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Social intranets, user adoption and cocktail parties: Tips for dealing with barriers to adoption
“I recently read that intranets (think also online workspaces, online communities etc…) are like cocktail parties. You arrive and case the room to see who else is there and where the action is. You decide pretty quickly whether you’ll be staying awhile, and will be in for a great night. Or, if it’s a quiet affair – missing the big personalities, the ambience and the buzz – you’ll stay for just a drink or two before heading off to find the action elsewhere.
This analogy worked for me. These days you need only look at an intranet homepage to decide if it’s the ‘stick around and enjoy’ version of the cocktail party. Or not. Is there a home page activity stream full of comments from a wide range of people on what matters most? Can the activity stream be personalised, to feature what matters most to you? Are the news articles, event listings, and communities fresh and brimming with comments, ‘likes’ and other signs of strong participation? Is there a people directory, where a quick search will unveil expertise, past projects and current clients of colleagues across the entire organisation?”
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1. With all my existing subscriptions, feeds and activity steams to track, an internal network is just yet another channel to monitor. Too much!
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With the right filters in place, your homepage intranet activity stream should evolve into your best activity stream, providing you with the most relevant and important insights more effectively than ever.
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What’s best – to spot the small fires and act quickly to put them out, or to wait until they gather momentum and become a raging blazing? Let’s hope you have a management team, or are part of a management team, who understand the benefits of giving everyone a voice, listening and providing an authentic, timely response.
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sometimes the greatest benefit comes not from the number or readers, likes or retweets, but from the self-reflection exercise.
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. Rather than reluctant conscription by their boss into a committee, they have chosen to participate out of genuine interest and enthusiasm for the topic. Communities can take on a very different buzz when interested members self-elect participation, and share a sense of responsibility for community success
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How Savvy Marketers Harness Social Data for Product Development
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Online, we often talk about listening to our customers on social channels to help make content decisions in marketing. Moving to a fully integrated marketing picture for enterprise, using social media to compliment traditional market and product development research only makes sense. The very nature of uncontrolled conversations empowers customers to communicate and yield unthought-of insights and new product directions.
However, most companies are still at the basic point of simply making Facebook and Twitter work, much less mastering content for marketing or social web-wide conversations. In fact, last autumn’s Global CMO Study from IBM confirmed that most enterprises just aren’t there yet.”
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- While 82% of CMOs plan to increase social media use during the next three to five years, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% are tracking third-party reviews, and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
- 56% of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel, but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.
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The process can be broken into two main areas: 1) building listening stations and dashboards on relevant topics, and 2) sifting through the data to find actionable intelligence.
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Dell’s work with Ideastorm as a crowdsourced marketing intelligence center is legendary, leading to almost 500 implemented products. Going further, as one of the first social enterprises, Dell’s Social Media Listening & Command Center does more than just seek out Dell conversations to comment on. It also drives relevant reporting throughout the enterprise for strategy and product marketing decisions.
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The first critical step in harnessing larger market intelligence is expanding those listening stations to include more topics to drive strategic and product marketing intelligence.
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Dell actively listens to its competitors’ conversation and how they impact larger macro issues.
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A company needs to learn not only how to listen, but also which data points to act on.
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While social data trends can be fascinating, if they are off-topic, they probably are irrelevant. It’s important not to become distracted by shiny objects and to stay on mission.
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Dell provides a series of daily, weekly, and monthly reports based on its social intelligence. Reports cover specific topical or announcement daily reports looking at the size, sentiment, locations, who was leading the conversations, etc.
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“We find our listening and tracking of information on the web is often a ‘leading indicator’ of a product issue that requires our product teams’ attention, such as the need for a new driver or software fix on some hardware issues that emerge over time
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Moving from tactical social media experiments to social business transformation
“The elephant in the social media room at the moment is that most corporate social media initiatives to date have been tactical experiments. Of those, few have generated meaningful business results. Sure, people have built up Facebook Fans and Twitter followers or they have launched the odd viral video on YouTube. They have claimed these as a success, but in reality these metrics should never be the end goal. “
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A relatively small number of companies have pushed things further and achieved real, transformational results
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Most large enterprise clients I meet acknowledge that the age of social media experimentation is now coming to an end. They want practical advice as to how to move from social media experimentation to social business transformation.
