructional design principles, learning theory, and performance management. The trick is to be so fluent in our knowledge and performance that we can provide structured design quickly to keep pace with the speed in which organizations operate.

Benefits of Social Sharing in Organizations 2.0

I believe that behaviour in the consumer space that people are exhibiting on Facebook and Twitter and other social technologies will be replicated within organizations soon. In the US - tools like Yammer, Socialtext, Socialcast and others are already making this possible.

However people always ask "why should people share within the enterprise?". Here's an interesting post I came across that shows how this behaviour is a generational change and how people using these technologies think differently about work and the hows and whys of work.

Andrew McAfee blogs on the HBR site on How Millennials' Sharing Habits Can Benefit Organizations

Matt Gallivan, a senior research analyst for NPR, who said "Sharing is not 'the new black,' it is the new normal. There are too many benefits to living with a certain degree of openness for Digital Natives to 'grow out of it.' Job opportunities, new personal connections, professional collaboration, learning from others' experiences, etc., are all very powerful benefits to engaging openly with others online, and this is something that Gen Y understands intuitively."

Older generations of knowledge worker, including mine, don't share this intuition. We basically work in private, or in small groups of close colleagues, and only share our output — papers, reports, plans, presentations, analyses, and so on — once we consider it done.

Gen Y finds this approach somewhere between quaint and dumb. They inherently follow the advice of blog pioneer Dave Winer to "narrate your work" — to use 2.0 tools like blogs, microblogs, and social networking software to broadcast not only the finished products of knowledge work, but also the work in progress.

Millennials are more likely to talk publicly about the tasks and projects they're working on, the progress they're making, the resources they're finding particularly helpful, and the questions, roadblocks and challenges that come up. This narration becomes part of the digital record of the organization, which means that it becomes searchable, findable, and reference-able.

As this happens, two broad benefits materialize. First, people who narrate their work become helpful to the rest of the organization, because the digital trail they leave makes others more efficient. Second, by airing their questions and challenges work narrators open themselves up to good ideas and helpfulness from others, and so become more efficient themselves.

As Gallivan says, the Facebook generation understands these benefits, while other workers often do not. Older generations are more likely to see work narration as a narcissistic waste of time. Gen Y, meanwhile, knows that narrating their work, when done right, saves time, increases productivity, and knits the organization together more tightly. We should start following their lead and stop reflexively working in private.

We will see norms and behaviours evolve in this space - but it points to one thing specially in the Learning aspect, its more important to know the hows and whys of what people have learnt than the learning itself. That is the key to unlearning - the critical skill in the new generation.

What do you think?

Do you think this will lead to a clash of generational styles of working in the organization?