Information leaks on social networks : that’s not the problem

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : businesses see social networks as possible channels for information leaks caused by negligence. What is right. But their retort, that is mainly technological, does not solve anything because social networks are only one of the many channels that can make risks become true, not the cause of the risk. As a matter of fact the largest social network in the world is the street. If a global approach through awareness and accountability will help to deal with the whole risk, solutions that are being currently implemented are only window-dressing regarding to the many channels information can use to leak. Human issues can’t be solved by technology only and firewalls will never replace trust.

It’s obvious that information leaks is a sensitive point for businesses and the risk of employees being negligent on social networks has to be taken seriously. Hence the need for limiting this risk. Most of time the response relies on technology. That solves a part of the problem but is far from being enough.

As a matter of fact, prohibiting any connection to these sites or filtering outgoing information may limit the risk. But such an approach has weaknesses. It only works on corporate devices. At the moment people use their mobile or connect from home the risk is here gain. Making employees aware of the risks caused by their own behaviors is more useful because, in some ways, tools are only the vehicle behaviors use to make information flow. Adopting this approach helps dealing with some of the consequences but none of the causes.

The largest social network is not Facebook or Twitter but…the world, life, the street. And no technology will prevent anyone to do anything there except accountability. The good side of this approach is that, when it’s successful, it works with any device, anytime, anywhere.

We all have examples to tell. This group of coworkers of Bank xxxxxx having a drink and talking about their employer’s solvency, not being conscious everyone was listening to them. These two executives discussing their secret new corporate strategy at lunch. Everyone around appreciated. This group of employees of YYYYY vacationing together and discussing, around the pool, of lay-off program they were secretly working on. The problem that, even if they were on the middle of the Indian Ocean there were lots of french people in the hotel. One more thing. I would like to thank the sales rep of ZZZZ that were discussing their plan to sign with a customer in the plane….since I was meeting the same client a couple of years later my colleagues and I make the best possible use of it. I also think about all the people that can’t prevent from working in trains or planes, making it easy for anyone to see what’s on their beautiful HD screen.

Of course such things never happen. I’m even sure that in the above mentioned companies, social networks are filtered or blocked. Human issues won’t be solved by technology and firewalls will never replace trust.

 

 

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

No matter your organization is an elephant : it can dance too !

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : What makes a social business project successful ? To what extent question the existing and transform the culture ? Is success possible when top managers are not much concerned ? If we observe three major cases, there’ something obvious : the project was tied to an organizational change wanted by deeply involved CEOs. They become social business projects afterwards because they eventually used some new tools to support a years old approach. The example of IBM in the 90s shows that there are little limits to what’s possible and that arguments that “our culture doesn’t make it possible”, “that won’t work here” or “we’re too big to change” are not relevant.

Whatever the way we consider the problem, there is no example of an enterprise dramatically changing the way it operates without a strong leader deeply attached to a vision of business. Nothing new there since this has been proven right for decades even before words like enterprise 2.0 or social business became trendy.

Successful projects have a couple of things in common : a visionary CEO who is deeply involved, a goal at is not about social business and the courage to challenge the corporate culture. And those who fail ? Top executives that are not concerned and not very involved, projects aiming at implementing a social network and a moto looking like “don’t be rough with people, we’re not ready for that”.

Let’s have a look at a couple of cases.

Alcatel-Lucent. Whoever knew this enterprise 5 or 6 years ago should have been surprised when their project came under the highlights. If there were a place where such a thing could not have worked this should have been Alcatel-Lucent. Yes but…one day came Ben Verwayyen. We all know the story. First an email adress so employees could directly interact with him. Then an internal blog. Then, as his own approach was beginning to influence people in the organization, the need for a social network. All of this because his vision of business is made of words like transparency, accountability and that’s the way that he things a business should be run.

Danone. When a CEO (Antoine Riboud) states, in the early 80s, that “The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” much is said. The rest is about sustaining a strong corporate culture. In th 2000s they started a program called “Networking attitude” to favor interactions, ideas exchange and problem solving. A program that was only about behaviors, management and the human side of the organization at a moment when web 2.0 and social networks did not exist. Technology will come years after and won’t be a break but a way to reinforce the corporate project.