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Business model – the ability to digitize products and distribute them at mass scale or to a micro niche (both enabled by social networks) can radically challenge an existing business model.
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Culture & mindset – one thing that is clear from the failure of many social media experience is that applying an inside-out mindset to social can backfire spectacularly.
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Technology – The pace of change within social technology is so fast that it places huge pressure on the traditional IT operating model.
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Business Operating Model – perhaps the toughest and most under-appreciated challenge of social is to the business-operating model. They way people are incentivized, reporting lines, business objectives, ways of working can be placed under intense pressure by social.
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The Payoffs and Penalties of Holding Meetings
“Although it’s widely recognized that getting the most out of team members’ expertise requires interaction and the coordination of tasks and tools, research that links meetings to organizational performance is scarce. The authors of this paper sought to address that gap by discovering which types of communication and behavior led to productive meetings and which dragged the sessions down. The difference, they said, turns on how well a meeting stays focused on defining problems and their solutions and how well it avoids turning into a gripe session that proves demoralizing.”
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Overall, teams succeeded (and their companies had higher productivity) when they used problem-focused statements during the meetings
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Teams also got high marks when they used proactive communication — when members expressed interest in taking responsibility for the changes ahead or planned concrete actions.
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By contrast, unstructured meetings negatively affected team members’ satisfaction, group productivity, and organizational performance
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To Investigate Culture, Ask the Right Questions
“Be sure to understand the role you’d have, what you could accomplish, and what you’d learn. A strong culture will set people up for success, and you need to be sure that’s in place. In discussing your role, you’ll also get insight into how the place works.
Then, ask questions that point the discussion to how the organization works. General questions — “What’s the culture like?” or “Are people treated well?” — seldom work. I’ve come up with specific sample questions you can ask as you’re interviewing for a job or talking with others who know the institution. They’re grouped into six topic areas. “
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1. Purpose. Seek an institution whose purpose you could find inspiring
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2. Teamwork. Consider how people work together, especially if you prefer to work in a highly collaborative environment or more independently
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3. Colleagues. Who you’ll be working with and how they interact with each other is an important aspect of culture.
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Communication. How people communicate with others — and how they expect you to communicate with them — will affect your day-to-day life
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5. Performance. Before taking a job, you need to know how fair or demanding performance management is and how supervisors will be looking at your work.
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6. Productivity. A good match of process and policy against your preferences will significantly affect your productivity.
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5 Ways Process Is Killing Your Productivity
“In a study of U.S. and European companies, The Boston Consulting Group found that “over the past fifteen years, the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals needed…has increased by anywhere from 50 percent to 350 percent.†What’s more, in the most complicated organizations, “managers spend 40 percent of their time writing reports and 30 percent to 60 percent of it in coordination meetings.†No wonder people feel like they can never get any real work done.”
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Why do we love process so much? It offers a way to measure progress and productivity, which makes people feel more efficient and accountable.
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Smart processes encapsulate bundles of organizational knowledge. And that’s a good thing.
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Empowering with permission–but without action:It’s not empowering when people are given more responsibility, yet must still obtain an unreasonable number of approvals and sign-offs to get anything done
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Leaders focused on process instead of people: In an effort to standardize and sanitize everything we do, nothing at work is personal anymore.
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Overdependence on meetings: “Collaborative†and “inclusive†are corporate buzzwords, but productive teamwork does not require meetings for every single action or decision
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Lack of (clear) vision: Great companies need a grand vision and important goals. Too often, companies have vision or mission statements laden with jargon but devoid of meaning.
