Figure 11.1 Connecting Workforce Engagement with the Full Vision of Social Business
Note: UX = user experience; CMS/DMS = content management systems/document management systems; HCM = human capital management
Chapter 11
Workforce Engagement
Creating a Connected Company Using Social Business
In 2006, Harvard professor Andrew McAfee heard from his students and elsewhere that a handful of forward-thinking organizations were using social media to make it easier to work together and facilitate collaboration. Social media were still relatively unknown beyond technology circles, and most adopters used existing tools for personal reasons. Although these efforts were early and often highly experimental, they hinted at possibilities of how these media could be used within organizations. Social media were bound to make their way into businesses if its application could improve information sharing, enable collaboration, and help retain knowledge where it could be easily found and reused by all.
McAfee explored a few early examples of social media in the workplace and wrote a groundbreaking treatise that laid out both its premise and promise: “Do we finally have the right technologies for knowledge work? Wikis, blogs, group-messaging software, and the like can make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers—a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.”1 McAfee called this new way of getting work done through social media “Enterprise 2.0,” which focused primarily on the collaborative, team-based activities that took place between employees internally. This started what has grown to be a wide-ranging trend as companies carefully—and not so intentionally or carefully in some cases—figure out how to incorporate the social communication innovations coming from the Web to their organizations.
Large organizations have operationalized Enterprise 2.0 principles to improve workforce engagement, reshaping themselves into social businesses. The stories of IBM, MillerCoors, and Mountain Equipment Co-Op earlier in this book provide three examples. Another example comes from the use of wikis, user-editable Web pages. The power of wikis may be familiar to anyone who's used Wikipedia, but not as many people know why wikis are such potent tools. Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham in the early days of the Internet, and it took a while for their core idea to catch on: that anyone can visit a wiki page and edit the information it contains. That's the general principle behind Wikipedia and why wikis follow the core tenet of social business: as many people as possible should be enabled to participate.
Morgan Stanley is a massive firm, with six hundred offices in the Americas, Europe, and Asia and 2011 net revenue of $32.4 billion. Social media, if applicable, would have to function inside this complex and highly sophisticated global environment. In 2004, an open source product called TWiki seemed to work well for the early adopters in the company's information technology department. Since it was easy to put information up on the intranet for all to see, the Morgan Stanley Twiki environment experienced rapid uptake, compared to the time-consuming processes required to go through traditional intranet content posting processes.
Wiki use quickly spread around the world for a multitude of uses, including vital services and process documentation, operations manuals, and collaborative team work spaces. Use increased such that by 2007, support had to be reconfigured to maintain multiple instances running on three continents; by 2011, over 500,000 topics existed in the Morgan Stanley wiki environment, with over 4 million pages viewed per month. Over half of the company's approximately sixty thousand worldwide employees use wikis every month to obtain information and update the company's global knowledge base. The accumulated information in the environment has grown to 350 billion characters.2 Wikis enable the first two tenets of social business, while the structure and processes that surround it can enable the rest of them. Morgan Stanley has achieved a global social business transformation in the way it communicates and collaborates around knowledge workers, enabling every employee to contribute value as well as tap into it.
First identified as a growing trend in 2006, social business workforce engagement (or Enterprise 2.0) has an active role in many large and small organizations. Research firm Forrester pegged the number of companies investing in social tools to improve workforce collaboration at 42 percent in 2011.3 For many, however, the objectives of workforce engagement and its processes are unclear, so it's worth examining how social business in the workplace happens and how it can create a more connected company.
Successfully enabling social media in the workplace requires a couple of key prerequisites: knowing what will be improved by the effort and defining success in terms that make sense from a traditional business perspective. Social business benefits accrue in many interesting but often unexpected places, and trying to figure out what these undefined outcomes are ahead of time is largely a fruitless exercise. Instead, companies should begin by solving a small set of well-defined business problems with social business solutions. Over time, emergent and highly opportunistic new local solutions to the existing problem—as well as, over time, emergent solutions to a host of downstream situations—will appear.