Then IBM. Looking at the success of IBM, not as a vendor selling social business solutions but as a social business itself, is very instructive. But a large part of the lesson is missed if we don’t step back in time to learn from the Louis Gerstner era (1993-2002). I just reread the book he wrote about the time he spent at IBM (he also worked for American Express and Nabisco before), Who said elephants can’t dance. This book is very instructive for the very reason that, at this time, internet was not what it is today…and concepts like social networks or “anything 2.0″  where not even a dream. But, in some ways, Gerstner perfectly set the cornerstones that made social business possible ten years later.

This is a very important lesson for all those who think that “it’s not possible in our company”, “we’re too big to change” or “we don’t have to change…we’re the biggest, we’re the best”.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Books I read, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If it matters measure it. If it’s new build a new frame of reference.

January 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary : When the world and the economy are transforming, the existing frames of references on which be base our thinking and decision making become obsolete. To adapat to their current and future context, organizations not only should have the vision of what they want to become but also implement it in their employees’ day do day work. Not superposing two opposite models in order to let change happen without daring changing the existing but replacing the one with the other. It only makes sense when employees are provided with tools and indicators that favor and reward actions that are aligned with the new model and not with the old one anymore. It also helps to measure the impact of change and measure how far they’ve been. That seldom happens in enterprise 2.0 projects because of a lack of reflexion on new frames of references. Fortunately, examples coming from other fields shows that when one really want to do things well and deep, change is possible and measurable.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Danone to talk about their social responsibility program, what made me learn a lot, believe it nor not, in terms of organizational transformation and had many things in common with enterprises 2.0 approaches. How possible is that ? Read what’s coming in the following lines.

Like many enterprises, Danone has understood that the environmental question will be key in its business. It’s already a cultural fact that is not new at all (remember that Antoine Riboud, Danone’s former CEO, used to say that the responsibility of the enterprise did not end at the facilities’ doors…30 years ago) and new an economic fact. There are many chances that, in a near future, carbon will be monetized, so managing it efficiently leads to a competitive advantage.

How did danone do ? First by stating it in its corporate values and project, long before it becomes a trendy topic. Anyone who has a few contacts with Danone knows that concepts such as double project ou triple bottom line are known by everyone and are a share concern. Such an approach need to be embodied and the discourse has to be turned into action. So Danone established a “Nature VP” so the environmental concern has currency at the very top of the organization. But, since Danone is a business and that there is an economic reality behind all that, that people need to change the way they understand and feel what added value means in such a context, they even established a Nature CFO. The logic is obvious : we’re entering a world when things that used to be secondary are becomming essential. So they need  to be integrated into the value calculation system so what was a cost in the previous vision becomes an investment and an opportunity in 2012.

So they invented “green Capex”, some very concretes things to implement to translate this vision and awareness into business. Looking for ROI on a 3 or 5 years scale to take time to learn and not give up too early. But there were no relevant indicators to do that. So they could have come to the conclusion that it was not measurable, what could have lead to the consequence we all know : the project would have become a dead body because no one would have been able to see its impact or one’s personal contribution through one’s decisions, not even the interest of changing one’s thinking and decision making model.

So Danone worked on designing new models allowing to measure the impact of their business in terms of carbon and its short and long term financial consequences. They experimented it on the field, tried to make the most of new data, made an empirical job then tried to model. The organization tried to measure what matters, since it matters. That’s as simple as that.

It also helped to make something else possible : reducing the carbon footprint is now a part of executive’s evaluation and reward system. So everyone, at his own level, in his business unit, in his field is concerned.

But they still were trying to make sense of it for more and more employees. It means that anyone should understand his own role, impact, contribution to the project. It also means that, when facing two possible choices, one making sense in the old paradigm and the other making sense in the new one, they people should make the right one without fearing to put their performance at risk and sacrifice their bonuses.

