Chapter 20
Ten Common Themes in Social Collaboration Success Stories
When social collaboration is successful, it makes the organization adopting it more successful. The payoffs come in the form of innovation, efficiency, camaraderie, and engagement.
What distinguishes the successes from the flops? I try to answer that in this chapter, based on common themes in social business success stories I’ve encountered during the research for this book, as well as my work for InformationWeek and the Social Business Leaders program at the E2 conference.
Not every success story exhibits every one of these characteristics, but most could cite several of them.
Executive Sponsorship Makes a Difference
I discuss the CEO’s perspective in Chapter 15. Not every initiative is fortunate enough to have a CEO who starts blogging and commenting and promoting the social collaboration network as soon as it goes live, as UBM’s David Levin did. He seized on the introduction of the platform as a way to encourage better communication and more cohesion within a diverse, multinational company.
More often, the most passionate social collaboration advocates are several levels removed from the top of the company, whipping together a pilot project on a shoestring and trying to demonstrate enough value that senior executives will pay attention.
Seek executive sponsorship at whatever level you can find it. Inspiring a department head to participate on the network and encouraging his people to participate will give you the opportunity to show what social collaboration can do on that level, which can in turn be an argument for broader use and a more official endorsement from leadership.
Some executives, particularly older ones, may give their consent without becoming active participants on the network themselves. Thank them for giving the okay, but keep working to recruit them as at least occasional participants. At a minimum, educate them on how a collaboration network works and what to expect from it.
Executive tolerance is just as important as participation. If you tell people the goal is an open and transparent organization and then have company leaders punish those who speak their mind, the online conversation will come to a halt. That doesn’t mean the organization and its leaders ought to tolerate extreme disrespect or rudeness or clear violations of the acceptable use policy for the collaboration network. If the online behavior is extreme enough, the community will expect it to be dealt with appropriately. But if a statement could possibly be considered constructive criticism, it probably should be.
Community managers may have to manage up the organization, coaching executives on what to expect and the most productive ways to respond to criticism.
Familiarity Is Just a Starting Point
Successful organizations don’t assume that employees will figure out how to use the collaboration network productively, just because it looks something like Facebook. Consumerization is your friend, but it gets users only so far. Make sure to provide the necessary guidance, training, and encouragement so that employees are successful in using your social collaboration tools productively.
Because it exists to help organizations get work done, social collaboration is as different from a consumer social network as it is similar. That means documentation, training, and coaching are required. The good news is that after users pick up the basics, the platform itself can become the vehicle for sharing ideas about how to use it better.
One way to deliver rewards along the way is to use gamification, a user interaction strategy that applies some of the techniques that motivate game players. Techniques adapted from games can be used to motivate and reinforce other sorts of behaviors, such as the effective use of specific software. A simple way to do that is to award stars or rankings based on a user’s level of participation. New users on the network can even be assigned “missions” related to fleshing out their profile or posting their first status.
I discuss gamification product selection criteria in Chapter 8 and the use of gamification in Chapter 12.
Don’t Hamstring Use
At the same time when companies must win over employees who resist social networking, they also need to tap in to the knowledge and energy of those who have been using Facebook and Twitter for years. If they find that their supposedly forward-thinking organization has turned social networking into a bureaucratic chore, they will not be impressed. Don’t focus so much on preventing misuse of the social collaboration network that you prevent productive use.
Restaurant chain Red Robin made a conscious decision to implement its Yammer collaboration network without a lot of rules around how to use it, other than basic acceptable use policies. Restaurant workers adapted pretty readily to social media interaction because Yammer looked and functioned a lot like Facebook, says CIO Chris Laping. Social collaboration “gets out of the hierarchy and works the network,” Laping says. “To me, it’s the essence of fast companies and next-generation companies.”
When Red Robin introduced its Tavern Burger product line, store manager feedback on Yammer proved to be an important part of refining the product and its delivery. Customers “talked to the servers, the servers talked to the managers and the managers got on Yammer,” Laping says.
Using those store manager discussions on the enterprise social network (internally branded as Yummer), Red Robin was able to refine the recipes and the operational processes in the restaurants in about four weeks — a process Laping estimates would have taken 6 to 18 months in the past. Without it, operations leaders would have been “scratching their heads” wondering why the product wasn’t performing as expected, he says.
Build on What Works
Social collaboration advocates should pay attention to what works, and then do more of that.
For instance, when social collaboration starts at a grassroots level, give strong consideration to building on its technology of choice, even if it would not have been the first choice of enterprise IT. In some cases, that won’t be possible because the rogue product is truly awful, missing critical enterprise features. In that case, shut it down, but try to give the people involved a soft landing on your new, official platform.
Build on successful teams and processes as much as technology.
TD Bank started with a simple experiment, using simple tools: not a full collaboration system, but software that let employees comment on newsletter articles posted to the company intranet. The response showed people would take the time to share their ideas about improving the business. For example, an article asking about bank workers’ biggest frustrations prompted one teller to suggest that a paper-based enrollment process could be handled much more efficiently online. Hundreds of other employees quickly voiced agreement and added ideas about how it should be done.
“The idea had come up before, but until social [networking] amplified it, it was not a priority,” says Wendy Arnott, TD Bank’s VP of social media and digital communications. That small success led to bigger plans for social collaboration, based on the IBM Connections platform.
