Chapter 17
The Workplace Leader’s Guide to Social Collaboration
In This Chapter
Using social collaboration to create a welcoming, productive workplace
Choosing social workplace applications
Recognizing achievement
Synchronizing with HR information systems
Social collaboration is an important tool for creating a more productive workplace and a more engaged workforce. By making people feel more connected to each other and the organization as a whole, a collaboration network can help motivate employees to work harder, contribute more actively, and seek to advance within the organization (rather than jump ship to a competitor).
A survey by APCO Worldwide and Gagen MacDonald (www.gagenmacdonald.com/ism/power-internal-social-media) found that employees in organizations with successful internal social networks are
39 percent more likely to recommend their company’s products and services
60 percent more likely to give their company the benefit of the doubt in a crisis
67 percent more likely to purchase the company’s stock
78 percent more likely to support government policies that their company supports
In short, these employees are more fully committed to the organization they work for. This chapter is for anyone — including human resources and corporate communications professionals, organizational development strategists, and managers — seeking to use social collaboration to create a better workplace or organizational culture.
Maybe it should go without saying, but adding social collaboration won’t magically cure all the ills of an otherwise dysfunctional organization. The social element needs to be more than just a veneer: It needs to dovetail with broader policies and corporate behaviors that invite and reward employee engagement.
Using Social Collaboration to Create a Welcoming, Productive Workplace
Here are some of the ways that you can use social collaboration to help create a better workplace:
On-board new employees. You can introduce new colleagues to a support network of co-workers and people who can answer questions. The activity stream is a great place to introduce new hires, and you may even introduce a new hire to groups that are relevant to the person’s position and responsibilities, if that option is available.
Bring the corporate directory to life. A social collaboration system includes social activity and shared content, not just basic phonebook info.
Extend learning opportunities. In a social collaboration system, networked learning can extend beyond the boundaries of what’s taught in formal corporate training. There may be no course that covers what an employee needs to learn but plenty of people willing to teach or coach the motivated learner. The network can also supplement more formal training, through social groups students participate in parallel with class work, which they retain access to after the class is over.
At Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Vice President of Learning and Collaboration Nick Howe, says of all the things employees need to learn to do their jobs, only a fraction lend themselves to being taught in a traditional corporate training course. Meanwhile, in a fast-changing technological business (HDS primarily sells computer storage), just-in-time learning is often a better match anyway.
Provide employees with ongoing feedback. Performance review time isn’t the only time that employees need feedback. In a social collaboration network, they can get ongoing coaching and recognition from peers as well as supervisors.
Engage employees. Within the activity stream, within groups, or wherever is appropriate, you can actively involve employees in discussing the goals and future of the business or their part of it.
Identify the best collaborators. Analyzing patterns of collaboration to understand which people and groups are working together most actively. A manager who pays attention to those patterns will know which teams to assign to projects requiring collaborative work.
Flattening the organization. You can shorten the chain of command and streamline organizational communications by letting the CEO and other top leaders engage in two-way communication with employees at every level.
Help colleagues communicate beyond silos. Encourage collaboration across business units and functions by making it easier (opening the door to productive uses that I discuss throughout this book).
Court “digital natives.” As new employees who have grown up with social media enter the workforce, while others have their expectations raised by consumer technologies, using social collaboration helps make work systems feel more competitive with those we enjoy at home. For example, a social collaboration network that works well on mobile devices will be attractive to an employee who has grown used to being able to do everything on a smartphone.
Unite the workforce. Make employees feel more connected to each other and the organization, which tends to make them feel more engaged and happier in their work. A social collaboration network makes it possible to get the big picture of what is going on in the company, no matter how organizationally or geographically distant from the individual employee.
Establish or reinforce a productive, effective corporate culture. You want your people working to act like part of the same team. With its emphasis on sharing and cooperative work, a social collaboration network can help.
Knowing Who Leads on Workplace Design
It’s not always the head of human resources who takes the lead on workplace transformation. It can be, and maybe it should be, but often it isn’t. Sometimes, HR is one of the obstacles — the rules-based bureaucracy that knows all the reasons to say “No.” Or HR may be a supporting player in an initiative that starts elsewhere, with corporate communications, training, operations, or a culture change initiative directed from the CEO’s office. HR leaders may see it as their job to make the workforce more productive, innovative, and engaged. Or they may be too bogged down in the practicalities of hiring and firing atop managing benefits.
Many organizations are embracing elements of “social HR” in the context of using public social media for human resources purposes, such as recruiting and backgrounding potential new hires on LinkedIn. They are not necessarily focusing on the internal applications of social technology, however.
Yvette Cameron, a Constellation Research Group analyst who covers the intersection of social technologies and HR, argues this is a mistake. Rather than leading on workforce innovation, too many HR leaders are involved as supporting players, if they are involved at all. Or, they may be active naysayers, giving too much weight to the risks related to regulatory compliance and too little to the potential benefits, she says.
