You’re a major consumer goods company that delivers products designed for the fashion elite, constantly at the leading edge.

You’re a global technology company, that attracts the brightest minds to deliver the most innovative solutions.

You’re a worldwide non-profit that attracts those who are looking to make the world a better place, drawing on great people to solve world hunger.

Yet in all four cases, your intranet is out-of-date, poorly designed, hard to use, under-resourced and non-functional.

What message does this send to your staff?

It says: “we’re a powerful organisation that cares about customers, products and the world, but not about our staff.” In this modern age, is this something that you can afford?

[July article by James Robertson, read the full article]

There was also palpable enthusiasm for social tools amongst participants at the Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) conference in Stockholm today. This is feeling like the “topic of the moment” for intranet and comms teams.

There’s no doubt that social tools provide a powerful new way of connecting people with people in organisations. These tools are increasingly effective, easy to use, cheap and transformative. But there’s some serious over-enthusiasm and naïvety about the impact of these tools.

When asked about why social tools are such a focus, comms and intranet teams say:

“We want to help people connect with other people.”

“We want to break through silos to connect the organisation together.”

“We want to enable two-way communication with staff.”

“We want to create a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture.”

“We want to reshape the way the organisation works together, from the bottom up.”

These are all interesting goals, but in response I have to say:

You can’t change corporate culture using social tools.

Simply rolling out new tools, particularly as part of a pilot, will not magically change the organisation and its culture. There are also growing concerns that collaboration tools will simply reinforce existing silos, rather than break through them.

While there is a clear need and opportunity for social tools, we must:

• set clear, business-focused, objectives for social tools
• recognise where social tools will, and won’t, work
• use tools to support, rather than drive, culture change
• focus on gaining adoption
• be realistic about the cultural impact of social tools

If you have an organisation where business areas don’t work with each other, don’t think that this will be solved by deploying social tools. If there is a business goal of transforming the organisation, by all means support this with the deployment (and adoption) of social tools.

But let’s never forget that connecting people is about people, not the tools we deploy.

Other less tangible but no less important benefits include increased safety, lower absenteeism, reduced fraud and pilfering, increased customer experience and loyalty, and more innovation.

Engagement surveys and intranets

Billions of dollars are spent assessing employee engagement annually with many intranet initiatives being driven by the need to improve low results received on these questionnaires.

However, without understanding the clear linkages between the engagement levers and what the intranet offers, the results can be very hit and miss.

Dr Peter Langford and his team at Voice Project (www.voiceproject.com.au) have conducted rigorous research on employee engagement which underpins the surveys they use. This research provides a basis for explaining what engagement is, describing the levers that drive engagement within organisations and exploring how the intranet can be used to work alongside other initiatives to help enhance employee engagement.

[December article by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

Our over-arching statement has always been this:

Staff will use the intranet if it’s useful.

The challenge is to uncover and understand staff needs, and to design the intranet to meet them.

While the intranet must be functional and valuable, there is another softer side to the site. It can present a human face to staff, do much to build and reinforce corporate culture, as well as underpinning broad organisational change.

Presenting a human face

In addition to being useful, intranets can and should be enjoyable to use. Maybe even fun. At a minimum, they should always present a ‘human face’ to staff, one that is engaging and encouraging.

The article Starting to define the intranet brand outlines a simple technique for capturing the overall ‘brand’ of the intranet, beyond look-and-feel.

[CMb 2009-20, read the full article]

“Collaboration” will fail at your firm, because of lack of freedom. Eg, you two are hand-slapped for going to talk to other people at head office (talk!). Collaborative activity doesn’t flourish in tightly controlled environments / dictatorships.

3. Select and discover pilots

Pilots are the instrument of experimentation, of trying new things within safe boundaries. Choose what new things you want to try and how to go about it, so you find out what works and how to scale it across the organization. However the most valuable experiments are probably already happening, so you need to discover and nurture them.

Consider the following scenario: an organisation introduces collaboration by piloting a discussion forum. The topic chosen is ‘staff employment conditions’. There are few guidelines, no mediation and anonymous posts are allowed. It starts off encouragingly, but soon descends into a storm of personal attacks, with strong opinions expressed about an emotive topic. The organisation wonders what happened.

A review discovers that while the organisation is not large, it is made up of self-sufficient business units in several locations with little interaction between the teams. The organisational structure, the management style, and the physical layout of individual offices, do not encourage cross-organisational communications.

As a result, staff are unaware of who is in the organisation, what functions are performed, or what skills exist. Effectively the discussion forum has been an online exchange between strangers.

The existence of collaborative tools does not automatically imply that people will collaborate or collaborate effectively.

A culture of communication

It is a simple concept, but if people are not already communicating with each other, then there is little chance they will feel comfortable enough to share their knowledge online.

[CM Briefing 2009-03 by Amanda Broomhall, read the full article]