Social Software in the Workplace

This week analyst firm Gartner published its 'Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace',  a review and categorization of 35 different solutions that in one form or another support internal employee 'teaming, communities, and networking'. Flickr - dsevilla

It is an expensive piece of research, but if vendor Jive Software is making copies available via its site here, (registration with Jive required).

I don't want to get into the never-ending debate on whether these analyst reports are biased or not, or even if the Magic Quadrant model is all that helpful, but I point out this research to illustrate for the HR community (the primary readers of this blog), how diverse and crowded the market for internal social software has become.

If you believe that organizations can achieve significant competitive advantage by more effective internal communication, collaboration, and teamwork, then you as an HR pro and leader will almost certainly be called upon to either participate in either a software selection project, lead an internal deployment of collaboration technology, or devise ways to design and implement performance, recognition, and compensation programs that reflect the impact of collaborative tools in the organization.

There are really several keys for the HR leader in approaching social software:

One - Identification of the business issues that can be solved by more frequent, effective, and sustainable collaboration and expertise and information discovery.

Issues centered on Research and Development and Marketing collaboration may require a different set of tools than ones between Account Management and Customer Support.  A large company in numerous countries and locations typically faces much different challenges than a smaller, single location enterprise. The point is that your organization's challenges are unique, and blanket approaches, 'Let's get everyone on Yammer', may not really solve any specific business problem.

Two - Assessment and selection of the best technologies that will support the solutions identified in step one.

The 35 solutions listed in the Gartner report, while all broadly defined in the 'social software' category, have unique feature sets, characteristics, capabilities, costs, and in some cases deployment options.  HR leaders will have to invest the time to develop a better understanding of market segment that they likely may not have much familiarity with.  Fortunately many of the solutions have free trials, or other low-cost options for targeted pilot projects.

Three - Design and implementation of the technology solution accompanied by change management, communication, training, etc.

Definitely part of this step is the development of new performance management metrics and possibly compensation plans to support the project's goals. 

Four - Evaluation of the solution and the implementation.

Are employees adopting the new collaborative technology and the associated changes in process? Do metrics like content creation, participation, activity, etc where you want? And most importantly, is the solution meeting the desired business outcomes?  Many organization are absolutely littered with rarely updated wikis, or internal blogs with only sporadic posts and comments. The causes of failure vary from the wrong technology being chosen, a company culture that does not embrace the new collaborative process, or perhaps a lack of adequate change management and communication to the employees as to the benefits of the new technology and process. 

Five - Refinement of the technology itself, or the process based on the evaluation in step four.

Does the organization need some additional or enhanced system capabilities? Have the employees taken the system to places you had not considered, but they find valuable? Unlike traditional enterprise software, where business processes are usually clearly defined and employees simply follow user instructions, with these collaboration tools employees will almost always adopt ways of working and using the tools that you as the HR leader and implementer had not considered.  Hopefully, your initial projects were successful, and now you can plan ways to expand the footprint of the solution to more employees in the organization.

For HR, the opportunity to help drive superior business performance by designing and implementing strategies to increase and reward effective collaboration has never been more apparent. Understanding the related technologies that support these initiatives is a critical component of the process.

In the next few weeks I will highlight some of the specific solutions reviewed in the Gartner report, particularly some of the newer ones, to try and provide some assistance in your learning process.

What do you think, do you feel as an HR leader prepared to drive internal social software adoption?

Google Wave and HR

In 2004 (which in internet time is about 49 years ago), in a Harvard Business Review article titled Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?, the authors studied productivity and the effectiveness of team-based decision making in global, distributed teams.

One of the recommendations that came from the study was obvious, that modern, collaborative technologies must be utilized to support and enhance communication and collaboration for the purposes of problem-solving.  And way back in 2004, one of the specific findings was that e-mail should be used sparingly, if at all, as it has severe limitations as a collaborative technology. Additionally, the 'closed' nature of e-mail does not foster trust in distributed teams, particularly ones where the members are expected to collaborate for the first time and do not have a history or shared experiences to draw from.

So e-mail is generally lambasted as a collaboration tool. But for many project teams and organizations it remains the primary technology that supports team-based work.  Everyone has e-mail, everyone knows how to use it, and the barriers to adoption are at this point zero.