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Management acts as judge, not jury: If the purpose of a meeting is to think, create, or build, management has to stop tearing people down when they propose new ideas or question the status quo
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Jobs-to-be-done’s place in a customer-centric organization
“I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted as an internal mantra, but the manifestation of that was…wait for it…sentiment analysis.
It’s a start, right? But is it really a difference-maker?
I’ve written recently about jobs-to-be-done. As in, what customers hire your product to do. Those jobs have a tendency to (i) be hidden from you; and (ii) change over time. Knowing, and acting on, jobs-to-be-done (JTBD acronymized) is probably one of the most customer-centric things a company can do. You’re getting deep into what someone is buying your product for.”
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Customers love talking about their jobs-to-be-done. Seriously. I usually schedule an inital hour to talk about them, and every single company has wanted to continue to the conversation for another hour
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Those are the current factors influencing the product/service development process.
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Market Analysis
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Customer Service Tickets:
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Customer Surveys
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Focus Groups:
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Most are a triangulation to understanding what customers want. Now some are quite useful in a customer-centric sense: usage vectors, customer service tickets, surveys. But they’re also piecemeal.
They represent the hope that you’ve got a bead on customer needs and wants.
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Are Your Employees Drivers or Victims of Process Innovations?
“To stay competitive, organizations need to continually find opportunities for innovation in key processes such as customer service and product development, and adoption of a new process almost always requires the implementation of new information technology. In his 1990 classic HBR article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Michael Hammer argued that IT must drive radical process innovation.
Unfortunately, this creates two problems. First, as Hammer argued, these large investments in new IT systems tend to deliver disappointing results, largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business. That is, they leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up, rather than redesign them from scratch. “
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Second, they don’t take enough advantage of the innovative abilities of their people themselves. Employees often feel victimized rather than energized by the changes.
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The best way to solve both of these problems — and make innovation efforts stick — is not to impose a new process or technology system, but rather have front-line employees drive the change.
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They say their projects are more successful when they follow the sequence of people, then process, then technology. “If you automate too quickly, you don’t find out what the front-line people need,” they explained to me recently. “We stay with manual workflows longer than others. Until you have a clear idea of what people need, you may automate workarounds and waste
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“In the case of a workflow management software project, we bought the tool and told people to use it,” Bogaerts and Schuyer said. “It was technology first, then process, then people, and it didn’t work very well.”
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when workers identify improvements in their jobs, a new computer system appears as an opportunity to eliminate waste and better serve customers, not as a threat.
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Les défis du management au 21ème siècle
“Lorsque je suis passé du statut de développeur d’application logicielle à celui de responsable d’équipe, il s’est passé une chose étrange.
D’un seul coup, mes camarades n’étaient plus des professionnels passionnés par leur sujet qui en parlent et qui en parlent et qui en parlent encore. Ce n’était plus des professionnels qui s’intéressent à leur discipline et qui étudient sans relâche les nouvelles innovations, découvertes ou bonnes pratiques, dans un soucis d’amélioration et d’apprentissage.
Non. Il s’agissait de Managers, comme si le seul intitulé, par je ne sais quel enchantement, leur infusait le savoir nécessaire pour accomplir leur mission”
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“La contribution la plus importante (…) du management au 20ème siècle aura été de multiplier par 50 la production du travailleur manuel dans les industries manufacturières.â€
Je vous laisse deviner comment il en déduit l’objectif du management au 21ème siècle, objectif,
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1. Quelle est la tâche ? La définition même de la tâche à accomplir reste à définir. Il s’agit d’un point important : être capable de définir le problème et la tâche à accomplir pour le résoudre s’avère être une de ces compétences majeures retenues par Andrew McAfee pour les travailleurs du savoir de demain.
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2. La responsabilité de la productivité du travailleur du savoir lui appartient. Il doit se gérer lui même et jouir de l’autonomie.
