Conversation and Being Liked at Work

Last week the popular enterprise microblogging service Yammer, released a new set of features under the name 'Leaderboards'.  With the new 'Leaderboards' capability, organizations that have deployed Yammer to support internal sharing and collaboration will now be able to gain additional insights into what conversations and topics are generating the most activity and interest, which employees are the most engaged on the Yammer platform, and how other employees value and respond to topics and each other.

Some of the metrics that the new feature will provide include:

• Most Liked Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most ‘Likes’
• Most Replied to Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most replies
• Members with the Most Posts: Top 10 users with the most public messages posted
• Most Replied to Threads: Top 10 threads with the most replies
• Threads with the Most Participants: Top ten threads with the most participants

A screenshot of the 'Leaderboards' feature is below:

The Leaderboard offers a small, but important step for organizations that have deployed Yammer as an internal messaging and conversation platform. Having a better view into which employees are most active and 'liked', which employees consistently and effectively engage the community with topics and updates that generate interest and dialogue, and what general subjects and conversations drive the most overall response rates across the entire organization, can provide organizational knowledge and insights into the pulse of the enterprise; and the kind of understanding the is often difficult to discern, particularly in large or dispersed organizations.

Looking at active and popular network participants and assessing what topics and conversation threads generate the most activity are valuable inputs that can lead to potential improvements in organizational design, workforce planning and deployment, and even with creation and execution of business strategies.

What users generate the most engagement? Perhaps their roles in the organization may need to be reviewed and enhanced?  Or more likely, the enterprise many need to make sure adequate succession plans exist for these drivers of network engagement?

What topics launch the most conversation?  It could be that senior management needs to do a better job articulating their messaging around these topics, or perhaps more attention needs to be paid to a particular popular or recurring theme.

It used to be that managers and leaders could try and sort out what was really going on at work by hanging out in the lunch room, or the watercooler, or the local bar at Happy Hour. Today though, many of the other informal and serendipitous meetings are taking place virtually, in places like Instant Messaging chats and increasingly, enterprise collaboration networks like Yammer.

Still for many managers and leaders, the value of a platform like Yammer may be hard to quantify, but with the development of tools like the Leaderboard, the 'sell' to these decision makers will continue to get easier. Knowing which employees are most engaged, who is capturing the interest of the most of their colleagues, and what conversations and topics are most resonant with the workforce is the kind of insight that can be incredibly difficult for management to gain.

Even if they spend a lot of time hanging around the lunch room and watercooler.

Of course cynics might say that once employees catch on the the metrics that drive the Leaderboard that they will try to find ways to artificially 'game' the system, to raise their profile and position, but in an online platform, with 100% visibility and attribution of comments and activity, it seems like any reasonably healthy community would sniff that out and put a stop to it rather quickly.

Do you use Yammer, or another similar internal microblogging too?  

Would this kind of insight into network activity help your organization?

More on Collaboration (I know, you're bored too)

Last week on the HR Happy Hour show, Jon Ingham from consultancy Social Advantage, and Matt Wilkinson from Enterprise Collaboration Technology vendor Socialcast joined us on the show to talk about HR and Collaboration, and more specifically the approach to and importance of technology in organizational initiatives to enhance and improve collaboration, innovation, co-creation, and likely several other important sounding words ending in '-tion'.

It was an interesting and informative show, but while looking back on some of the comments in the #HRHappyHour Twitter backchannel, and then upon reading this post today from Laurie Ruettimann on The Cynical Girl blog I think that perhaps we did not really do a good enough job making the case (as our guests certainly believe), that not only is enterprise collaboration fast becoming a critical concern and initiative for many organizations today, but that HR is uniquely positioned to be the key leader and driver in the organization for these projects.  I know that on the Happy Hour show the core audience are not tech geeks, and that doing shows too focused on specific technologies will unleash the snarky comments on the backchannel faster than dropping the 'seat at the table' reference.  But since I believe strongly in the importance and potential of these technologies, I am going to try to give the HR professional three compelling (I hope) reasons you should care about these technologies (while trying not to talk about technology).  

Failing that, I will revert to the 'Because I said so' line of reasoning.

Reason 1 - Twenty Years of Change

The last major change in organizational collaboration technology was the introduction of individual email accounts and widespread access in the early 1990's.  Since then, for the vast majority of mature enterprises, email remains the dominant tool used for almost all types of workplace collaboration.  And it is an awesome tool, the first and perhaps only 'killer app'.  Despite tremendous (and recent) advances in email capability by public and free email providers (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo), the email application and service that most knowledge workers utilize at work isn't tremendously different or superior to the 1992 model.  