Other tools have emerged in the last few years that can in some form replace and improve upon e-mail, (wikis, group blogs, IM, Twitter, Yammer, among others), and have enjoyed varying levels of success in supporting distributed collaboration. But since the widespead adoption of e-mail as the so-called 'killer app', no single technology for collaboration has come close to supplanting e-mail as the main tool for employees and organizations to work together and share information, and to (gasp) foster innovation. Truly, since e-mail was created over thirty years ago, the corporate world has been waiting for the next 'killer app' for collaboration.

Perhaps that will be the lasting legacy of Google Wave.  Wave has been described as 'e-mail if it were invented today'. Wave, at least at first glance, seems to address and improve upon many of the shortcomings of e-mail, while certainly offering the promise of capability far superior to e-mail.  This video does an excellent job of explaining Wave in the context of e-mail 'replacement'.

Where e-mail tends to be 'private' between sender and receiver, Wave is much more open; anyone can be invited to see and participate in a Wave. Folks invited late to the conversation can use the 'replay' function to see just how the conversation developed and to get more of a flavor for the twists and turns in a problem solving process. The contents of the Wave itself are much more enduring, accessible, and portable than long e-mail message and response chains.  For all those reasons, and probably many more, Wave offers an exciting alternative to traditional e-mail collaboration. There have already been scores of posts explaining the various features of Wave, so I won't try to re-create that again here.

But I think another, perhaps more interesting question for HR and Talent professionals than whether or not Wave is 'better' than e-mail, is this one: What is the role of HR in the assessment and evaluation of tools that can increase employee collaboration, raise productivity, and foster innovation? 

When an interesting and potentially groundbreaking technology is created that has such potential in the workplace should the HR organization, the ones that are meant to be the leaders in helping to find and assess talent and to position that talent to ensure organizational success, be on the front lines of these technology discussions and tests? 

I think the answer is yes.

These evaluations and determinations of what technologies to try and implement in the workplace, particularly ones that may reach deeply in to the organization have to be influenced by HR's unique position as the 'talent' experts.

These decisions are too important to cede to the IT department.

Employee Networking at Nokia

The HR Technology Conference is now two weeks past, but I had one more conference related note to write, about the presentation on the internal use of Web 2.0 technologies at Nokia.

The presentation given by Matthew Hanwell - Senior Director of Organizational Development and Change, covered the history of Nokia's engagement with Web 2.0 technologies for internal purposes, the current state of these technologies inside Nokia, and I think most importantly, offered some excellent insights and recommendations on how an organization might introduce these technologies in their environments.

Some of the tools that Nokia has deployed internally:

The Jazz Cafe - Essentially an anonymous forum, where employees could ask and respond to questions, carry on conversations, and at times, vent.  This was Nokia's first foray into Web 2.0 technology for internal use, and was extremely popular with the employees.  In time, other platforms and technologies have been implemented and grown in popularity, the Jazz Cafe forum still maintains a dedicated used base.

Ask HR - another anonymous forum, similar in nature to the Jazz Cafe, but dedicated to HR topics.  Employees can ask questions and get feedback from corporate HR ,and it also provided a great way for HR to check the pulse of the organization based on the nature and tone of the questions.

Blog Hub - Employees at Nokia are encouraged to blog, and the company aggregates the blogs into a 'hub' that serves as a kind of company wide repository and barometer of the organization.  Company management can monitor what blogs are popular, which ones generated the most comments, and what the overall trends are indicating about the mindset of the employees.

Video Hub - Similar to the Blog Hub, the Video Hub aggregates video content that is created by Nokia employees.  The interesting aspect of the video hub is that Nokia has trained over 200 employees worldwide in the mechanics of short video creation.  Skills like shooting, editing, and narrating these videos to produce effective and interesting content.  Notably, the video creators are charged with finding and documenting examples of employees living the Nokia values and using video to communicate these ideas across the organization.

News Hub - The Nokia News Hub is much like a classic corporate intranet news service, but with the added capability of employee comments, ratings, and discussion. It takes what could be a fairly standard and dull news feed and enhances the content and the experience.

