Give employees a voice
Many organisations already have successfully implemented open communication or social tools in their intranet. Others are still hesitating because of various reasons like e.g. strategy, culture, technology or lack of recognition of the benefits.
The society has changed, organisations are now seeking for other ways to communicate with external customers. When will organisations themselves change? Recently I looked at Microblogging as an instrument to open up internal communication in the enterprise. In this post I elaborate on the impact it can have for the organisation and its employees.
Open Communication?
Come on, we are an open organisation
In this article I refer to communication that is interactive and between people:
Person A sends a message to person B. Person B receives the message, reads it, understands it, thinks about it and replies with a message back. Other forms are just sending information.
In traditional 'corporate communication' the focus is on sending information. This is usually done by email, a message on the intranet or a corporate newsletter. There is one limitation with this approach: The sender does not know if the message is received, read or understood as it was originally intended.
Open communication is top-down, bottom-up and horizontal.
Top-Down communicating is no real communication, it is instructing employees or broadcasting messages. There is no significant interaction, and interaction is required for real communication.
Bottom-Up communication can e.g. be achieved when employees react on messages, on blogs and so on. But managers are very busy and it is not a good idea that employees start sending emails en masse to the management. That will definitely not work.
Horizontal communication is interaction between employees, independent of hierarchical relationships, business units or any other silo like geographic location or culture.
With open communication not only the direction is free, but also the type of information:
- Process information (information related to daily work)
- Company Strategy Information (Messages from Senior Management)
- Work Progress information (Management information, feedback from customers and successes)
- Social information (information shared between employees - not directly work related)
Microblogging has the characteristics to enable open communication without filling up the inbox.
Impact for the organisation and employees
Employees & Networking
The society we live in has changed. People are not only higher educated, more critical, assertive, IT savvy and so on, but they also use social tools in their private lives to communicate with companies, instances, family and friends.
People have a natural desire to connect and share ideas and opinions with like-minded.
The next generation of employees will be experts in filtering many information sources to achieve their goals. The best information sources in companies are colleagues who have dealt with similar issues in the past or have built a large expertise in a certain area.
Due to many protocols, procedures, policies and top-down management hierarchies, employees have become anonymous fte's in organisations.
Open communication provides easier access to information sources, makes employees aware of current issues and encourages collaboration and networking between employees. Employees have valuable things to say, give them a voice.
The networking that will take place will not follow hierarchical lines. The networks will be created by topic or interest. They will go beyond the 'old-fashioned' silos. It will actually tear the silos down. It will create new networks even with people of whom you had never expected it.
Microblogging is a great way to support serendipity as Oscar Berg mentions in his article Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers:
"Enabling people to find both information and people they didn’t know they were looking for".
...
"We just need to implicitly and explicitly share what we do and know to other people in our networks, to people who share our interests, or to people who happen to pass us by at any other kind of cross-road."
Open communication will decrease the MUM-effect (Minimize Unpleasant Messages to management). Management often does not know what really happens in the market and what keeps employees busy. The consequence is that these organisations lose the ability to innovate. Employees generally know better how the business processes actually work and they often have ideas to improve them. Front-line employees get important signals from the external market first.
If managers get regular updates on what really happens on the market, they can react and make better business decisions. Knowing what lives on the work floor gives them an opportunity to (re)gain the trust of the employees (and raises employee motivation / engagement / retention).
Knowledge
Knowledge workers are the fastest growing group of employees in the current information society. That same society also forces enterprises to use and manage that knowledge.
Knowledge is more than information:
Knowledge = Information + Experience + Skill + Thinking.
Information is static data and can be stored in computer systems. However knowledge is a product of thinking, it requires combining information with experience and skill. Knowing is the part of the work that can't be automated. It relates to anticipating, innovation, leading, and it makes the sale. It results in action.
Knowledge is an important factor to perform complex or unstructured tasks. It the most important asset that many organisations really have and is the most important factor to differentiate from the competition and to be successful in the future. It becomes crucial for companies to use the knowledge and experience that is available in the company.
In the past decades a widely used strategy to cut costs or improve the profit was downsizing. The effect of this strategy was that good employees with years of experience and created knowledge left the company.
Therefore companies should develop a knowledge management strategy. A strategy that encourages knowledge development, knowledge sharing between employees and most important to use this knowledge in order to support the work processes and make them more effective and efficient.
Open communication makes networking easier and helps to spread the knowledge between employees across the enterprise.
Faster communication between employees and a wider shared knowledge base will result in faster and more efficient processing of business procedures and will result in productivity gains.
Management & Culture
A Change of culture will also result in a change of bahavior
With a change of culture, it is very important to know the hidden rules of that culture. That is how people act, that is what them make do what they do.
Microblogging breaks with some formal hierarchies in the organisation, it shows how relationships really are: These are based on the roles people play, their expertise and the relationships they maintain with each other.
The role of management might change as information will spread more horizontal instead of top-down only. This is not a threat for their position, on the contrary!... Managers should also use the new way of communicating. And it gives them also a platform where they can listen what lives with their employees and they can spend more time on personal coaching.
There is less opportunity to control, but more room to influence.
With an open communication culture in place, you have to accept that the role of the internal communications department is not only to favor the management anymore. You would neglect the valuable knowledge of the employees. Employees are not a passive communication target anymore that can be stimulated to perform the desired action by top-down communication only. The role will shift to a role more of facilitating, monitoring, influencing and steering when needed.
