Employee Community – Intranet 2.0

“Work is a profoundly social activity. The design problem of cyberspace has thus become how to develop information systems that support work socially.”

Prof. David Hakken, SUNY Institute of Technology

The Problem and the Fact

Blogs can be a powerful communication and collaboration tool. Using this mechanism, today and continuing my blog series; I want to focus on the

idea of Employee Community (internal to an organization) and distinct from the ‘Customer Community” (external to an organization). In doing so, I want to highlight the… 

• Problem: Many companies are silos of information, where knowledge is either unshared, or lost.
• Fact: Silos are best left on the farm – not in your company, association or organization.

I think the term ‘silo’ serves as a relevant background for the problem.  Many are aware that the term ‘silo’ was snagged by the technology age and was taken to describe the technological simulation of the free-standing grain silos, a common sight wherever there are farms.  One word – two meanings.

A silo mentality within an organization assumes the position of independence, seclusion and isolation. Information, knowledge and original ideas are communicated top to bottom – vertically, and thus limited to those within the silo.  Interesting enough, the silo found on farms have no windows – nothing can be seen from within the boundaries of the silo; not even people in other silos.  (food for thought)!

Now, considering the age of technology and the speed at which it is evolving, it is no time to conduct “business as usual.”  Truth be told, the results of a siloed mentality are not hard to predict.

Some of the unintended consequences include:

• Managers, employees, departments are unable to freely communicate with other information management systems
• Supervisors are unable to efficiently track the collaboration and interactions amongst their projects and teams
• The company is prevented from monetizing the opportunities offered by an employee community Using Email exclusively for your communication prohibits knowledge to be easily shared and searched across the organization.

Good News:  Knowing and accepting the problem are the first steps to building a vibrant, active, community and will provide the infrastructure needed to connect these silos laterally.   The problem does have an Answer – its called Employee Community. I want to take into account just a few of the Benefits of an Employee Community.

An Employee Community will:

• Break down silos between teams and departments
• Enhance the knowledge repository and sharing across the enterprise
• Allow remote employees to stay engaged with business
• Allow targeted and purposed collaboration around company objectives
• Create mentoring with those with professional compatibility – like a new employee to a senior one, in the same department.
• Customize news and announcements; bringing together multiple areas of company information into one aggregate dashboard. 
  

At Avectra we have AvectraCommunity.com. It’s our own Employee Community. It’s already helping our own organization by allowing departments to interact both among their teams AND also across departments. HR uses it to share updates with particular teams, office locations or departments. Product teams can update stakeholders of new features and sales teams interact with engineers AND customers during proposal processes.

So now, as you consider your employee community, allow me to make a few Recommendations:

• Make it mandatory and develop a procedure for employees to use Community for knowledge sharing, otherwise… email will prevail.
• Top Down Support. The CEO and Executive team must not only endorse community use, but be users themselves.
• Integrate with your infrastructure: Whatever your employee management system is (HR system), such as NetSuite. That way when employees are hired or leave the company, the community is automatically updated.
• Have one overall community manager to ensure the community is correctly used, but also ensure each department has a community manager for their indvidual team.
• Make it fun! Use rewards, contests, or games for active or valuable community users. Those who are sharing or helping the most should be rewarded or recognized (vacation time, prizes, or even just Community Member of the Month).

“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.” 
- Joe Paterno 

Here’s to the success of your Employee Community!