Employee engagement Part 1
Extract from ‘Defrag your business’.
I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking charity web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to log on every day or so 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 and changed our horizons and expectations of how we find information and interact massively. 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 rich media applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect our intranets, our most powerful internal communications tool, to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually and fundamentally not much has changed.
I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as it presents me and you with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is, more often than not, passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.
Intranet audits were a staple of my experience. I have seen lots of them. Way too many for anyone who wishes too maintain their sanity. With some glorious exceptions, which I can count with my socks off, there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet has acknowledged by management as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of technology and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication, engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we like to put into our mission statements.
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 and benefits for social computing applications on intranets are huge.
Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge bank. (Arguably more useful is actually a 'failure bank' but that’s another story) These tools are used so not much for communication but address 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, (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?
Lets just pick one simple example. The commonest .net2 deployment are, or at least should be, blogs used for collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. This is frankly bonkers as they take seconds to set up and can save thousands of pounds
Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine, and I know this is a stretch, 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.
The often quoted example of this in practical action is BT's launch of their Home Hub. Initially it was an unmitigated disaster but, by using a blog site to give direct feedback from sales people, installers and development engineers to the CEO, it was transformed into the biggest selling device of its kind, not just in the UK but across Europe.
Imagine her feeding back to the team, the whole team, 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.
The phrase I often hear from frustrated CEO's who are bemoaning the lack of communication is that 'my door is always open'. Yes, it might be but it works both ways too.
As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.
So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss? Mistrusted and a place of last resort for finding information.
Frankly, because it is not that big a signal on the corporate radar simply. 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 key 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
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 more 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 you can generally just pick one of the following and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases it's just simply down one major decision, often made at the beginning of conception- who will be its owner? Who looks after it, nurtures it and cultivates it? For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What should a knowledge manager manage then?
So who does own it. It is seen by many as a poison chalice - it is easy to pass the buck to IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now, and this may surprise a few people who know me but 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. (It's really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks).
It 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 given their workload of fixing printers and replacing laptop keyboards that are allergic to Starbucks Latte, 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? And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making all that compatible with their new ERP system or SAP.
Corporate IT staff and corporate comms 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 actually be hugely relevant and have a massive benefit 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. 20th century communication in a 21 st century world. And any way, should the IT department 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, and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.
Many communicators/managers ( if that is not a contradiction, sorry but I'm just a bit skeptical), figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? This is an interesting view from those who inhabit the dreamworld of delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least for every IC and innovation projects I know and have worked on, is that its about change and change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end date, think that box is ticked and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing life-cycle. Even more so for the company Intranet. It should be the heartbeat of any organisation. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.
Trust, and that is the key element in all effective 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 an historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.
Inevitably at some point we have to start talking numbers to justify investment in fixing tweaking or ripping up and starting again. As you or somebody else from higher up the food chain will undoubtedly obligingly point out, 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 and tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interesting to see the metrics applied to measure its affect, success or return on investment. Generally these amount to a big fat none, which, for any management process is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.
And, if you don't think your intranet may not be mission critical in your organisation, here is one statistic you may like to reflect upon. Even if this is only half true is still truly breathtaking. On average the typical administrator in any office environment spends 45% of their working day looking for information to help them do their job. I am assuming that those who could make the decision to invest time, effort and funds in getting the intranet right have no concept or are remotley interested in the impact that freeing up 25% of their colleagues time could have on, their customer focus, their efficiency and even, their bottom line. If this tone appears slightly sarcastic my apologies, but it arises from the huge frustration that my experience has shown me that faced with all the other daily challenges what is looking them, literally in the face, every time they log on to their network is often the cause of so many of their problems.
The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive to implement.
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 and the best intranet in the world won't help you.
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? I see that in any comany and I’d be polishing up 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 and her boss's boss
Rainmaker 2009
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