So Danone co-innovated with SAP to integrate this new model in their business tools, in their production management system. It was all about putting the new model at work in employees’ day to day lives, in the flow of work and avoid schizophrenia. No contradiction here anymore : there’s a single model, a single vision and not an ideal one set on the top of an old operation model that has nothing in common. All indicators, measurement tools, tools supporting processes takes it into account. SAP brought the technology and Danone its knowledge and IP.

Anything in common with enterprise 2.0 projects ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t tell my mum I’m a community manager, she believes I play piano in a brothel

January 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

Summary : There’s a tendency to call “community manager” any person that communicates online for an enterprise…even it the activity has nothing to do with communities. This excessive use of a buzzword seems to start worrying applicants that want more precisions on the nature of the work and how it articulates with “real” operations. A search for sense and perennial positioning that also comes with the fear of seeing this title being a millstone around their neck, now and in the future

NB : the title of this post is inspired by a book written by the advertising leader Jacques Seguela at the time the advertizing industry was in its early days and did not look very credible. The title was ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising, she believes I play piano in a brothel”

In the last months I saw some contacts asking me things about the same concern. Enough for me to think that there must be something really important around. Each time the question was quite similar : “I’m about to get a new job, I’m close to the end of the recruitment process and we’re discussing the job description. I don’t know why but I’m very uncomfortable with this community manager thing. What do you think ?”.

The first idea that came to my mind is that they were lucky enough to be discussing with enterprises that were open minded enough to refine the job description and even the job title with the people on the short list regarding to their understanding of the challenges and opportunities. And that’s already a good point.

Now let’s focus on the core issue. It seems that more and more people fear that once the trend will be over, they’ll suffer from the buzzword nature of the community manager job. What makes them be very cautious about what the work is really about and wonder if having such an job mentioned in their CV will have a negative impact once fashion will be over.

The problem with community management is that it’s a position being held by people with very different profiles, from interns to experienced 40/50 years old people. Surprising ? Not at all because the title apply to many possibilities in terms of job description and experience. From the “young guy talking in the micro” to the experienced manager leading a global strategy. If I had a look at what real experts say, we can learn from the Community Roundtable that, in fact we have :

  1. Community specialists
  2. Community managers
  3. Community strategists

Let me add one more specie : customer service professionals who are being called community managers by anyone for the only reason they now operate online. I recently talked with one of them who told be with a bit of irritation. “I’m not a communication person and will never be. I’ve been put a ‘community manager’ sticker on at the time I began to use online tools. But if I’m a CM, the guy answering on the phone or the one solving clients’ problems in our shops is a CM too ! What I see is a dangerous shift toward a job that’s not mine, with goals that may be contradictory to mine. Maybe we have an online community…but what I see is thousands of individual cases to be solved”.

This diversity is poorly understood by enterprises that often think that’s all about the same thing. Not surprising that experienced people now start to make things clearer when they’re being offered such a job.

The people I was talking with were having, in my opinion, a very relevant questioning. In addition to the job (managing what ? A community ? A community strategy) they were also raising questions about the scope and goal.

- scope : will my job be an online only one or will I have to operate offline. If it’s about mobilizing an ecosystem of stakeholder, the online part should be a part of a global program aiming at doing much more than creating and managing communities.

- that leads us to the goal. Communities…but what for ? Communities or stakeholders ? What do we want to do with them ? For what shared value ?

What lead these person to conclude : “in fact I should position my job in a ecosystem, stakeholders and value approach. There are many kind of stakeholders to mobilize, in different ways, for different purposes. Online activities are only a part of the job and some actions will be 100% offline, others 100% online, some will be a mix depending on the target and the need. It the job is confined to online communities we will miss a huge part of the challenge and spend a lot of energy on it without even knowing why. I need to be vigilant on the job description and title. It will even be better than a buzzword title that means both everything and nothing and won’t help my partners and colleagues to understand my mission. It will make me more credible”.

Interesting thoughts on the very nature of professional community managers and their role in a logic that goes beyond fashion.

