According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by McKinsey, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,” Over the last few years the external facing groups of companies have embraced (enthusiastically or in some cases- gingerly) social networks and online communities to connect with external stakeholders. Marketing, Customer Service and PR groups in organizations have leveraged it to build an army of fans and advocates.
However, many feel that getting an organization ready internally should be the first step to being a true "social business". Social can scale only if employees are engaged and connected to each other and external stakeholders.
However, the reality in most organizations is that the budget of the external facing groups is much higher. Social there also shows more immediate benefits and benchmarking is easy (however can get misleading)
So if there is budget available and executive sponsorship then an organization should focus on getting internally ready and externally focused at the same time. However for the vast majority of organizations the "social competencies" would be learned by folks in marketing, sales, PR, customer support and then travel to the other parts of the organization.
This is not to advise HR and other people in organizations not to focus on social - far from it. But to recognize that once top management understands the value of social media they would expect that other groups then leverage the tools for their business ends.
However there are differences. Externally social media campaigns can be done again and again to get across to more and more customers/fans. However when launching a social initiative internally, it would need to be successful in a far smaller group and would need to be designed to succeed.
Often you'll hear Social Business (or Enterprise 2.0) enthusiasts say - like we said in the days of KM - "The key to success is people, process and technology"
And then followed by the statement - "Success is dependent 80/90 percent on people"
I believe that "people" issues have a whole lot of other issues that get hidden behind that word that companies might miss. I have mentioned "culture" in the title of the post which is itself like "people" a composite of many other things.
Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.
Employee engagement is impacted by three factors:
The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's engagement level is unlikely to go up.
The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.
Organizational culture
Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts faster. However if any of the above three factors cause disengagement, it's unlikely that the employee would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue" technologies is still early stage.
Factors that can help drive adoption of social technologies by employees
Vision : Leaders and employees need to know why social technologies are being deployed and how do they link to the existing vision of the company.
Role Modeling: Leaders need to exemplify the sharing and collaboration behavior on social tools that they expect employees to display.
Rewards and Recognition: Social tools have to be in the "flow of work" - but traditional reward systems that do not recognize and reward new behaviors would be a hindrance to widespread adoption.
Linkage with goals: The team focusing on implementation needs to learn with each and every group in the organization to map how social technologies can help them achieve their goals - in a faster and better way. Without articulating that, the support of crucial group leaders and middle managers would be a pipedream.
Finding and empowering employee advocates: Data shows that according to various studies that in most large workplaces the majority of the employees are not engaged or disengaged. Expecting them to adopt new tools without being clear of future value is going to be difficult at best. Organizations must map the actively engaged employees who are active creators and sharers of content and showcase how the platforms have helped them achieve their goals.
Organizational values: These are the big ways in which shape the behavior of employees. Is dissent encouraged? What happens when people make mistakes? Can leaders be questioned and criticised openly? How do they respond to such questions? These are the "norms of behavior" which operate on the ground. Answers to such questions determine whether social, openness and transparency would thrive in the organization.
Education and Training: Even though social tools seem to be intuitive to use – but the purpose and how of using would need to be communicated
Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.
While companies come to terms with employee usage of social media and HR departments start working on “regulating” social media usage and come up with “policies” – I think they are missing one key point – leveraging social tools to make HR itself a social activity.
In a certain way, HR is ripe for social disruption. It impacts external perception (employer branding) and internal employee engagement unlike any other part of the organization save the CEO
Let’s start with policies themselves. Using a social tool which leverages crowdsourcing ideas from employees can help HR in co-creating processes and policies – and raising acceptability when they are finally rolled out. Dell’s EmployeeStorm is a great example by which employees give ideas on everything in the company.
Recruitment – Since it’s an external facing part of HR the Recruiting teams have been quick to leverage social media to “Broadcast” vacancies and several applications. However the next level would be actively creating and nurturing communities of practice shaped around skills where hiring managers can gauge level of skills of people and also develop them
Learning: Social technology can make learning more of a continuous process than the 2-3 day event it currently is. 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. Marcia Conner’s book “The New Social Learning” shows how various firms are using tools to augment employee training.
Employee communication is often the most ignored aspect of HR initiatives without too much thought or resources being dedicated to it. HR people often forget that communication is a two way process. In my view it is critically important to listen to what employees are saying, and that is an aspect that is usually not done in organizations on a regular basis, apart from an annual or semi annual satisfaction surveys. Communication is the bedrock on which the success of change initiatives depend.
More and more listening to employees. I foresee large organizations large organizations will soon start analyzing data on which employees are thought leaders, experts and influential amongst the workforce (like marketing does for external customers) and try and build them as employee advocates.
Recognition : Companies like Rypple, Globoforce have started the concept of social peer recognition and it can be a powerful factor to excite employees than traditional reward and recognition.
Knowledge Sharing: Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal social networks can capture employees work activity as social intranets connect deeper into business applications – and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as a enterprise version of Quora, the popular Q&A site.