Blogs, wikis, microblogging tools, and an ever expanding set of social business suites attempt to provide social environments within which workers can engage and create improved business outcomes. ‘We firmly believe that although social media are convenient and useful for social business, they are not the only option. Furthermore, consumer social media frequently cannot address the full range of capabilities that businesses need. Consequently, a practical understanding of social business in the workforce requires a step back to consider two foundational questions: (1) What exactly does social mean in the context of the social business tenets? and (2) What are the essential functions of an effective social business workforce environment?’
Everything these days receives the label of “social” as long as sharing or communication is enabled in some way. There is some connection: e-mail is certainly social, as are mobile phones, and in fact most legacy communication technologies are social in some way. So what's the difference?
First, let's look at what exactly makes social media social, and then we'll look at social business to see if it's different. Structurally two fundamental aspects must be present for something to be considered social media:
Those two components make social media social, along with a process to govern the participation process, where everyone can contribute and contributions automatically become visible to everyone in the social graph (as opposed to point-to-point, as in older communication methods). This goes to the heart of the key difference between traditional communication methods and social media: because created value is shared as widely as possible by default, social media enrich the entire community instead of a few narrowly defined interlocutors, based on network effects, that is, situations where each user in an environment creates value for others; more participants in a network create greater value for everyone involved.
Bob Metcalfe, the creator of Ethernet, the first workable computer network, saw the implications soon after he invented it: the value of networks is exponential due to the proliferation of the number of potential connections between nodes. He called it Metcalfe's law.4 Thus, a million-person telephone network can theoretically connect all 1 million people to each other, though that never actually happens. In fact, most networks greatly underdeliver on the potential of deep connectedness. This relatively low level of use continued for several decades, until researcher David Reed began to validate what was different about social media. He asserted, and validated to a considerable extent, that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network.5
However, by the time this insight emerged into collective consciousness, the world had largely discovered that social media were taking over global communication in the form of social networks. Social networks brought people together and facilitated communication, creating observable value for individuals. The aggregation of individuals into groups led to the terminology of social media: open, shared participation in the context of that user's connections with others that results in high levels of shared value (the network effect).
As companies felt the impact of these trends, businesses began to consider commercial applications. Would the same ideas work and create value within business contexts as well? In social media, an environment must allow some sort of social graph and, for information to be distributed to user connections, some form of activity stream, in a way in which anyone's contribution can be viewed by all of that person's connections. Businesses create sharing environments with the intent of solving challenges to create value. Thus we arrive at a definition of social business: open, shared participation that results in high levels of shared business value (the network effect).
“Social business” can be a placeholder for “social media for business-related outcomes,” but it also encompasses other forms of mass participation. For the workforce, this means that social business inside organizations encompasses a broader range of activities than might be found if the conception is limited to the notion of what consumer social media bring to the table (Figure 11.1).
Figure 11.1 Connecting Workforce Engagement with the Full Vision of Social Business
Note: UX = user experience; CMS/DMS = content management systems/document management systems; HCM = human capital management
Most companies approach workforce engagement by functional area, considering employee activities and workplace functions and then determining how processes could be improved by applying social media tools. Because so many communication methods exist, one of the signature challenges of social business design is detangling and reconciling the large palette of options in a way that is effective, nondisruptive, and compelling enough to get workers to change their behavior and do their work differently and more socially. There are a number of combinations of existing business systems and social media, but the functions that follow are the major types that organizations will have to consider and sort out into a clear, concise internal social business strategy that is supported by fundamental social media capabilities.
Also known as Enterprise 2.0, this is one of the most frequent starting points for those who are setting out to improve the performance of knowledge workers in the enterprise, typically the most valuable and important contributors in the organization. They are the decision makers, gatherers of strategic insight, and managers of the projects, the operations, and the direction of the company. Most companies already use collaboration tools ranging from SharePoint, e-mail, and instant messaging to videoconferencing and unified communication suites. Social collaboration tools put the social graph and activity streams in the center of the work process, becoming a dashboard for collaboration. The resulting environment connects to other frequently used communication systems to send notifications and reach users who otherwise haven't switched over to the social collaboration environment.
