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.

Care to share?

In thinking on the conditions necessary for a vibrant and valuable online knowledge sharing platform or enterprise social network, it seems that the following three components all need to exist for sustainable, meaningful, and reproducible success:

One - Contributors

People have to want to contribute, and they have to be given all the needed time, resourFlickr- clappstarces, technical training necessary to that end.  Some of the top barriers to individual team members from contributing have to be assessed, and strategies implemented to better enable contribution.

Some of the most common barriers are technical ('I do not understand how this software works'), cultural ('Why would I want to share this information with anyone else?'), and fear-based, ('I am not comfortable posting content for the entire company to see').

Two - Consumers

Two - People have to be willing to ask the questions, usually in a public manner.  This is very different than the way they typically have sought information in the past, a face-to-face discussion,  a private phone call, or a personal email.  Publicly posting a question on a company forum or wiki page potentially exposes the employee to embarrassment, and some studies have suggested that the desire to avoid looking uninformed or incompetent to be a powerful inhibitor of both asking questions as well as providing content.

But clearly if there are not enough 'seekers' of knowledge and information in the community, the platform becomes more a stagnant content repository and less an active community.  The simple asking of questions should generate helpful answers, and once people have seen that the community members do indeed provide

Three - Comments (and ratings)

People have to be willing to rate and evaluate contributions, and to have their own contributions also evaluated.  Great content needs a way to get 'surfaced'.  Users must have the ability to provide comments, vote up or down, and give ratings to the content that is contributed by the other members of the community.  The best content then becomes easier to find and those contributors get recognized by the community as experts, and sources of insight.

When any of these are missing

Think about what happens in absence of any of these requirements.  Obviously without a significant number of employees participating in generating content and sharing their expertise, the community will stagnate quickly, people seeking information and answer will quickly give up, and the entire project will be dispatched to the dustbin of IT or HR failures.

If not enough employees go to the community to seek answers, then contributors will quickly lose interest and enthusiasm for creating content, and eventually the community will simply house some basic, static type information, and not much else.  The process of users asking questions of the community serves two purposes. One, to get the user the anwser he or she needs to their issue, and two, to serve to generate more discussion and collaboration that often leads users to actually create new sources of knowledge.

Lastly, if consumers and contributors are not comfortable or honest about evaluating content on the community, then as the volume of contributions grows, it becomes difficult for information seekers to find the 'right' answers, the 'best' contributions, and the 'experts' in the community. Not all contributions and contributors provide equal value to the overall community. The community becomes a much more effective tool when the best content and expert members can be easily identified.

In some future posts I will go into some detail on how some of the barriers and enablers for all three areas describes above.  It is important for organizations to think about these three requirements as they consider and deploy software for community building and collaboration.

Shareflow - A new tool for collaboration

So by now unless you have been under a rock for the last two months you have heard about Google Wave, the upcoming tool from Google that promises to radically change the way people collaborate by merging or mashing up content (web pages, images, documents, social networking, etc.).

But Google Wave is several months away from launch, and if you are anxious to get a feel for a Wave-like experience, perhaps you should give Shareflow a try.

What is it?

Shareflow is a tool for collecting updates from team members and organizing them in a live stream, called a 'Flow' that similar to a Twitter stream or a Facebook page. Short updates, links, or attached files most typically sent via email are the types of updates that will be captured in a Flow.

These Flows can be shared to unlimited participants by using a simple 'Invite' link, and once the new user follows the extremely simple registration process they can get straight to collaborating on the Flow.

Also, since offering an alternative to email collaboration is a prime use case of Shareflow, each flow has a unique email address that Flow participants can use to forward or copy emails right in to the Flow.

What's so cool about it?

But where the tool shows its strength, and earns is comparisons with Wave, is when multiple participants in the Flow are collaborating in real-time. Keeping the flow open and 'live' so to speak lets you share information and comments with the other members of the flow in a neat, seamless manner.

Folks can scroll down the Flow to see how information or concepts were developed.  While it does not offer the dynamic 'replay' capability that is promised in Google Wave, this ability to collect and make available the history of a stream is far superior to a typical email centric work process.

The embedded Google Maps capability is really neat, simply type in an address, an the Flow auto-generates a Google Map on the spot.  Additionally, Sharefow provides RSS feeds of each flow, enabling easy subscription to flow changes and additions in a feed reader and sends an optional daily e-mail digest to Flow participants. Finally, in a really cool feature, Shareflow enables drag and drop from your computer right into the Flow, simply highlight some content with your mouse, and drag it into the Flow and it automatically creates a new 'item' in the Flow.

Who can use this

I see a few obvious use cases for Shareflow; a group of students collaborating on a research project could set up a Flow for all members to share articles, links, and other content as part of the data gathering process.  People trying to organize or plan an event could leverage the platform in this manner as well. Since the Flow 'owner' can invite anyone to participate in the flow, project teams can easily collaborate with customers, prospects, or contractors on projects, without having to grant access to all of their flows to external users. Even an individual gathering ideas for a blog post or article could easily set up a flow to capture notes, ideas, etc in a really easy, lightweight manner. Really any time a give and take, or a simple exchange of ideas and comments needs to happen, a Flow might be a great solution.

How do I get started?

Go to www.getshareflow.com and register. Shareflow offers a free plan that allows 5 active flows and up to 25MB of storage, and from there you can upgrade to paid plans ranging from $20-$80 monthly that both increase the number of flows you can create and upgrade the file storage limits.

I encourage you to give Shareflow a try, if nothing else to get yourself just a taste of what working with Google Wave might be like in the future.

Note : Thanks to Ben Eubanks from the UpstartHR blog who helped me do some testing and provided some good feedback on Shareflow.

Measurement and ROI

I read an excellent article earlier in the week on the Chief Learning Officer site on the inability of the traditional definition of ROI to adequately assess the importance and value to the organization of its employee's networks and the value that is derived from these internal and external network interactions, and by extension the technologies and processes that support these interactions.

The essential point of the article was that these network benefits are intangible in nature, do not 'fit' the classic ROI model (that was developed to understand how tangible activities like buying a new factory, or upgrading an assembly line) of measurement.  It really is a riff on the 'what is the ROI of e-mail' argument that is often used when folks are attempting to justify time and expenditure on new tools and processes designed to increase workforce collaboration.Flickr - Darren Hester

Can the organization really accurately estimate the ROI of 'increased network activity'? Does it even make sense to try?

Unlike the new industrial machine, that is built to precise specifications for productivity, output, and operating costs, it is just about impossible to predict how new technologies and processes for collaboration will be embraced inside the organization.  You may be able to apply typical benchmarks on participation rates and utilization statistics, but I have to believe its just about impossible to intelligently make an argument to senior management that a specific 'return' is likely to be generated, at least prior to the introduction of these tools.

In many ways organizations that embrace these projects, and the new ways of communicating, collaborating, and working that they introduce have to take somewhat of a leap of faith that there will be sufficient 'return' on the investment (which for all but the largest organizations is chiefly employee's time, the technologies that are most frequently utilized tend to be low cost, sometimes even free). It is very easy for management to constantly drive the focus back to the traditional 'ROI' measure, and it gives many leaders a convenient 'out' from having to address and show true skill and even courage. 

But just like communication and collaboration advances like voice mail, fax, e-mail, and personal and network computing all moved from experiments to critical business infrastructure mostly without any idea of traditional ROI, so it will be for social networking and collaboration technologies. The smart and leading organizations have already embraced this concept, and I do not think it long before these technologies also become essential components of the modern organization.