Of course in many situations there is a clear need for top-down decision making.
Summary of the impact for the organisation:
- Make the most of expert people - identify new talents in the organisation
- Improve the coordination of business processes
- Harness the collective intelligence (Sharing information and experiences keeps more information in house)
- Analyze the conversations - data summarization, relationship analysis, the buzz - this will give interesting insights
- Overcome the silo thinking
- Makes management and communication easier between people in different geographical locations
- Get new employees up to speed on existing information
- Provide all employees with common answers to questions
- Because the communication is open and light, you can have more opinions about new ideas than in regular meetings or focus groups
- Solve complex issues by combining the "corporate" knowledge
- Information and knowledge will be more transparent in the organisation
- People that share knowledge will become more important than people who keep it for themselves
Mail
Microblogging will certainly not replace email. Mail will still be the best medium for sensitive messages, direct work related instructions and many other subjects...
But we are flooded with emails every day. We ignore most of the emails we get in our inboxes and we spend half a day dealing with the rest. That is very unproductive, both for the senders as for the receivers.
You should use the best available tool for the message and the purpose. Microblogging is better suited for many types of messages than email or intranet articles. That should take some of the heat of email.
(Blogs, wikis or regular intranet articles are often also a good alternative for email)
The business case
The business case and the ROI issue
A new (IT) tool often requires a business case to justify the costs (budget) and to get the required resources to implement it and, very important, to maintain it.
For a digital communication tool we could focus on the usual suspects: operational costs savings, travel costs reduction, employee retention, faster time to market and IT savings. These are all very true, but will these really make a good case? I doubt that. Many business cases rely on a direct financial return on investments or cost savings, these are hard to prove when you're investing in the most valuable asset of the company: the employees.
Andrew McAfee answered in his blog article The Case Against the Business Case a question he was asked about the financial analysis of an IT investment. Andrew answered with a quote from the book "Strategy Maps" written by Bob Kaplan and David Norton:
"None of these intangible assets has value that can be measured separately or independently. The value of these intangible assets derives from their ability to help the organization implement its strategy… Intangible assets such as knowledge and technology seldom have a direct impact on financial outcomes such as increased revenues, lowered costs, and higher profits. Improvements in intangible assets affect financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships."
"Intangible assets, such as knowledge or social capital rarely have direct impact to financial outcomes such as revenues and profits". If you try to assign an economic value to these benefits, these initiatives are then based on best estimates or in the worst case at pure speculation.
The cost of human capital of companies is very high: Let's then also get the best out of it.
These "cause-and-effect relationships" have been worked out in further detail in the excellent article Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 by Dion Hinchcliffe, please read the full article, but this brilliant image tells it all:
"At the end of the chain, the solution will affect the competitive and financial position of the company and therefore guarantee long-term market place success."
Some other very important points are made in the article Making The Case for Enterprise Activity Streams (And Why It’s Not Just “Another Tool”) by Christopher Lynch:
"Ultimately, the real value with activity streams will be to provide a social layer on top of your current business systems.
...
Before many companies get there, however, they need some more practical reasons why they need activity streams in the first place."
In other words connect microblogging to business systems or projects. Measure if microblogging makes processes or projects more efficient.
Another tip: Many organisations have mission statements highlighting the corporate professional attitude, the openness of the organisation, the importance of the employees and so on. (Mostly these are just hollow phrases - we all know that) Embed these smartly your business case as well. Arguments based around these principles can't be neglected by senior management.
We should also ask a question: What is the ROI on email or telephone? These are also IT solutions that only created a positive business value after traveling a long and indirect chain of cause-and-effect. In general many IT solutions have a long chain
Final Notes
Why Microblogging? Because it is not difficult to learn, it is intuitive in its use, relative easy to implement and well suited for various purposes. You can use it for communication, knowledge sharing, network building, team collaboration, improving corporate morale, personal branding and to support business processes.
But it is not all 'hallelujah'. There are serious risks. Setting the expectations too high will result in a certain failure.
Every organisation is different and there exists no blue-print for a successful implementation. The impact for the organisation will be different per organisation and so needs the implementation strategy to be.
Make sure the implementation meets business targets. Start small (microblogging can easily implemented in small teams as a pilot). Don't focus on all the benefits directly, others can and will follow later.
A long-term strategy is recommended and don't forget to think about governance.
This is the first of a series about microblogging. In the next posts, I will look at more usage examples, risks and implementation tips.
Sources used for inspiration
The Case Against the Business Case by Andrew McAfee - July 28, 2006
Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 by Dion Hinchcliffe - April 12, 2009
The state of Enterprise 2.0 by Dion Hinchcliffe - October 22, 2007
Making The Case for Enterprise Activity Streams (And Why It’s Not Just “Another Tool”) by Christopher Lynch - July 7, 2010
Open Communication, Emergence and Serendipity by Sebastian Schaefer - June 22, 2010
Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers by Oscar Berg - July 14, 2010
Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years - August 4, 2010
The article as PDF (191 kb)
This is the first post in a series of four in which I try to encourage the use of microblogging in the organisation, a way to open up the internal communication in the enterprise and to be prepared for the future. Other posts are:
- Open Communication in the Enterprise - give employees a voice
- 12 More things to do with Micro Blogging
- Open Communication Scepticism and Fears
- Implementation tips (coming soon)
You can follow me on Twitter at @BasZurburg. I mostly tweet about intranets and changing corporate environments due to new thinking.