There were several interesting take-aways from the session.  Most notably:

Inappropriate postings - Matthew reported that Nokia had never had to delete any postings on any of the various platforms that were deemed inappropriate.  The organization's members did effectively manage the policing of content.  Comments and ratings are extremely effective mechanisms whereby the community determines and enforces the company norms.  Matthew also pointed out the importance of allowing employees the freedom to use profile pictures of their choosing, rather than require everyone to use the more formal, 'official' company ID photo.

The employees are already talking - Nokia became aware of an employee that was maintaining what became a very popular personal blog where he wrote about the company and its products in sometimes not so flattering ways. Partially from this realization Nokia started down the path of creating a space for employees to blog and participate in online conversations in a platform where the company did not control the conversation so much as support it and learn from it.  Particularly in a large organization, there are almost certainly blogs, Facebook groups, and other online conversations happening among employees in 'unofficial' forums.  Better from the company perspective to host and more effectively monitor, respond, and support these activities.

Continuous innovation - Nokia started down the path of internal community building and support with the Jazz Cafe platform, and eventually migrated into other tools and technologies. While the Jazz Cafe was quite successful, Nokia did not stop there, but rather built on that foundation of success to expand into blogs and videos.  Technologies and the ways that employees will want to embrace new technologies to interact, discover, and collaborate are constantly evolving. Companies should understand and embrace this, and not get wed to a specific approach or technology as being the 'final' solution.

It really was an excellent session that left the audience with many solid ideas and concepts to build from.  While most organizations are not as large, or have the resources of a Nokia, the approaches and strategies could be applied to any size organization really, and at certainly fairly low costs.

Bottom line, the employees want to connect, share, and socialize, give them an opportunity to do all of these, and you will likely reap the benefits.

Google Sidewiki for HR

Since so many new tools and technologies emerge, seemingly every day, it can be hard for HR Professionals to keep up with all the new developments.  A question I get asked often is which of these flashy new tools might have real utility in the workplace, and which might better be considered as consumer oriented solutions.

Sometimes a new tool or enhancement to an existing tool is created that on the surface does not have obvious workforce related implications, but with some thought, and perhaps creativity, can be leveraged in an effective way.

One of these tools is the Google Sidewiki.  Introduced about two weeks ago, Sidewiki allows anyone that installs the latest version of Google Toolbar, the ability to add comments to any web page.

Once installed, Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can view, add, or comment on entries made about that web page.

This video from Google gives a quick overview of the tool:

Thinking about the potential HR and workforce uses of an 'always on' commenting and feedback tool for any web page:

Candidate communication - Carry on discussions, offer links to more resources, and provide a bit more of a 'personal' experience to your corporate jobs pages. If nothing else, monitor the Sidewiki entries that may already be on your jobs pages.  It is not too far a reach to think that a disgruntled candidate may start using the Sidewiki capability to indicate any frustration or displeasure they have with the application process, or your company in general. If HR is the new marketing, then part of the duty is to keep an eye on what is being said about the brand.

Employee feedback - Chances are your HR and Benefits related information sits on your employee intranet, changes only about once per year, and is read only on an 'have-to' basis by your employees. Sidewiki can be a mechanism to inject a bit of interaction and interest to normally dull pages and content. If you operate in the kind of environment where getting changes made to your HR intranet requires forms filled out in triplicate and taking the IT manager to lunch, then leveraging a free, and no-IT necessary tool like Sidewiki may make sense.

Integration from 'static' web sites to social networks - Sidewiki can become a component of your integrated strategy in communicating your messages in social networks.  Sidewiki entries can be easily shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger blogs, and help you achieve some consistency and reach in your message. In fact, as soon as this post is published, I will add a Sidewiki entry to the page and share it out on Twitter. If you see the Tweet and link to the entry, please let me know what you think of the tool and the process of sharing information in that manner.

Impetus to add social elements to HR/Recruiting sites - The aspect of Sidewiki that HR and Communications departments have to understand, is that it in 'on' whether you want it to be or not.  Even if your 'Working Here' page does not have a forum, integrated chat room, or even a simply 'contact us' e-mail address, candidates, current employees, past employees, heck anyone can add Sidewiki entries to your page. Since Sidewiki entries are largely out of your control (Google decides what is offensive and what entries are the most relevant, not you), you may want to finally join the cool kids and incorporate more and better mechanisms to engage employees and candidates that you can control somewhat.