 

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

 

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do you need a brand strategy on the social web ?

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the presence of brands on the internet is a major concern for businesses entering the social web. But there’s a big difference between thinking and definining oneself as a brand and an ogranization. A brand is the expression of an identity while the organization is rather an action driven approach to customer service. Both should come together but, unfortunately, the social channel is often owned by the people in charge of one of these two approaches at the cost of the other. As recent surveus show, customers, even if they appreciate appearances, often prefer to value the execution of the promise. It’s time for organization approaches to replace brand strategues on the web.

Every time a new platform or service is launched on the web, the first question that comes is “how to make brands exist there.”. From a personal standpoint, as an internaut, I find it exasperating. I don’t want to rub shoulders with a brand or to become “friend” with it, most of all when it corrupts the system. You may retort me that I sometimes interact with brands and appreciate it. In fact I appreciate these interactions as long as it helps me to satisfy one of my needs. According to what I see, the more a business acts like an organization and less as a brand the more it succeeds at satisfying my needs. And, according to reports I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
What is the difference between a brand and an organization ? And what are the deep consequences of the differences between a brand oriented approach and an organization oriented one ?

A brand is a matter of identity. “This is who /what I am, what I embody, my image”. Having a brand strategy is unavoidable when we see how much time we’re spending online and to what extent our online experiences impact our lives and decisions. Brands have to be known, have to let people discover and know them better, deliver a message that’s better understood when carried by conversations instead of declaration. So, having an online brand strategy is vital. But not enough. The post I mentioned above clearly shows that internauts, contrary to received ideas, don’t value neither social conversations with brands nor being part of a brand community. They want concrete and operational outputs.

For instance, let’s consider a clothing business. It can hire a kind of muse that will embody and carry the brand, make people buy its products. But if the product has a poor quality or when it need some cleaning, I not sure that asking the muse will be of any help. Not because the muse won’t want to help, but only because it’s not her job.

Another example. Everybody knows that I appreciate KLM a lot. Of course, they have a very good brand strategy but this is not the reason why I began to watch them and pay attention to what they were doing. It all started because of their effective organization strategy that once turned what could have a nightmare into a nice travel experience. Without excellence in customer service, brand strategy has little value and may even be counterproductive.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Tools connect people. But with what ?

January 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

summary :tomorrow’s enterprise will be connected. And employees too. If they don’t they’ll become obsolete and useless : success, performance and competitiveness relies on connectivity. That’s why businesses have been trying to connect their employees for years. But connect them to what ? To their colleagues ? To information ? Of course. But the most important point has been overlooked : reconnect them to their work. By forgetting people’s challenges, the very reason they were part of the organization and neglecting execution for communities and conversations, businesses lead their social business and enterprise 2.0 projects in dead ends they have to get out of now !

In a very near future, connectivity will be a key factor of competitiveness. That’s obvious because it was ties businesses to a complex environment to feel its changes, its moves to react relevantly. Another point is that, since no one can know everything, everyone need to be able to get in touch with someone who knows to do a better work, solve problems, make decisions.

So the future of the connected organization is discussed a lot but that hides another reality : the connected employee. Of course, there won’t be connected organizations without connected employees. That’s obvious but help us to consider what’s been undertaken by lots of organizations with new eyes. Some tried to be highly connected with their external environment while disconnecting their employees. Others tried to improve their internal connectivityfirst. That was the starting point of many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects : employees need to be connected.

Yes but…connected to what ? If you’re trying to understand why many projects of this kind are still struggling at delivering tangible results, a part of the answers lies there.

- connecting employees with information : yes. It’s been done at two levels : social bookmarking (what is still a minor usage of internal social platforms) and exchanges within communities that is main objective of many projects.

- connecting employees with employees : that’s the role of social networks. But, to work, it needs that people can be identified through their contributions and up to date rich profiles.