Almost everything else about work, the organization, the nature of the global economy, the demands of the worker, the modern attitudes, technical ability, and expectations of the newest entrants to workforce has changed.  The need to adapt, to create and organize, to source information and expertise from the extended enterprise, and to develop new ideas and innovations faster than ever before are all real organizational challenges, and increasingly the anchor of email as the primary or sole collaboration tool to meet these challenges is seemingly more and more unsustainable.

How much stuff have you kept around since 1992? Besides your plumber.  Good plumbers are like gold.

Reason 2 - It is happening already, probably without you

Whether it is rogue departments that seek out new and better IT solutions that are currently available and are 'officially' sanctioned, or leveraging external and public networking technologies liked LinkedIn, the shift inside enterprises towards more collaborative and open technologies is begun.  And for a time, and perhaps for just a bit longer, the classic IT and HR reactionary response from the 'block/control/write a policy' playbook will no longer serve the interests of most organizations. In fact, CIO's at large companies seem to already have started to come to this conclusion, witness the growth of the IT-dominated Enterprise 2.0 conferences and the recent observations from industry leader Andrew McAfee about E2.0 beginning to go mainstream.

Reason 3 - Get that seat, place, position...  Dang it - help deliver results to the C-suite

In her piece Laurie notes, correctly I think, that the 'business leaders hate HR Technology more than HR itself'. Which is probably accurate when HR Technology is viewed through a lens of compliance, administration, and policy enforcement.  If all HR Technology delivers is accurate Payroll results every two weeks and on-time affirmative action reporting (while both necessary), then I don't blame the C-suite from getting bored by the whole thing.  Time and attendance systems simply aren't sexy.

But these new enterprise collaboration technologies are much more about creativity than compliance, and designed to better connect people with ideas, content, and more importantly, each other.  These tools are meant to support the generation of new ideas, to allow the entire organization to participate across locations and time zones, and to enable the organization to more rapidly find, surface, and validate innovative ideas and the people best positioned to act upon these ideas.  The reason these technologies are exciting are mainly because they are not traditional HR Technologies at all. So when you as an HR leader decide to pitch or promote these tools, you are 'selling' the ability to deliver results, to address business issues, and to squeeze more out of less.  

Ok, I am done - there's three reasons why this stuff matters to HR.  

And if I did not manage to convince you, well then -  these tools matter Because I said so!

Tonight - HR and Collaboration

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour show the topic is ‘HR and Collaboration’.

You can listen starting at 8PM ET from the show page, using the widget player below,  or by calling in on the listener line - 646-378-1086.

Extending Your Reach

Yesterday enterprise collaboration vendor Socialcast announced availability of a new set of tools and capabilities called 'Reach', that enable easy integration of the Socialcast activity stream and microblogging platform to traditional enterprise systems like CRM, ERP, Sharepoint; and even newer tools such as wikis and blogs.

To appreciate why this is important let's take a step back to look at enterprise microblogging in general, and Socialcast in particular. Internal organizational microblogging, often referred to as 'Twitter for the Enterprise', has been around for some time.  Several vendors offer varied solutions in the space, the most notable and popular is probably Yammer, a service that has also recently improved and expanded its offerings.  Enterprise micoblogging has always offered important benefits and features for organizations, especially when compared to Twitter. 

Chief among these features are the ability to create secure, company-only networks, support for internal group formation, better functionality for sharing files and images, and less restriction (or no restriction at all), on the length of status updates beyond the Twitter-standard 140 characters. While the internal microblogging solutions have evolved, and continued to improve, they have to this point been somewhat limited in their attractiveness in many organizations due to their stand-alone deployment and their position as yet another enterprise system to be used, maintained, and monitored.  

Much like Twitter sort of 'exists' on its own, mostly separate from other applications and software services that people use for their work, enterprise microblogging has stood separate as well, and for many use cases or valuable forms of collaboration between and among company colleagues this has proven if not an absolute barrier, certainly as a constraint to more widespread organizational deployment.

Activity stream embedded on a wiki page

Socialcast has been in the enterprise collaboration space for a few years, and their microblogging and  'enterprise activity stream' solution is flexible (allowing integration of content from external networks like Twitter or RSS feeds), and easy to use and deploy.  Deployment options both on-premise or hosted make the solution more broadly appealing and able to meet varying IT organizations requirements.