To try out Google Sidewiki go to google.com/sidewiki to load the new Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer that contains the new Sidewiki button.

Can you see any other, perhaps more meaningful uses of Sidewiki for HR?

Work and Networks

Since many organizations have adopted or are considering adopting technologies to facilitate internal employee social networking, naturally research is beginning to surface as to the success of these internal networking projects, and that is also aimed at understanding the enablers and barriers in the technology adoption.

This week I came across an excellent study titled 'Motivations for Social Networking at Work' (PDF link) from IBM Research that discusses the internal IBM social network called Beehive. Thousands of IBM employees participate in the network that is meant to facilitate connection, sharing of interests, and very importantly in a large organization, expanding one's network beyond the immediate work group to colleagues that were previously 'invisible'.Flickr - e.phelt

The IBM Research group undertook an extensive study of participation and usage patterns to better understand the true impact of Beehive in the company, and while there are many interesting findings (I really recommend reading the entire study), I thought it very interesting to focus on a key question; Why do employees share information on the network?

The research revealed three main motivations for employees to participate in the social network that they termed, Caring, Climbing, and Campaigning.

Caring - Connecting with co-workers on a personal level was found to be the most commonly cited benefit to participating in the network.  Particularly in a large, global, distributed organization like IBM, where the opportunity for face-to-face contact with many colleagues is limited, this 'caring' element was critical. Connecting on a more personal level helps engenders affinity, which in turn leads to an increase in collaborative interactions.

Climbing - The researchers used the term 'climbing' to describe individual's motivation to participate in the network to further their career development and aspirations to 'climb' the corporate ladder. By active participation in specific technical topics, people could be seen as 'thought leaders' and could potentially leverage that position to land better assignments, more high-profile projects, and further their careers. In addition, similar to external social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn, simply making connections and building out one's network was seen as a benefit, and in fact necessary to long-term career growth.  In a large company it can be easy to get 'lost', but by actively participating and connecting in the internal social network some employees felt that this was a way to make a name for themselves.

Campaigning - Gathering support for projects and ideas, driving traffic to personal profiles, and project web pages was termed 'Campaigning' by the researchers.  Employees interested in using the social network for this purpose emphasized the ability to get their ideas more visibility with senior managers as an important factor and a major motivator to participate in Beehive. Most notably, the ability to connect with a wide range of influencers and potential supporters outside of the traditional, hierarchical structures was seen as an essential element of Beehive. Users could build coalitions of support for their ideas and projects in ways frankly impossible in the 'old' manner.

What does this all mean to organizations that are considering launching similar projects to give their internal networking projects the best chance for success?

Make it personal - The internal network can't be all business, all the time.  People (most anyway) want to share some personal information with their colleagues. The ability to connect personally has consistently been shown to be an important aspect of ongoing and productive workplace collaboration. Let folks post their favorite about their favorite sports teams, swap recipes, and upload personal profile pictures.  Don't feel like every post, comment, or contribution has to have the 'official' stamp of approval.

Individual value - Employees will only continue to participate and contribute if they see a direct personal and individual benefit. Whether it is easier access to information and expertise to help them solve their problems, or a way to build their reputations as leaders.  Employees will give of themselves and of their knowledge, but they have to see the benefits back to them as well.  Make sure that you build ways for employees to see how participation will truly help them in their current jobs, as well as in their career goals.

The Big Boys have to play - Many technology projects stall, or even fail due to lack of executive support.  Internal social networking projects are no different.  But in addition to the vague concept of 'support', these projects may also require active participation.  When employees see executives and directors as active participants and contributors on the network it can have a dramatic effect on overall enthusiasm and participation.  Just like the company holiday party where everyone wants a little face time with the boss, connecting with leaders and executives on the network can be a really important driver of the overall success of the project.

Definitely take a look at the entire piece from IBM Research, there are lots of excellent insights as to the motivations behind internal network participation.  We are getting past the point of wondering about the right technology to choose for these projects, and arriving at the much harder place of figuring how to make them work.

I would love to hear from you on what motivates or curtails participation in your organization's communities?