“Sometimes, I think we wear the HR hat a little too tight,” agrees Heathre Moler, a human resources executive who led the implementation of a social performance management application at her organization. The orthodox tasks of hiring, firing, and benefits management are necessities, meaning. “You have to do them, but not any better than the next guy,” she says. “You need to reduce as much of the non-value-added work as you can.”
At the same time, one of the mega-themes you hear from management consultants and business analysts about how the best organizations function concerns crafting of corporate culture. Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great (HarperBusiness) and other books about how great companies create and sustain values, emphasizes that culture is not a mission statement or a values statement but rather the alignment of an organization’s core values with how it actually operates. In the article, “Aligning Action and Values,” Collins explains. “For instance, many organizations say they respect and trust their people to do the right thing, but they undermine that statement by doing X, Y, and Z. The misalignments exist not because the statements are false: these companies believe what they say. The misalignments occur because years of ad hoc policies and practices have become institutionalized and have obscured the firm’s underlying values.”
Where such misalignments occur, who is responsible for correcting them? Who within your organization is responsible for making the organization itself more cohesive and productive? The CEO has ultimate responsibility for setting the right direction, but who is responsible for following through on it?
My employer, UBM, has a People and Culture department that includes human resources but has cultural change as part of its organizational mission. The challenge of creating one cohesive culture of many merged organizations was one of the motivations for our social collaboration initiative. Our Global Community Manager Ted Hopton reports into that group, although he works closely with Collaboration Systems Manager Tracy Maurer, who works in IT. Naturally, the online collaboration initiative is only one element of the UBM strategy of aligning culture and action.
At SAS Institute, an analytics software company routinely ranked as one of the world’s best places to work, social collaboration originated as an initiative of corporate communications, independent of HR. The introduction of Socialcast as an internal social network was “a good fit for what our culture already is,” rather than an attempt to change it, says Becky Graebe, the senior internal communications manager who oversees the system. “It’s a way for employees to do what they already do naturally, except we’re connecting to a broader group of people.”
If anything, the project has forced a culture change within the internal communications group itself, away from broadcasting information in the form of newsletters and toward enabling two-way communication with employees and networked communication among employees.
Choosing Social Workplace Applications
Workplace applications can be social without necessarily being part of a general-purpose social collaboration platform, such as Jive or Yammer. Like many other sorts of software, applications for corporate training, performance management, and employee recognition have been sprouting activity feeds and user profiles. What would be unfortunate is to support entirely separate feeds and profiles from those that exist in your company-wide collaboration platform — assuming you have one, that is. You have to decide whether that’s important to you or whether the social functionality in the standalone application is really what’s most important.
Many learning management systems now boast social features, where the idea is to augment online courses and on-demand, video training modules with peer-to-peer interaction between learners, which can continue after a course is done.
Hitachi Data Systems runs its HDS Academy program on learning management software from Saba Systems that includes a number of collaboration features, including video conferencing and social discussion streams. In fact, Saba has built out those features into its own social collaboration offerings, but Howe says by the time Saba had a complete social platform he had already committed to Jive.
Another category where there is overlap is social performance management software, which uses social networking and gamification techniques to track and motivate employee performance. Consider the case of Rypple, which began life as a startup with offices in Toronto and San Francisco focused on “re-inventing processes,” such as employee goal setting, evaluation, and peer recognition. One of the reasons why Rypple had such a good Facebook-like user interface is that it won Facebook as a customer: The social media firm integrated the software with its own custom internal collaboration environment. Rypple was also identified with the trend toward gamification of workplace software, challenging employees to set ambitious goals, compete to achieve them, and win visible recognition in the form of badges.
Rypple can operate as a social collaboration environment onto itself, but it was really designed to replace the traditional annual review cycle of employee feedback with ongoing recognition and performance management. Rypple also worked on integration with other products, becoming one of the first participants in the Jive Apps Market with the Rypple Thanks app.
Acquired by Salesforce.com at the end of 2011, Rypple was eventually rebranded Work.com. Work.com can be used independently although Salesforce.com encourages using it in combination with Chatter. Figure 17-1 shows how Work.com data looks in the Chatter stream. Meanwhile, because the integration with Jive is unlikely to get much love going forward, Jive has introduced a simple employee recognition app of its own, called Props, into its apps market as a free alternative.
Courtesy of Salesforce.com
Figure 17-1: Work.com makes employee goals (and progress toward them) part of a social profile.
At the end of 2012, IBM moved to solidify its “smarter workforce” strategy with the acquisition of Kenexa, creator of a suite of apps for recruiting, on-boarding, learning, and compensation, as well as performance management. Expect to see Kenexa more tightly integrated with IBM Connections over time. SAP’s social collaboration strategy is built around its acquisition of SuccessFactors, which is a suite of human capital management products that also includes recruiting, on-boarding, learning, and compensation. An accompanying social collaboration product, SuccessFactors JAM, became SAP JAM following the acquisition, reflecting a broader focus on social integration across all SAP business applications, with the SuccessFactors HR-related apps still in a favored position. Oracle has amassed its own family of HR and social technologies, as have other competitors.