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3. Son travail exige non seulement un apprentissage continu mais aussi qu’il enseigne aux autres.
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4. L’innovation continue doit faire partie du travail, de la tâche et de la responsabilité du travailleur du savoir.
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5. La productivité du travailleur du savoir n’est pas question de quantité mais de qualité.
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6. Le travailleur du savoir doit être considéré comme un actif et pas comme un coût. Il doit vouloir travailler (un peu à la comme pour une activité bénévole) de préférence à toute autre possibilité qu’il s’offre à lui.
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Le poste de travail collaboratif en mode agile dans l’E2.0
“Le poste de travail collaboratif en mode agile dans l’E2.0 “
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“J’ai eu l’occasion dernièrement de participer à une conférence à l’IAE de Lille, sur le thème « Génération Y : comment dynamiser l’emploi des jeunes dans le Nord pas de Calais ?».
Particularité de cette intervention, c’est que celle ci était organisée par les étudiants en Master 2 GRH.
C’est à dire par et pour les futurs acteurs RH de demain, appartenant aujourd’hui à la génération Y.
Bref : une conférence sur la génération Y, pour la génération Y… mais pas que par la génération Y.
En effet, sur les 5 intervenants, 2 avaient moins de 30 ans, et 1 était là pour témoigner en tant que tel.”
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Or, le saviez vous, en moyenne, un manager de proximité ne passe que 20 à 30% de son temps à manager effectivement. Le reste de son temps se partage entre gestion administrative, compte d’exploitation, opérationnel, reporting.
Et en temps de crise, vu qu’il faut aussi rassurer la hiérarchie, ce reporting se transforme en reporting de reporting : on fait des tableaux pour synthétiser les autres tableaux, ou pour compléter ceux existants.
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On les dit zappeurs et pas impliqué. Du coup, difficile de les responsabiliser sur des sujets en profondeur.
Eux (la génération Y) se disent impliqués, mais managés par des personnes à qui, lorsque elles sont arrivées dans l’entreprise, on a demandé d’appliquer les stratégies d’entreprise sans réfléchir.
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le mode projet se développe de plus en plus, et répond à une volonté d’être acteur du projet.
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Total: quand un Y vient avec un problème, le responsable propose la solution, voir prend en charge la solution.
Ce n’est pas à proprement parler de l’écoute et de l’accompagnement.
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J’ai souvent entendu des DRH, Directeurs, voire Responsables de Formation, demander ce type d’intervention pour leurs managers de proximité.
Et c’est très bien.
J’aime particulièrement cette question qui tombe à ce moment là : « Qu’êtes vous prêt à changer dans votre mode de management pour leur permettre de développer ces nouvelles compétences ? »
« Euhhhhh….. on va les accompagner, poser des objectifs. »
Une entreprise qui demande à ses managers de proximité de changer de comportements sans changer elle même, c’est mettre un emplâtre sur une jambe de bois.
Remarquez, ça ouvre un marché ensuite : celui des risques psychosociaux, lorsqu’on constate qu’ils ont du mal à gérer le stress, ou qu’ils le font redescendre sur leurs salariés.
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Nos futurs RH seront des Y : quels sont les enjeux qui seront les leurs let quels sont leurs atouts pour faire réussir leurs entreprises de demain ?
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Employees First, Customers Second: Why It Really Works in the Market
“When I worked for IBM, the customer was always right. In today’s column I interview Vineet Nayer, CEO of HCL Technologies, one of the largest I.T. outsourcing firms in the world. Vineet argues that how it got to be one of the world’s largest IT firms is by putting employees first and customers second. Sounds radical, but when he explains, it makes sense.”
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The question is “what is the core business of any corporation?†and the answer is to create different shared value for its customers.
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The answer to that question is the business of managers and management should be to enthuse and encourage employees so that they can create a different shared value: enhance employees first and customers second.
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the question is any company that says “customer first†does not know how to deliver that promise. All I am saying is by employees first you can actually deliver your promise of customers first.