Social collaboration solutions can focus in two areas: horizontal collaboration that applies to any type of internal teamwork and process-specific collaboration enabling a halo of conversation to form around routine business activities. Making both work necessitates design into workflow and not requiring an extra system that users have to switch between.
The intranets inside company networks have long been a target of criticism for being frequently out of date and difficult for workers to add or update information. Yet the corporate intranet has always had potential as a sort of miniature private Internet containing the sum of an organization's tacit knowledge, ongoing work, and useful reference information. However, it would be fair to say that the majority of intranets are relatively unsuccessful and typically see light use other than as a convenient reference point for human resource policy or for driving directions to corporate headquarters.
The formal processes of publishing and content management that most intranets impose on contributors also don't work very well for the give-and-take of freeform collaboration. Consider the origins of Wikipedia, which started out with a change management process for adding updates similar to corporate intranets. Wikipedia was initially part of Nupedia, a project to produce a free online encyclopedia. Nupedia employed a qualified, carefully screened group of expert contributors and a sophisticated multistep peer review process for new submissions. Despite its mailing list of interested editors and the presence of a full-time editor, the production of content using the centralized and bureaucratic process was extremely slow: after a full year of effort, only twelve articles had been produced. To facilitate production, a wiki was established to run parallel to Nupedia; it opened on January 10, 2001.6 Within a month, over a thousand new articles had been posted. Studies have also subsequently validated that centrally produced work has similar rates of error as peer-produced work, and the latter are usually orders of magnitude richer and more diverse.7 However, intranets at most organizations remain at the Nupedia level of capability.
Content and document management is a core activity of organizations and one of the most frequent tasks of today's information-intensive knowledge workers. This work has given rise to a generation of sophisticated and complex products designed to structure and control the production of business content, such as forms, paperwork, reports, spreadsheets, and scanned images. Systems keep track of the different versions, make them secure, organize them, help people find existing information, create paperwork trails, and connect everything to business work flows. In practice, most content management systems (CMS) and document management systems (DMS) ignore the key tenets of social business: they limit who can participate, are complex and hard to use thereby reducing participation, and so overly structure the process that they are often inconvenient to use.
Social CMS and DMS tools have emerged, although they do not always obey social business tenets. While some processes must by definition have limited access and be structured to meet certain requirements, most rules are greatly overdone. As an ideal model for participation, social media have shown that simple rules work best: radically simple usability, as little structure as possible, and open contribution. Reconciling CMS and DMS with social business requires a new look at the technologies being used, as well as a rethinking of how they are applied to the business.
It's safe to say that most workplaces will receive an enterprise social network in the next few years. Some of these networks will see limited use, while others will be vibrant and strategic assets for how the company gets work done. Overlapping with the social collaboration and social intranet functions in this list, enterprise social networks are often considered in isolation, as a feature to be added to the network and not deeply connected to other business systems.
A more cohesive social strategy is needed to take into account and sort out the many social capabilities flowing into today's organizations. At its core, an enterprise social network looks a lot like an employee-only, single-company version of Facebook, though it's not usually visible to those outside the company. It can play a role in building cohesion among far-flung workers, locating expertise on the fly.
One unique area for social business in the workplace is in human resources (HR), which has long concerned itself with hiring and firing and more recently has turned to cultivating the potential of a company's workers. This includes the establishment of personal and professional development programs and creating policies designed to promote better worker performance. The discipline of workforce performance improvement is better known as human capital management (HCM). Because the open environments of social business leave behind a wealth of knowledge available on the network for all to see, discover, analyze, and learn, there are numerous human capital management implications. Benefits include capturing and preserving the acquired subject matter experience of staff members in high-turnover workforces, creating training programs, and identifying educational and developmental needs, which happens naturally if employees are “working out loud” in internal social business environments. Many HR and HCM products are beginning to incorporate social business approaches, creating opportunities while also increasing the growing challenge of social business fragmentation across so many business systems.
