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.

Trust in Social Networks

I recently read a paper that studied a major organization's use of collaboration technologies (wikis, internal forums, and blogs) indicated the most commonly stated barrier to employee participation in knowledge sharing using online platforms is the fear that one's contributions were not going to be seen as relevant, important, or accurate.

If we accept that these fears are true barriers, then we must try and examine what causes them, and adopt strategies to mitigate them.

Why might an employee 'fear' contributing to an internal collaboration platform, or social network? Some potential reasons:

1. Confusion - I don't know what the heck to post on here anyway

2. Uncertainty - I'm not sure if this is even right information

3. Lack of confidence - I don't think anyone would care about this

4. Doubt - Can I even find important information here?

5. Pride - I really should know this answer myself, I can't ask such a dumb question

It seems that a lack of trust is the underlying cause of these issues.  But there are really two kinds of trust that factor in here, and it is important to understand the difference.Flickr - Salty Grease

One - I trust that you know what you are talking about

When I read your posts, comments, and answers to submitted questions, I have belief in your expertise and authority.  If I rely on your information to help make important decisions, I won't get burned.

Two - I trust that you won't make me look foolish for asking questions or posting information that is incorrect

Communities need a balance of those providing information with those seeking information. Seeking information in online collaboration platforms frequently involves explicit posting of questions, or leaving comments asking for more information or clarification on posted content. In an open, company-wide system this can certainly be intimidating for many employees that would prefer the 'protection' of phone calls or e-mails when seeking information.

Both types of trust have to be in place in an organization for a collaboration platform to take hold, grow, and thrive as an imortant resource.

So what steps can an organization take to help instill this trust, and enable participation in light of the barriers described above?

1. Confusion - I don't know what the heck to post on here anyway

Set some clear guidelines about what kinds of content are meant to be posted on the platform. Enlist some early 'power users' or champions to help seed content of the type and format that (at least initially) the platform is intended for.  Be very firm and clear about what content the organization deems inappropriate for the platform.

2. Uncertainty - I'm not sure if this is even right information

Encourage employees to share first, and question themselves seconds.  Let the community members themselves help guide newer, or less confident employees.  An environment where members comment, modify, and otherwise help to shape content is the key. Give employees the freedom to contribute 'part' of the answer, and not feel pressure to know everything on  given topic.

3. Lack of confidence - I don't think anyone would care about this

This is where a strong feedback loop inside the community is important. When it becomes a standard practice for others to comment on, enhance, and promote or rate contributions, you can start to mitigate the feeling of 'why would anyone care what I post'.

4. Doubt - Can I even find important information here?

Employees will only consult the community if they have success in finding either the information they seek directly, or a way to easily locate and connect with other members of the community likely to possess the needed expertise to help solve their issues.

5. Pride - I really should know this answer myself, I can't ask such a dumb question

Here is where Trust in the organization is really critical. Employees have to feel that content contributions can be made and questions asked in a 'safe' environment. That is not to say that incorrect or irrelevant information should be allowed to remain intact, but that criticism or comments be made in a positive and respectful manner. It is similar to a student that is reluctant to ask a question of the instructor in front of the entire class, but instead approaches the instructor privately, after class to ask the question.  Sure, the student may feel more comfortable, but the rest of the students do not get the benefit of both the question and the answer.  Better still, one of the other students may have had the answer for her in the first place.

In conclusion, organizations considering adopting tools for collaboration, or evaluating why their current projects are stagnant, need to take a very close look at these barriers to participation to see if they are present.  Selecting and deploying a tool is part of the solution, but creating and supporting an open, trusting environment to ensure its success is another matter entirely.

What methods might an organization use to encourage open participation in online employee communities?

Tomoye Community Software in the Class

For the current edition of the HR Technology class we were fortunate enough to use the Tomoye Ecco Community platform as a basis for many class activities, and all class discussions.

The Tomoye Community platform is a basis for sharing and collaborating on content (documents, images, video), asking and answering questions, and finding and accessing organization expertise. Content can can be organized by main topic, then further identified and described with user-defined tags. Users can comment on or ask a question about any piece of content in the Community.

In class, we took advantage of these capabilities in several ways:

Organization

The Course content was organized into Topics, one per week, and all readings, assignments, discussion questions were placed in the Week's Topic, as well as being tagged as a 'reading', 'project', etc. This way students could easily see all content in a chronological manner, or by type (by doing an easy tag search, or using the tag cloud).  This made content more accessible and consumable for students, and did not necessarily 'force' them to access content in only one prescribed manner.

Content

All class assigned readings were uploaded to the community as 'Documnents', but beyond simply loading a file, I was able to introduce the reading, set some context, and even offer some of my observations on the content. Sometimes I asked a specific question or two, and other times simply asked the students to share their comments and observations about the reading.  Here again the ability to post comments or ask questions directly tied to the content item was very valuable, and a great feature for the class.

I also used the Documents feature to load images, usually diagrams or charts taken from presentation material from the 'in-person' version of the class.  This worked well, as the ability to set context and describe the material in the image was key to ensure better student understanding.

Discussions

Each week there was at least one 'required' class discussion topic that I entered as a 'Question' in that

week's topic.

Students were asked to provide their views on the question, and to comment and discuss their answers with each other.  Here the class utilized one of the powerful features of Tomoye, the ability to mark an answer as 'Helpful'. This is a simple, yet effective mechanism for bubbling good content to the top, and for building the reputation of community members.  In a short class, community ratings and recommended members have fairly limited utility, as really more time needs to pass and more discussions created for this feature to be really powerful.

Overall Thoughts

First, the Tomoye Community was vastly superior to the course management system that is available through my school in the areas of content management, discussions, and organization and locating information. While all these are possible in a traditional CMS, the features of Tomoye like tagging, commenting, asking questions, and rating are a major improvement and enhancement.  The visibility in comments and discussions to all student contributions is also far superior in Tomoye to the 'classic' threaded forum style in the CMS.

Certainly Tomoye, or any other community not designed for course management can't completely replace functions like online grading, online live quizzing, and perhaps even private exchanges between and individual student and the instructor. 

But going forward I see huge potential for using a platform like Tomoye not just for an individual course as I did this quarter, but as an overall community platform for the entire program. I can envision a community that is set up for all enrolled students, faculty, staff, and even alumni.  There could be separate content areas or topics for each individual course containing overview material, sample course content, reviews from students, faculty bios, and areas where prospective, current, and past students could ask questions and have discussions. Additionally, topics can be created for overview information, coming events, and perhaps job opportunities posted by alumni or friends of the program.  What I am thinking about is sort of a hybrid between traditional 'alumni' networks and an active student network.

To close, we had a great experience using Tomoye in class, and many thanks to the great folks at Tomoye, especially Eric Sauve and Kathleen Brault, I am truly appreciative of the fantastic support in this initiative.