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The first thing that you need to do is create an environment of trust where the employees believe what you are saying and are willing to follow you wherever you are going
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The second is you need to make all the enabling functions, H.R., finance, and all these functions, the office of the CEO which all have enormous power with them, accountable to the employees as much as the employees are accountable to them
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The third is to make the management and managers as equally accountable to the employees as the employees are and one of initiatives we took was my 360 Degree is done by 80,000 employees across the world and the results are published on the web
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If Customers Ask for More Choice, Don’t Listen
“In his provocative book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz’s warns that giving consumers more product choices actually lowers their purchase satisfaction. Schwartz reasons that having too many options makes us fear missing out, which causes anxiety, analysis paralysis and regret.”
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consumers are actually overwhelmed, unable to effectively process the flood of product information and choices.
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These are the behaviors of overwhelmed shoppers who struggle to process information and unnecessarily agonize over otherwise trivial purchases. The problem is cognitive overload — the result of excess demands on our cognitive powers that lead to poor decision-making.
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The harder consumers find it to make purchase decisions, the more likely they are to overthink the decision and repeatedly change their minds or give up on the purchase altogether.
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The antidote for overloaded consumers isn’t more options at the store shelf, it’s decision simplicity.
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“Organizations have been trying for years to cultivate employee engagement. Like JetBlue, they persist in their efforts for good reason. One of the most powerful factors that spur customers to become advocates for a company is employees’ positive behavior and attitude. Bain consumer surveys show that the overall experience of dealing with a company often matters much more to customers than price or brand or—in industries with a big service component, such as home insurance and retail banking— even product features alone.”
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One reason for this superior performance is that engaged employees direct their energy toward the right tasks and outcomes
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And when the true source of job satisfaction, happiness and recognition derives from enriching customers’ experiences, good things happen.
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These trailblazers manage to instill an extraordinary sense of purpose and autonomy, as well as strong affiliation with the company and its offerings. They take a systematic approach, focusing on a few key areas.
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It’s intuitive that customer advocacy closely correlates with employee engagement.
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To make progress with the Net Promoter system, it’s critical to build customer feedback into daily operations and then “close the loopâ€
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Such questions helped Belgacom, a telecommunications provider in Belgium, reduce the excessive flow of customer inquiries to its call center. Workshops with employees generated many hypotheses about what prompted the calls, and the company used customer feedback loops to winnow the hypotheses to a handful that merited attention.
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Feedback should not dwell exclusively on problems. Hearing a customer’s descriptions of how an employee’s actions had a positive effect can be a powerful reinforcement of desired behaviors and reminder of the employee’s purpose.
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Performance metrics can be powerful incentives for behavior. Rate employees along metrics of time or cost, and they will respond in kind, even if that degrades the customer experience.
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Masters of engagement change their processes to give employees greater decision-making autonomy because people on the front lines have a great influence over the quality of the customer experience.
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Many companies don’t take the trouble to understand which are their linchpin roles—as distinct from high-performing or high-potential people. These are roles that have a big influence on the customer experience or that provide critical support or coaching to employees who shape the customer’s response.
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The human resources walled city
“HR/HCM is historically the mature ’social’ center of businesses and can either lead digital transformation or be subsumed into a supporting collaborative role”
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Despite the slick exterior image many companies create for themselves, the internal reality is typically a patchwork quilt of technologies layered over the years since the dawn of enterprise computing by a succession of inhabitants to serve specific business needs, both departmentally and across the organization
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Many of these technologies are clearly modeled on outdated work concepts and processes, but the entire organization hangs together around tenured ideas in the collective mind of the organization
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f there is any area that desperately needs a social model, it is HCM. People-centric systems should promote connection, communication, and collaboration. That is the core of the social enterprise.
