What do employees need to turn 2.0 ?

The paradox of enterprise 2.0 is that even when businesses manage to go on their fear of the unknown and decide to embrace this new paradigm, they are often not followed by their employees even if they bring a solution to their problems with solutions that are supposed to make their work easier.

Everybody now understands that employees need mor than tools and communication campaigns to adopt new practices and behaviors even if that would be beneficial to them. Even saying “do whatever you want, we trust you” doesn’t work”.

Here’s a little checklist of customer’s expectations.

• What are the expected outcomes ? What am I supposed to “produce” on these tools, and what is expected from the groups / communities I’m a part of.

• What are the limits to my responsability ? To what extent am I autonomous, beyond which point should I ask for permission or refrain from doing anything.

• Is it a part of the job I’m paid to do ? Will my manager or any person paying me with his budget consider my activity as wasted time ? Will they blame me for participating or reward me ?

• What’s my exposure ? How to control it ? What kind of information am I supposed to share ? Facts or opinions that engage me ? Can I set my own limit ? Who can access what ? And what will the information I share be used for ?

• Show me first and then I’ll follow.

• Before asking to me to any new thing, show me how all that can help me to do what I’m already doing today, how it makes it simpler and easier.

• Don’t scatter my attention. I already have so much to do so don’t distract me with pointless information and issues that have no added value according to my objectives and daily tasks.

• Don’t break my “personal workflow”. I don’t have time to play with 3 applications, aggregate information, forward it, copy/past. In this case I’ll focus on the tool that is not the best but that can do a little bit of anything, even not in an efficient way, without having to switch between several apps. (email ?)

• Don’t add but remove. For 50 years, the response to any new issue was a new layer of solution (tools, rules, practices), These layers have been piling up for decades and we’ve reached such a point that they slow me down and are sometimes contradictory the one with the other. Instead of adding new layers, remove those that are actual burdens, doesn’t make any sense anymore and are useless.

• Don’t bring me into one more experiment. I’m not a guinea-pig and the time I’m investing penalizes me in my real work and is even bad for my image and reputiation. I’m ready to learn, to explore, provided it won’t be shut down in 6 months and it will help me in my day-to-day word.

• How information will be used ? Reused ? It will help me to know what to share.

• Teach me, show me how to articulate the structured and unstructured part of my work, the formal and informal ones. And I hope tools take this need for articulation into account because I don’t want to play the human connector.

• Teach me how to seamlessly integrate it in my daily work and how to translate it into a simple, scripte, reassuring routine I’ll follow without thinking about it.

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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