That’s working but, in most cases, not very well. Of course there are exceptions but not enough to think that a new era has strated. After the novelty and euphoria phase that can make 80% of employees or more register on the social platforms that hosts these new usages, numbers can quickly decrease and, in the end, only a few percent will be active users and contributors. Not that high regarding to the investment. One of the reasons is obvious : considering the social platform as a bubble disconnected from the rest of the intranet is a first step to failure. The second reason is that even if people are socially addicted (what is not proven at all), even if they are willing to exchange and connect with their peers, employees are not internauts nor the ones they are at home.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tomorrow’s businesses need strong processes and deep automation

January 3, 2012 By 1 Comment

Summary:Tomorrow’s business will give people and their peculiar skills a good deal to increase overall performance. Creativity, problem solving, exception handling…everything that has nothing to do with processes and automation. But if excellence is not reached on these points if will be difficult to develop knowledge work and even to give it time to happen.

When we talk about the future of enterprise, we often mention the need for getting rid of the rigidity of processes, autonomy, processes, making the system (organization and IT) serve people instead of making people serve the system. It need a very scarce resource to work : time. It also need trust and a strict definition of the limits of autonomy, understood by all. Without that, tomorrow’s enterprises won’t last under this form.

I often say that the largest part of employee’s activity is and will be more and more about exceptions handling and problem solving what supposes to have time for creativity, innovation; knowledge and practices exchanges etc.. In fact that’s only half true. That’s true when everything that could be automated has been (some things that could not be automated have been , in fact, automated but that’s not our point today). As long as everything needs no judgement and does not tolerate any exception has been modeled and given to the appropriate tools. This is the one and only condition to make people focus on what they excel at and are much better at than any software. If it’s not met, “essential routines” will require most of their time on tasks where their added value is poor and where they’ll be rather sources of errors.

That said we have to admit that the dawn of social tools in the workplace brought more confusion to things that were not easy to get. Before, it was very common for employees to capture data on many different tools. This the reason why lots of information where not captured or updated because doing so was both boring and time consuming. “Social” brought a new layer of troubles. In addition to capturing data in traditional business tools, employees had to switch to social tools to say “I’m doing this and need some help to solve that problem”, identify the right resources to progress. Reason why most people stick to the basic, well known, lowest common denominator of their work. Today we’re seeing a solution slowly emerging with the integration of social and business tools, the latter being able to send signals into the firsts, not participating into the conversation but becoming conversations starters. Globally speaking, the ability to easily, directly (even automatically) link an object (document, event generated by a business tool) to the conversations that relates to it will be essential.

If the first point misses, time lacks and energy goes (is wasted on ?) essential but repetitive tasks where the human factor has a poor added value. If the second misses, the new social layer will be more a burden than an opportunity.

Going further, we can even add that if these foundations are not perfected and solid, anything that will be added to move toward new organization models will generate more troubles than benefits.

It’s always easier to be agile and mobile when one’s feet are on a solid ground rather than a friable one.

 

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Is reputation a new currency ?

December 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary :reputation is often mentioned as a new currency in models based on exchange, trust and collaboration. It’ logical to some extent but a too easy shortcut if it prevent from thinking about how to remunerate contributions from people who are not looking for recognition but to satisfy more basic needs. Reputation is rather a new raw material that will be used to build new systems than an alternative money.

That’s something we often hear here and there : reputation is the new currency for a world and companies based on collaboration, sharing, networking. Both a liogical and too easy shortcut.

It’s logical because trust is key in emergent collaboration based systems. And reputations contributes a lot to trust. It does not replace trust but can accelerate it. Similarly, systems promoting empowerment and intrapreneurship, making employees become businesses in the business, need a personal branding approach in which reputation plays a big part. That’s also the same outside of the organization because reputation contributes to separate the wheat from the chaff on an internet where every individual can participate and could need to prove his legitimacy. Last, in a connected world, one’s reputation helps to spread ideas and thoughts.

That’s also an easy shortcut because, in a social or community system that need the contribution of lots of people, reward and remuneration approaches to contribution are still poorly understood and defined (and sometimes even taboo). Hence the choice of the easy way : reputation is the reward. As a matter of fact, who does not like to see his work and contribution recognized and his reputation improved. And what’s more it has been proven right by Maslow : this kind of need strands at the top of his famous pyramid. But does something hide behind this sweet image ?