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Performance management systems are universally hated. Why? Because they create work for every employee in the company, while serving only to meet HR-driven compliance processes. Somewhere along the way in building these systems, we focused the core design on the wrong problem
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Nevertheless if there is an area within businesses which could historically always have been termed ’social’ it is Human Resources/HCM. (interestingly the term ‘human relations‘ predates HR/HCM).
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More broadly ‘Enterprise 2.0′ sprang up to challenge the rigidity of older forms of database powered computing and to more closely map to the way humans interact, and was and is far more about people than tools.
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HR’s limitations are often the weakest foundations of the entire crumbling social business edifice, and ripe for overhaul.
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Old paradigms mapped to modern technologies tend to create information log jams, which are one of the differentiators for quality -or otherwise – of business performance.
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What is happening at an increasing velocity is evolutionary change, and the human resources executive function needs to stay ahead of this wave to become the nucleus – or risk being subsumed into a new wave of chaotic fragmentation across multiple silos.
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The future of customer support: Outsourcing is so last year
“”Unsourcing”, as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers’ problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company’s own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.”
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Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%
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To motivate members to participate, Lithium, a software company that provided TomTom’s and Best Buy’s systems, turns the whole thing into a game.
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Some of the issues frustrate customers most, such as billing errors, have to be dealt with by someone with access to confidential customer data.
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Moreover, Gartner warns that unsuccessful deployments risk a tidal wave of criticism on social networks. It expects customer satisfaction to fall in 70% of organisations shifting support functions over to users in the next two years.
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Le réseau social d’entreprise : nouvelles questions
“En fonction des choix effectués, le RSE sera ou non partiellement ouvert au public, c’est-à -dire à des personnes qui ne sont pas des salariés de l’entreprise, des consultants ou les clients par exemple, ou encore interconnecté avec des réseaux sociaux plus classiques ouverts au public, en flux entrant (un twit est publié sur le RSE) ou sortant (un éditorial du Président est publié sur la page facebook de l’entreprise, un groupe de promotion des produits est animé en externe par un salarié). Plusieurs RSE pourront coexister au sein de l’entreprise ou du groupe (le RSE fournisseur, client, des spécialistes d’un thème donné…).
Sans pour autant éclipser les anciennes problématiques – la règlementation des usages et des comportements par une charte, la nécessaire consultation des IRP dans les entreprises de plus de cinquante salariés, la question des propos abusifs, notamment – de nouvelles questions surgissent, parmi lesquelles notamment :”
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Parmi les clauses essentielles, une attention particulière devra être donnée à la question de la sécurité et de la confidentialité des données, à la clause de réversibilité des prestations, ou encore aux niveaux de service et aux moyens de les contrôler. Si l’on souhaite faire interagir le RSE avec d’autres RSE ou des réseaux sociaux ouverts au public, il faudra le prévoir au cours de la négociation du contrat avec le prestataire, car il n’existe aujourd’hui aucun véritable standard logiciel.
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Il conviendra également de définir des règles de conservation/suppression des profils et données associées, pertinentes au regard du RSE considéré. Un profil de sous-traitant associé à un seul projet ne peut pas être traité comme celui d’un salarié ayant 10 ans d’ancienneté et un statut de représentant du personnel.
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des formalités CNIL liées à la mise en place du RSE pourront se révéler nécessaire. La durée de conservation des données associées au profil devra être encadrée, notamment lorsque qu’un collaborateur quitte l’entreprise, de même que la conservation de ses contributions, éventuellement anonymisées, dans le système d’information.
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Une charte éditoriale, intégrée ou non à la charte informatique, qui prévoira les comportements, la modération et les sanctions, devra être acceptée par les utilisateurs en fonction de leur implication dans le RSE (utilisateur salarié, utilisateur temporaire, utilisateur externe, administrateur, community manager, modérateur).
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Par ailleurs, le contenu collaboratif ne va-t-il pas se transformer en moyen de se faire bien voir par l’employeur au détriment du ROI attendu par celui-ci ?
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