As more and more younger workforce enter organizations, their expectations shaped by consumer social applications like facebook, twitter and blogging, they would want access to similar tools within the workforce
The next step would be mobile. For example many internal networks are already available as a mobile apps. This would be a key aspect for organizations with a large sales force who are distributed and need constant communication.
Communication would lead to collaboration – as more and more employees connect and communicate with each other, they would change work processes itself, making things work faster better and changing processes. Organizations have to continue being open and continue the trusting processes earlier.
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"
The skills needed for HR people to become savvy socially
To manage online communities – HR people would need to become community managers. Community managers are online facilitators who understand how people connect and share online and understand what kind of discussions and content gets people to open up and share.
Community management is a subset of roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/HR), technologist and social anthropologist.
The focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help members develop strong ties.
Communities and Learning
Talent communities are where people go to connect with fellow professionals and learn. Hence they are more “communities of practice” than anything else.
Talent communities are places one goes to find experts and also to build their own personal career brand.
Companies must engage in talent communities by letting their internal experts connect with and build their own networks.
The best Talent Community Facilitator would be an expert in the roles – not necessarily a recruiter.
The Talent community is a place to discuss, solve other's problems, share war stories and visions of the future, to look at where the field is headed and what are the skills needed tomorrow.
The focus on jobs/recruiting has to be secondary to the above.
The skills a Talent Community Facilitator would be a combination of facilitation, teaching, guiding, triggering conversations, mapping the skills of community members and of course skills in the domain of the community.
How to Implementation an Internal Social Network
Create a Social Media Policy – This is a comprehensive document that spells out in detail the behavior expected from the people with access to the enterprise collaboration network. This would include the ways they can use access to the software and what kind of information they should share and also the kind of confidential information they should not share. It would also clarify that they have to be civil in their online discussions.
Social Network Needs Survey – Conduct a survey of the employees who to find the following:
The challenges they face in information sharing and accessing expertise
The level of openness in the organization
Their comfort with using social tools to share information and engage with others
The challenges in keeping track of changes to information and version control
The challenges of managing email overload
The familiarity of colleagues who are not in their immediate team
Leadership Readiness Survey – Identify areas in which the leadership can support the internal network. This survey would be administered to the department heads and other leaders identified. The survey would identify the following:
1. The goal what they want from this implementation.
2. The challenges they have in communicating with the employees.
3. Their own readiness to be role models in implementation and usage of the tool.
Survey Finding
The focus would be on the following:
1. The culture and processes that support the enterprise collaboration software
2. The needs of the organization where information sharing will have the immediate and most impact.
3. The strategy and planning for the implementation of the tool.
Implementation and Set-Up
Decide on:
The modules in the tools that need to be activated and which ones do not need to be. Who will have access to which content and module would also need to be decided. Other processes which need to be moved to the tool would also need to be decided and users trained on how to use the social technology to do that process.
2. Ongoing Community cum Engagement Management
Choosing Community Managers and training them on community management is critical to adoption of the internal network. Designing communication plan (like a contest, internal campaign) before launch so that people are excited when it launches and sign up.
Launch internal social network by implementation of the designed Communication plan.
Use social recognition to incentivize desired sharing behaviors
Design a content plan for senior executives to share content like blogs, photos, updates on the enterprise network.
The focus and objectives of these would be: Share company updates
Suggested Content Plan
Company Updates
Client wins
Rewards & Recognition.
Ideas/Suggestion
Press Coverage of leadership/Company
Assess: On going assessment of employee engagement – and driving engagement by triggering conversations on a regular basis.
Outcomes: Survey of users after 6 months to find out if the network is helping them do their work better and faster. Do they:
Know more about colleagues
Know more about their company
Join and engage in internal communities
Other outcomes could be:
1. Metrics like how much time has come down to turn around a document.
2. Tracking projects and assigning tasks are done on the network and not on emails
3. People create interest based communities on their own and share interesting content on them.
4. Employees give each other recognition and therefore raise motivation and engagement.
Implementing external online communities
Before implementing external communities organizations should conduct a “listening exercise” using third party tools (simple to complicated, free to paid all available) and find out if there are any conversations about it and if there are, what is the tonality of that conversation.
Once a listening exercise has been conducted a purpose of external communities has to be articulated, why, which target group, and which channel. After that what content and conversations need to be created and therefore roles assigned to people either internally or to an outsourced partner. An escalation and response plan also needs to be in place, if questions and doubts are articulated.
In conclusion
In conclusion, social media can be used in a variety of ways, and it is not a question of if but when, all companies would need to respond and react to it. The ones that make the initial moves will be the winners over the laggards. HR has a critical role to play and also one of the critical functions that would be impacted by business being social. To be relevant HR needs to build its own capability in social as well as facilitate the change that organizations will go through.
(Originally written in 2013)