Meanwhile, a handful of other social performance management players continue to compete as independent companies.
Social HR and workforce applications are more powerful when combined with a collaboration network that can also be used for other purposes. If you use a social application to bestow recognition on an employee for doing a good job, you want that recognition to be published widely. That way, the person’s friends will see it in the activity stream, without necessarily logging in to the recognition app. If you connect with someone through a social performance management or learning application, you want to be able to click through to his profile on the collaboration network and find out more about him, beyond his interactions with that one application.
If HR and workforce technologies are providing the initial impetus for the use of social applications in your organization, give strong consideration to a collaboration platform that either comes from the same vendor or offers a robust integration.
However, if you’re working within a large enterprise, you may not have the luxury of choosing a single, integrated stack of social collaboration and HR applications. The organization may have made several previous independent decisions to choose applications or whole suites of applications that it is committed to. In some cases, there may be one dominant vendor you deal with, such as Oracle or SAP, that also offers a social collaboration solution. If it fits your needs and you have the power to choose, that should probably be your choice.
On the other hand, the choice of the company-wide collaboration platform is just as likely to be dictated by the needs of IT and other constituencies for use in a broader array of business scenarios, and that may lead to a multivendor solution. Even then, you can investigate the options for technical integration. If there is an available software plug-in or prepackaged integration between these islands of social collaboration, try to work that into the budget. Creating your own custom integration may also be possible but more expensive.
You may just have to accept that perfect integration is impractical. If both your social applications and your core collaboration network offer a good experience, employees may value them without noticing the gap between them.
Recognizing Achievement
Whether you employ a structured employee performance app like Rypple or more informally recognize performance with comments in the activity stream, an internal social network provides a means of recognizing employees in front of their peers and encouraging more of the behaviors that drive corporate results.
Employees are already using social technologies at work, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned. “You’ve got to figure out how to leverage that to improve the performance of your employees and beat the competition,” says Heathre Moler, the human resources executive I quoted earlier.
When she led the implementation of Rypple at ETS-Lindgren (a manufacturer of radio frequency and microwave shielding products), it wasn’t part of any grander plan for social collaboration, but it was an important step toward changing some basic human resources processes, she says. Although she has since moved on to an HR role at another firm, she says, “I haven’t let go of what I believe about the value of providing a more real-time tool for performance that includes having social, visible goals people can share and contribute to.”
Now that Rypple has turned into Work.com, it may prove fortunate that ETS Lindgren is also a Salesforce.com customer. However, at the time she brought in Rypple, the sales team was just starting to experiment with Chatter and the two initiatives were unrelated. The first real experience the company got with internal social media was turning on the MySite feature of Microsoft SharePoint; that was the first collaboration environment in which every employee’s participation linked back to a profile with a photo.
The real impetus for introducing social performance management was a conversation with ETS-Lindgren President Bruce Butler about the company’s traditional performance review process, which was the subject of “a lot of belly aching from managers and employees alike” because no one saw the value in it, Moler says. “Employees would set goals at the beginning of year, but they probably didn’t get looked at again until review time the following year. The only time we would have a discussion about the performance review was when someone wasn’t doing well.” As a result, the company wasn’t “proactively rewarding good behavior” or helping employees calibrate their performances to line up with their goals, she says.
By introducing a continual, social feedback loop, the company introduced a much more dynamic process of tracking employee progress against both their personal goals and their operational goals for their roles within the company. The new process improved employee engagement with frequent feedback and informed a mentoring program the company instituted to coach employees toward better performance, Moler says.
Any social collaboration system will support the informal shout-out to someone who has done a good job. You can imagine that employees may be encouraged to publicly commit to their goals for the coming year with a status post as well. What social performance management applications add is the tracking to turn this from an ad hoc process to a structured one.
Because not every accomplishment that is important will be captured or have a badge associated with it, managers should be encouraged to post impromptu messages of praise and appreciation, too.
Synchronizing with HRIS
Regardless of whether your social collaboration environment is an extension of your human resources information system, it can benefit from Human Resource Information System (HRIS) data, particularly to enrich employee profiles. Because one of the goals of collaboration networks is to make it easier to locate expertise within the organization, the data about an employee’s educational attainment or completion of corporate training courses logged in the HRIS system should also be reflected in the social profile.
Between the HRIS system and a corporate directory (such as Active Directory), it ought to be possible to pre-populate every profile with at least a starter set of data also including contact information. Even in the absence of a live connection with ongoing synchronization, sometimes IT will use a mass import of HR and directory data to get profiles started at the launch of the collaboration network. If there is a photo in the system — for example, a security badge photo — that can be added to the social profile as well. Naturally, you want to provide colleagues with the option of replacing that photo with a better one and making other corrections.
Just as often, employees are welcomed by a blank profile screen and prompted to fill in the blanks manually. Often, they won’t be motivated to do a very thorough job of it, particularly if you’re asking them to supply information they would expect the company to already know.
If at all possible, you want to present employees with a social software environment that already knows a lot about them and is ready to learn more.