For years, the proliferation of communication channels in the workplace, including e-mail, mobile phones, instant messaging, text messages, and video, made the process of consistently delivering and managing communication for workers a growing headache. Keeping track of all the contact points, making them available to workers, and shutting down channels efficiently on separation is an ongoing challenge for most organizations. The solution, unified communications, provides a single identity and set of tightly connected and consistent communication methods and contact points. Unfortunately, when social media came along, unified communications fell behind. Although this is not yet a major issue for most large organizations, reconciling unified communications with internal social business will be a growing priority for most Fortune 1000 companies.
Fully enabled social businesses report a number of benefits:8
To limit the discussion to four benefits of internal social business is misleading, although the ones identified here are some of the more important ones. The benefits are extremely difficult to nail down because they are difficult to measure. The same is true with ways of working because their outcomes are many and varied.
The cause-and-effect chains, as they are called, are hard to get explicit credit for (see Figure 11.2), yet often have a significant impact on tangible financial outcomes.9 In the end, many organizations will adopt social media as inevitably as they did e-mail, others will look at social business transformation of specific business processes where it's easier to do a more literal return on investment and usually see considerable value to be had, and still others will largely ignore the changes happening around them and not see the benefits until social business is a widely used approach. Therefore, the adoption narrative of social business in a given workplace will take many unexpected paths (tenet 6). A good example is seen in organizations like Lloyd's Register, a leading global risk management firm based in London, where formal procedures were augmented in a dynamic way with social media to reduce the time taken to address customer queries.10 Because social business activity can lead to many useful outcomes, these should be tracked and supported where they prove to be particularly promising to the business.
Figure 11.2 Determining Social Business Value: Tracking Cause-and-Effect Chains
A good way to understand how social business works inside an organization is to look at an example that explores the activities and parts of the business affected. In Figure 11.3, a typical social business environment is shown with various actors as they go about their daily work. The principal output is the social work stream that continues to grow and get richer as everyone spends their day sharing, collaborating, and contributing knowledge. The environment is one or more social business tools, based on social media concepts, on the local intranet or elsewhere in existing information technology systems. At the bottom are typical line employees who work socially and out in the open with the processes, where anyone can look at their activity stream and even virtually look over their shoulder. Knowledge continues to accumulate from the full range of workers following their daily processes in the social business environment. Their team leaders and managers can keep better track of their progress and suggest changes early and often to drive more rapid course corrections and better agility, and executives can track all of this and have dashboards fed by analytics that allow all the open and observable work to be tracked and reported in real time, giving them a sense of the pulse of the organization.
Figure 11.3 An Example of Social Business in the Workplace
To facilitate this orchestra of collaboration is a small team of what are known as community managers (we discuss their role in the next chapter), who are essential for maintaining the health and effectiveness of the social business environment, resolving problems, providing just-in-time solutions, providing social business skill building and training, and much more. Just as an IT system needs a help desk, a social business needs community managers. Since the work proceeding across the company is open and visible, HR and legal can also ensure that social media policies are being followed and can provide oversight and assistance to workers who cross the line, intentionally or unintentionally. Subject matter experts (SMEs) within the company can be identified and plugged into processes quickly so work doesn't come to a halt without key information that's readily available somewhere else in the organization. External SMEs can be brought in to augment internal ones if necessary.
The result is a dynamic global activity stream containing everything the companies knows, who knows it, and what took place. The social work stream is the history of the organization and the narrative of nearly every process. It can be mined, analyzed, filtered, and processed for countless useful outcomes. Social business requires culture change, executive leadership, business process redesign, and technological updates to get to its full strength, but increasingly it's possible to get there in increments. The chapters in Part Three explore the process of social business design.