Employee engagement Part 1
Extract from ‘Defrag your business’.
I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to come in every day and see what the boys and girls have achieved. No-one can say that web technology hasn’t taken massive leaps forward over the last few years. Except, that is, if they look at one specific area. Intranets. Almost without exception they look exactly the same as they did five years ago. While the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true Web-based applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually fundamentally not much has changed.
I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as being in exactly this business it presents me and frankly my business with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.
Intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see lots of them, I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. With some glorious exceptions that I can count with my socks off there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet it is actually seen as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of intranets and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication and engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we put into our mission statements.
Sure, forums, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto some intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us, the social bookmarking Web site. The opportunities for social computing applications on intranets are huge.
Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge banks.( arguably more useful is actually a failure bank but that’s another story) These tools are used so not much for communication but stitches into the ‘at least we know where it is when we want to find it’ principle. But the true asset value of a company is its knowledge repository. It is 60% and more or your net worth if you believe Harvard Business School. Can you think of a better reason than giving the management of knowledge flow, its retention and acquisition in your organisation anything less than 150% support and making it your number one priority? I can’t think of any either but amazingly although Internal communications, innovation and differentiation features in pretty well every survey of corporate priorities, and even more annual reports, few pay it more than lip service. Why? Because it is hard to do and few know really where to start. ‘We tried the intranet thing but it doesn’t work ‘is probably the most often used phrase I hear. So you give up do you? Or, do you just get better at it?
The commonest .net2 deployment are blogs used by collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. Which is frankly bonkers.
Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine the impact and discussion arising from 40 sales people dealing with the inevitable launch issues and how quickly these issues would be flagged, fixed and customer facing people made aware of solutions.
Imagine him feeding back by video with a small thank you and identification and appreciation. It really isn’t hard this stuff but lets not get too giddy here.
As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.
So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss?
Frankly, because it is not that big signal on the corporate radar simply because on the face of it there are few metrics that can get put on the spreadsheet for the weekly meeting that get the juices going. It is true to say that the benefits (and costs) are largely hidden. But if you have to pick one try just this one. Staff retention. Then look at the incurred costs for loss of knowledge and recruitment and training. Now that is truly scary. It can wipe of the profit for a business unit in no time. One loss alone will pay for the tweaks in the intranet that may (I would say probably) alleviate much of the frustration in allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Which, if you are still awake, is cited as the number one reason individuals leave jobs
If you can’t measure it then you can’t do anything about it. Its blindingly obvious and one of the true clichés in business. I don’t know why I even have to mentioned it. This position is reinforced by the often prevailing view that it is just good money chasing after bad. The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now? Many executive teams, optimistic about the intranet’s potential in its early days, now wonder what all the noise was about. While there certainly are productivity tools online—that’s just a matter of common practice in the workplace anyway—the innovation and the knowledge sharing that was supposed to flow from the intranet just never materialised.
Why? Well we could point to a range of contributing factors. Actually just pick one and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases its just simply down one major description often made at the beginning of conception- will will be its ownership. Who looks after it, nutures it and cultivates it. For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What does a knowledge manager manage then?
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Being more specific it is easy to blame IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now I’m going to stick up for them, well for a minute anyway. It’s a s**t job. That is why they bring their own sandwiches, it is their one small pleasure. (Its really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks). I
t is a close tie as to whether HR or IT departments get more bad raps. To be fair to IT they have probably invested time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and, unsurprisingly, are in no hurry to move in a different direction. They haven’t had their lunch yet anyway. Intranet software vendors aren’t exactly blameless either. Few are using .NET2, most use ASP. or ASP.net at best. which is five year old technology. Do you get the theme here? I can’t help thinking what is going to happen next few years and when are they going to make that leap. And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making that compatible with their new ERP system.
Corporate IT staff and corporate coms staff, some of them, anyway—are largely under informed, if we can put it delicately, about what’s happening on the Web and often have a blind-spot that something they use daily actually could be relevant to them. They hold the belief, justified or not that ‘Our company would never sanction that’ so they don’t suggest or push their ideas forward. Its a self fulfilling prophecy and a depressing spiral. And any way, the IT department should be doing that. Who should be keeping on top of this - Can it really be the IT department’s responsibility, most of which are stretched pretty thin just keeping the meter fed, printers on line, drying out the latte in sales reps keyboards and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.
Many communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? An interesting view from the delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least the ones I know, change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing lifecycle. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.
Trust in communications is developed through consistency, relevancy timeliness and accuracy. One intranet I recently was asked to look at had not had anything added to it for three years. That is not an intranet, it is a historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.
Then we start talking numbers as you or somebody else from higher food chain undoubtedly obligingly point out. That there already has been an investment that been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for. It’s difficult for organisations to write off significant investments in order to start from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you should persevere with old tools tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interested to see the metrics applied to measure its affect, success or return on investment. Generally it’s a big fat none, which is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.
The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive either to implement. SOAS such as Basecamp to name but one, or my current favourite Page flakes which has now demoted my I-Google as my home page costs peanuts or less than that compared to your ERP or SAP introduction. The effect though is disproportionately positive
There are some practical limitations too and by far the trickiest for most organisations, both public and private sector, is struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are an anathema to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content. But is that what they should be their role anyway? Is there an argument for loosening the approval processes in key areas? I’d argue, yes absoblinkinlutely yes. Should senior management really be a feared of any possible negatives and shouldn’t they be aware of them and manage them anyway? We live in a world of 360 degree reviews and employee engagement surveys, you carry out them of course don’t you? You don’t? Well you are in trouble then.
Or maybe you subscribe to the view I saw recently in a post from an HR VP which was a thinly disguised ‘You should be bloody lucky to work for us, just get with it’. And then to sweeten the message, guess what, we are having a pajama day next week just to show you how cool and cute we are. Erm, yeah. Really? Then I’d polish my CV. You will be needing it when your competition cream you into history or you get ‘outsourced’.
Just ask for this stuff, what can they say? No? Its just a word and won’t kill you. I’m hoping here that you actually have some form of innovation and idea management built into your intranet. No? Then start reading at the top again and pass this onto your boss.
Copyright Rainmaker 2008
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