The newest addition to the solution, Socialcast Reach,  takes an important step in addressing the isolation issue, by providing the capability to embed and extend the collaboration platform and activity stream directly to the classic enterprise applications where employees carry out their work.  By simply inserting some simply code, the Socialcast collaboration platform is instantly embedded inside the ERP, CRM, or the company wiki.  So when a sales rep has a question about price or product availability when updating a customer account in the CRM, they can ask a question in an embedded Socialcast collaboration widget, to which others in the company can respond from wherever they happen to be, in the CRM as well, in the Socialcast application, on their mobile device, or anywhere else that the platform has been extended.

In addition to the familiar microblogging activity stream paradigm, Reach also offers support for two other types of collaborative engagement. 'Discussions' -  focused discussions around key resources within your business that allows employees to engage in specific conversations related to customers, projects and operational metrics; and 'Recommendations' -  a way for a user to “recommend” via a button on any resource in the enterprise, and for that recommendation to be inserted into the Socialcast platform, surfacing that person’s recommendation for the enterprise.

If you have only experienced microblogging via Twitter, or even if you have tried an enterprise microblogging solution, this ability to weave and embed the collaboration backbone more deeply within the accepted and expected existing systems and workflows in the organization may be the most important development yet in actually driving increased levels of user adoption and accruing value from more systemic collaboration. 

For companies considering an enterprise microblogging or collaboration platform, Reach gives you another reason to check out Socialcast.  Driving richer and deeper collaboration inside the enterprise and ingrained as part of the organization's work practices is likely an important issue and concern in most enterprises today.  Talking about increased collaboration won't make it so, but deploying isolated tools and technologies might not either, and with 'Reach' Socialcast has created what might be the first collaboration solution that really understands that issue. 

The Conference Room Paradox

It’s 10:00 AM on a Tuesday and you are standing huddled in the hallway with six or seven of your colleagues all awkwardly clutching notepads, files, coffee (and not the take out cups with protective plastic lids, regular office type mugs with funny sayings like ‘Number 1 Boss’ or ‘Wake me up when it’sflickr - faungg Friday’ on them), and maybe a laptop to take notes. Your standing weekly status/update/check-in/whatever meeting with the extended group is booked for 10, and the ‘big’ conference room, the only one relatively close to your cube farm that will comfortably fit everyone has been put on ‘reserve’ for this date and time for the next 179 weeks.

As usual there is another group meeting in the conference room before you, and once again their meeting has not broken up by their allotted ending time. So you do the right thing, you and your group give them a minute or two to wrap-up, no need to get all uppity about an odd few minutes.

It is now 10:03 and the conference room door is still closed, someone puts an ear up to the door and can hear some animated and excited (but muted from behind the closed door) conversations going on inside. Could be something innovative and exciting and important going on in there. Or it could be just another work team making casual small talk as their meeting winds up.  Hard to say, but you decide it doesn’t matter anyway, it is now 10:04 and your time is now being wasted, so you give the token quick ‘double-knock’ as a split-second warning and immediately open the door and state (politely but firmly), ‘Hi - I believe we have the room at 10:00’.

The folks inside do the right thing, quickly gather up their assortment of belongings (remarkably similar to all the stuff your team is carrying), and beat a hasty retreat to the door, pairs of participants sharing final bits of information, giving directions, making plans, etc.  You can’t help but hear most of what they are saying as your teams intermingle during the ‘file out/file in’ process.  It does sound like they were working on some interesting ideas on the new product line you have heard some rumors about.  Definitely way more interesting (and probably important) than another weekly meeting reviewing the same list of action items/tasks/statuses or whatever that you have to endure for the next 55 minutes.

But none of that really matters when availability of the ‘big’ conference room is at stake.  It is kind of a mark of status and importance to have a standing claim to a few hours a week of time using that prized resource.  Good thing when your assistant booked the room for you (for the next 179 weeks), the scheduling program didn’t ask you for a justification or an explanation of exactly how you manage to harness and direct insight, creativity, and innovation into exact one-hour increments on the same day every week.

You know you have all been there before. The big conference room paradox. Organizations drag everyone into a central location called ‘the office’, but then parcel out space in small increments of cubes and private offices, and there is hardly any space to actually interact and communicate and collaborate. The ‘big’ conference room becomes highly prized as a gathering place, and slots are tightly distributed by the hour, and snatched up without much thought to importance or value to the enterprise.

Dang, I just heard a knock, I can’t finish this post with an epic conclusion since my hour is up, I guess I’ll have to hold that thought until next Tuesday at 10:00, (or 10:04).