“Once you get to having communities of thousands of people, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy — people want to join so they can see what is going on,” says Mark Torr, the administrator of a technology practice interest group on The Hub, an internal social network at SAS Institute that is based on Socialcast. That group currently has more than 2,000 members who participate in discussions on technology marketing.
Torr said it’s true that although an enterprise social network adds yet another channel for business communication on top of e-mail, at the same time it potentially cuts down on some e-mail. “It’s just like when they invented e-mail, the phone didn’t stop ringing,” he said. “On the other hand, on social networks people don’t tend to write quite as verbosely, so you get to the point a lot quicker.”
Get Off to a Good Start
There are many ways to get started with social collaboration:
Embrace a grassroots effort and start to expand it, now with the organization’s blessing.
Launch a pilot project for one particular department or function, making the collaboration platform available to only those employees.
Launch the collaboration network to everyone at once, making a big splash, company-wide.
Launch the collaboration network to everyone at once, but target a particular department or function for training and support. If adoption spreads to other groups, that begin using it on their own initiative, terrific.
Any one of these can be successful, but the targeted approaches tend to work better. Pick a department or a function that you think has a good chance of success with social collaboration and try to generate some proof points that will convince others to come onboard.
Show Relevance
Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance at Unisys, wishes she had started earlier to tailor training to different types of jobs. Focused training works, as does encouraging employees to share lessons about how social tools work or don’t in a particular job.
“Nothing drives the adoption of something new more than a colleague telling you it works for them,” Burke says.
Unisys’s social business initiative has succeeded partly because of a top-down push from executives who recognize its importance, Burke says, and because of the groundwork laid by prior knowledge management initiatives over the past decade. The IT services company uses NewsGator’s Social Sites for SharePoint as its company-wide enterprise social networking platform. Sales and marketing teams use Salesforce Chatter collaboration software, but they also have access to NewsGator when they need to reach the broader organization.
What’s most important is helping people in sales roles achieve the goal of “market agility,” says Burke. One example is using a mobile device to post a customer’s question to colleagues during a client meeting. Using a search of employee social profiles can find an expert in order to “get the answer before they even leave the office,” says Burke. “That’s impressive to the client.” In a case like that, the tool of choice would be NewsGator because it reaches more people, across different areas of expertise.
Conquering Time and Space
These days, very few organizations operate by having everyone in the same place at the same time. They rely on home office workers, road warriors, branch offices, overseas offices, contractors, and outsourcing firms for different fractions of their labor.
There are all sorts of synchronous tools we use to collaborate long-distance: Phones, mobile phones, web conferencing, and video conferencing all play a part. Social collaboration is a good asynchronous counterpart, able to work across time zones or generally deliver a message later to someone who is not available now. Compared with e-mail (otherwise, the default), social collaboration provides better context and a wider variety of modes of interaction.
Many social collaboration platforms also include synchronous communication tools such as chat or instant messaging, or the option of integrating with unified communications platforms for Internet video and phone calls.
The most successful users of social collaboration tend to have the need to support a geographically distributed organization, which provides the motivation for embracing the tools and learning to use them effectively. They succeed because they make mastering social collaboration a business priority.
Fight Fragmentation
Social collaboration is often most successful as a unifying force in organizations that are otherwise fragmented.
At SuperValu, that was one of the reasons Yammer was initially adopted on an ad hoc basis as a freemium product and later endorsed by the CEO and IT. Having grown through acquisitions, the grocery chain operated on hodgepodge of systems and management hierarchies that were separated by brands (such as Shaw’s in the Northeast and Albertson’s in the West). The enterprise social network proved to be a unifying force, bringing together store managers from across the country and across brands to discuss issues they had in common. For example, store managers across all brands who operate in college towns or seashore communities now collaborate on marketing programs to serve those audiences, something they never had a good way of doing before.
A social software project leader at an industrial firm tells a similar story about factory managers from different divisions and different parts of the world making connections they never would have otherwise and solving problems faster as a result. For example, when employees at one location began conferring online about the problems they were encountering with a new fabrication process, their Jive installation was smart enough to give them a “if you like this conversation, you’ll probably also like this conversation over here” prompt. As a result, they connected with workers in a factory on the other side of the world who had encountered the same problem.
Maintaining Order
Social collaboration software is designed to help online communities be self-organizing as much as possible, allowing people to connect, share, form groups, and develop content on their own initiative. However, the most successful social collaboration strategists understand that communities don’t truly manage themselves, not entirely.
As social collaboration networks mature, they can also accumulate obsolete documents, inactive collaboration groups, outdated answers to questions and other content that could do more harm than good if users stumble across it in a search. Effective community managers try to minimize the accumulation of such cruft in the first place and eliminate it in periodic house cleanings.
Even more importantly, they highlight the best and most useful content and the most active and helpful communities, making those as easy to find as possible.
Showcase Success
Social collaboration can be a powerful force for making people feel better about where they work and the work they do. Encourage the use of the network for peer recognition on an ongoing basis (all those Great job! and Congratulations on winning the sale! posts) as well as more official recognition for exceptional work.
Consider the use of social recognition apps such as Salesforce.com’s Work.com, which encourage employees to award each other badges for desirable behaviors. In addition to serving as visual tokens of recognition, these symbols serve a classification function, allowing managers to go back and see how much peer recognition each person has earned as part of a performance review.
As a selfish interest, community managers and collaboration strategists will also want to showcase the role of the network in promoting success. However, for best results, emphasize the contributions of the people on the network rather than the software that drives it.