If we want Maslow’s model to be relevant in this case, the people in question are supposed to have climbed up the first steps of the pyramid. It’s easy to say that reputation equals money when it applies to people who have no problems with their basic needs. That’s true for most of the people (and I’m one of them) that talk about this topic, practitioners, consultants etc.. But when it comes to embark all kind of employees in the system, one need to address people whose opinion is seldom asked, don’t blog or speak at conferences to share their point of view. But that’s the economy of sharing, of donation isn’t it ? Maybe…but it implies people have things to give and to share. And, most of all that they have the means and enough time to do it because that’s not because something is free that it costs nothing. We are not all equal in such situations. As someone recently told me “it’s easier to nicely contribute for free when your job is secured than when you fear to be laid off or don’t know if you’ll be able to pay or rent at the end of the month”. Try to pay your rend with reputation and you’ll measure how wide is the gap.

Being paid with a currency with which you can’t by anything is just like being fobbed off.

Let me also mention the french philosopher François Elie, someone very involved in open source communities and I had the chance to met a couple of week ago. Speaking about communities in a conference he said ; “in communities, people contribute and people get money and rewards for the work done. The problem is that these are not the same people. Community bases systems don’t scale if you only pay people by saying ‘thank you’”.

So, is reputation a new currency ? I don’t think so. It’s rather a raw material that will be used to built new models for HR, collaboration etc… and provided that it won’t be use to avoid tackling trust related issue to focus on a personal marketing approach that’s often lead astray and becomes unhealthy and counter-productive.

 

 

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Internal communication and the available brain time syndrom

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the recent evolution of intranets make internal communication face many new challenges. First they have to broadcast their message on a information system that’s more and more split and where their own media will be less and less a mandatory landpage, capture users’ attention while everything (and even the interest of the enterprise) make the latter focus on more productive activities. Internal communication will have to reinvent its cornerstones on concepts like “sense”, “contexte”, “split media” and “attention”. Successful communication will be the one that will find its place in a decentralized and contextualized digital universe.

 

The purpose of internal communication is to deliver the corporate message, to inform employees. The purpose of employees is to do their job. One of the enterprise and managers’s biggest concern is to prevent key resources wasting, people’s time and attention being one of them.

The way internal communication, employees, managers and the enterprise try to meet their goals, each of them paying very little attention to the others’ concers is quite funny to observe from an external standpoint. It’s more worrying from an internal standpoint.

Communication communicates, everywhere it can, where it has the more chances to meet their audience. So, logically, on the intranet when internal communicants makes anything to be sure their message is well placed, occupy most of the screen. A little bit like brands fighting to have to best place to display their ads in cities.

Messages are hierarchized in a way that’s logical for any headquarters person : the most important is the corporate news, then branches news, then business units new etc…

As for them, employees focus on what matters to them. To such and extent that, when an intranet is mainly dedicated to corporate communication, the first thing the do is to close the window that automatically opens when they launch their browser because it’s been used as a mandatory home page. They focus first on what’s related with their word, then their close environment, then what’s happening elsewhere in the organization and, last, the far and neutral corporate message. In short that’s exactly the opposite of the way internal communication is hierarchized. There’s another funny side : when internal communication says something that really matters for a given employee, the employees seldom manage to find the information.

Hence surprises when one have a look at the “transformation rate” of corporate news even if they are pushed on employees’ homepages. Wide broadcasting, mandatory display…and few reading.

Managers can have a different analysis : communication tries to capture employee’s attention, what is resource they try to protect from any distraction that’s not immediately useful and productive.

In the end it seems that the goals of the ones are contradictory with the goals of the others and that the success of needs the failure of the others. But, from a global standpoint, it’s essential to reconcile all parts. Yes, employees should focus on their mission and businesses need to deliver their message and news because it improves engagement, understanding, situational awareness etc… But is it possible to find a balance ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts