Chapter 19

Social Collaboration for the Worker Bee

In This Chapter

Building your professional brand

Working out loud

Airing issues of company-wide or department-wide concern

Giving feedback and recognition

Social collaboration can be helped immensely by strong leadership from senior executives, but its success ultimately depends upon the contributions of a lot of people. This chapter is for every member of a social collaboration network, regardless of rank, who wants to maximize the benefits of the technology and be a productive member of the online community.

If you’re a manager at any level, you can use social collaboration to organize and motivate your team. Or, if you’re a worker bee with great ambitions, you can exploit the collaboration network to show your leadership potential. No matter who you are, you can make the network more powerful by participating in it — and in this chapter I tell you how to do that wisely.

Using Social Collaboration for Everyday Tasks

What really makes a difference in the context of work is that you use the collaboration network to get work done, celebrate accomplishments, and help the organization learn to perform better. Use the platform productively, and you will stand out as someone who knows how to get things done. In this section, I outline the basics of using the social collaboration platform to get stuff done, and I also help you evaluate when it’s appropriate to use social collaboration in place of e-mail.

Working out loud

One of the best ways of raising your profile and getting more out of a collaboration network is by routinely narrating your work or at least the important parts of it that your co-workers need to know. Give a brief description of what you’re working on in your status posts. Share your problems and your questions as they arise, and you have a better chance of getting solutions and answers from your network. This is often referred to as “working out loud” (see the upcoming sidebar).

The ideal approach is to give a glimpse of your work in progress, rather than make an announcement only when you accomplish something. This does go against entrenched work instincts, but narrating your work in process opens up opportunities for collaboration. Figure 19-1 shows how that works for a traveling executive who lets others know she is on her way to Boston and as a result lines up additional productive meetings for her visit.

Figure 19-1: The “working out loud” strategy.

In addition to letting colleagues know what you’re up to, working out loud includes the following practices:

Asking questions: When workers have a question, a common (and entrenched) time-consuming strategy is to start small, asking co-workers or people you know. Too often, those people don’t have answers. With a robust social collaboration system in place, though, you can save time by posting your question as a status update in the company activity stream or by posting the question in a relevant group.

Giving feedback: Similarly, when you have the insight or “the answer,” you ought to share it proudly (often, not the case). If you see a question in the social collaboration network and know the answer, answer it. Be as helpful to everyone else and as constructive in your criticism as you possibly can be. Spend some time Liking and commenting on posts, participating in discussions, answering questions, and so on.

If all you do is push your own content and wait for it to be praised or post your questions and expect answers, you’re not acting like a member of the community — and you won’t be treated like one.

Pacing your involvement: Naturally, you will need to budget your time so you aren’t spending so much time on social collaboration that you neglect other duties. If you can carve out a few minutes every day, you will establish yourself as a regular presence in the community. You can always spend more time when you find a productive reason to do so.

Sharing generously: A big part of the work out loud concept is integrating social collaboration into daily work, creating more documents as shared documents rather than isolated desktop documents and more communications as social posts rather than e-mail. (I tell you more about document sharing in Chapter 7.) If you can make participation routine, then participation in the collaboration network ought to feel less like extra work. Do it more consistently, and you ought to start seeing your work stretch farther.

As you build your network and your reputation, you gain the ability to help others spread their message or get their questions answered. Use that power generously. If you don’t know the answer to a question, but you know someone who would, make sure he sees it. (I tell you how to use tagging and @mentions in Chapter 4.)

The internal social network can also be a good place to share links to content from the external world. If you read a good article on management or marketing strategy or developments in your industry, post the link with a few comments about what it means for your organization. Not every thought you share on the collaboration network has to be original. Your colleagues will appreciate you if you bring them relevant news and analysis that they may have missed otherwise.

Recognizing others: Internal social networks are routinely used to announce promotions or congratulate a sales team on a strong quarter, but social recognition doesn’t have to stop there. Anyone can thank anyone else for doing a good job. Thank your peers, your subordinates, and your superiors (without being a toady) whenever they do a little something extra to solve a problem or help you complete a project. When you get credit, spread the credit around.

Some companies have instituted peer recognition systems featuring badges employees can award to each other. That’s great, but a simple message works, too. Don’t be a phony about it, but when you feel grateful, let it show.

Everybody likes a pat on the back, and the cycle of mutual affirmation makes the online workplace a friendlier place.

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Understanding when to ditch e-mail

If you can provide easy-to-access information to everyone in your organization who may need it, you’re doing everyone a favor. Many people say they can’t possibly use social communication for the majority of their work because e-mail habits are too deeply rooted in their organizations. But when you’re answering a question from a colleague, think twice about whether the person asking the question is the only one who would be interested in the answer.

If you find yourself writing a detailed e-mail reply packed with lots of information, chances are that you’re creating organizational knowledge that will wind up stranded in one person’s inbox — but shouldn’t.

Solution: Put your reply in a blog post, wiki document, or post to a discussion group on the collaboration network. E-mail back a link to that resource, inviting your colleague to add his thoughts in a space where others can also comment and build on your ideas.

Bryce Williams, the Eli Lilly community strategist and “working out loud” believer, gives the example of getting an e-mail request for examples of his firm’s collaborative platform in sales and marketing. He hesitated at first to reply with a link to a post on the internal network, but he did it anyway. Within hours, a colleague in Europe edited the page to add other examples he had missed. Within a few months, it grew from a list of 9 resources to a list of 30. When a similar question came up as part of a conference call with another group of employees, he was able to refer them to that document, getting more mileage out of his previous work.

“Don’t think that every example has to go viral with thousands of hits to be a successful outcome of working out loud,” he writes. “As soon as that wiki page went from one view to two views I had increased the return I got and that my company got from that initial interaction…for what amounted to the same effort on my part.”

The only caveat he adds is to be careful not to shift conversations from e-mail to social collaboration where there is a risk of disclosing information your correspondent may deem sensitive. When in doubt, ask permission to share your answer more openly, rather than with an e-mail reply.

Of course, Williams is an IT professional who has staked part of his professional reputation on social business, so he has a selfish interest in making this strategy work. But this strategy can work equally well for someone in HR: say, answering a recurring question about benefits with a link to a shared document.

Think about your own work life and the questions you find yourself answering over and over. If you’re in a situation like this and e-mailing back just a link feels too terse or rude, another strategy is to give a short version of the answer in the body of the e-mail, followed by a link to a document providing more details.

I have to say persuading others to change their habits is at least half the battle. I recently started what I hoped would be a productive online discussion on our collaboration network but was foiled when one of the other participants copied and pasted the message into a multirecipient e-mail. Thereafter, the conversation continued half on our social collaboration platform and half in e-mail, with different participants tuned in to each fork. Worst of both worlds!

Practicing Proper Etiquette

Who you connect with and how you interact with them will be governed by organizational culture and rules of etiquette, often unwritten. As an individual, you need to understand what’s “normal” and acceptable within your organization.

In this section, I remind you how to mind your manners and also give you some tips for navigating tricky situations.

Keeping Discussion Productive and Professional

By all means, share good news and congratulatory notes on the collaboration network. What about the not-so-good news? An endless stream of happy talk seems fake after a while, particularly when everyone knows the organization faces serious challenges.

The collaboration network can be a place to share your thoughts about what’s not working right, particularly if you can do it with some tact. There are many times in business when raising a concern privately is best, particularly if there is a personal dimension to the discussion like the need to identify an individual who isn’t doing a good job. Raising an issue broadly makes more sense when the issue is one of collective responsibility, like a communications breakdown between departments that needs to be rectified, or when the best person to address the issue has yet to be determined.

If processes are breaking down or customers aren’t getting the service they deserve, raising those issues can be a way to show you care about making the business better. You may even say that it’s your duty.

Still, before you speak up, take the temperature of your organization — how open is it to self-criticism?

Present yourself as a problem solver. Assuming you decide to be brave, you certainly want to be polite and professional. When you share a message publicly, you must make it clear that you are seeking solutions, not just griping.

“Transparency” is a popular word among social business advocates, but executives sometimes worry that introducing social collaboration means opening up a can of worms by giving employees a forum in which to complain and vent. You don’t want to be the person who brings all their worst fears to life. On the other hand, if the organization is at all serious about using social collaboration to solve problems, it has to be willing to acknowledge that problems exist within the organization. I discuss the importance of executives understanding the implications of transparency in Chapter 15.

Find a connection to company goals. If possible, tie your issue to concerns that have been raised publicly by the leaders of your organization, showing how your concern links to achieving their goals.

Be respectful. Never blame, insult, or demean any other individual. This has nothing to do with whether people should be held accountable if they have indeed caused problems; a social network isn’t the right place to sort out those issues.

Invite colleagues to communicate. On the other hand, the network can be the perfect place to sort out teamwork and communications problems. Most business processes succeed or fail based on the quality of the teamwork, not the good or bad qualities of a single player. For instance, if a customer who works with two divisions of your business is unhappy because of poor coordination between them, networking the right people together to address the sources of friction and save that customer from defecting would be a huge win.

Don’t just complain. Raise the problems you believe must be solved and then help solve them.

Building Your Professional Brand

In Chapter 5, I cover some of the routine activities associated with making and nurturing connections. I also draw a comparison with LinkedIn, which is best known as the social platform for building connections to help land your next job. Participation on a corporate collaboration network is a way of building your professional brand within your current employment.

How do you make yourself stand out on a collaboration network?

Many of the things that apply on a public social network factor in:

You contribute regular, interesting posts.

Others Like and share your content.

You like and share content from other people.

Your photo and profile project a positive image.

You build a strong network of connections and followers.

One of the people who stands out on my employer’s Jive-based collaboration network, The Hub, is Steven Carlisle, an assistant marketing manager who has earned an outsize online reputation through his work habits. Because The Hub’s managers have been experimenting with gamification techniques (using game-like virtual rewards to engage users), his reputation actually has a score attached to it. On the ranking of internal social network users, our professional community managers are at the top of the list (as well they should be). As of mid-2013, CEO David Levin is #7, and Carlisle is #10. In other words, he is a lot closer to the top of the organization online than offline — and that visibility should help him get ahead overall.

Confession: By that same ranking, I’m #388, with 5,800 points, compared with 35,900 for Carlisle. He racks up points every time he logs in and posts his status, but it counts for more every time someone else Likes or shares his content.

One reason for his high score is that whenever he initiates a project, he creates a project group and uses it to assign tasks that will build toward getting something accomplished.

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