Community Overload: Overwhelmed with Too Many Options

Finally there’s an online community at the office for me to share my ideas about employee benefits.  Oh nice, now there’s a community to talk about healthy options as they apply to my employee benefits.  Hmm, here’s another invite to join the community for employees to talk about work life balance.  So now I have three communities just to talk about benefits at work?  What about the other communities I’ll want to join to share my ideas about my job, or locating information and other work-related interests?  Will I end up belonging to a hundred communities just at work? 

Employee-based communities and groups are being created everyday around every subject at the office.  That is unless the company and the community/communication manager has a strategy for natural community growth.  That’s a big IF. 

If you’re a company that has recently implemented social media tools that allow for communities or groups, then you’re the prime candidate to be affected by this problem.  So let me dissect this community overload problem.  Companies (and certain employees – early adopters, mandatory participation folks) often jump in to the community space, building and creating without much planning.  There’s no roadmap, organizational structure, business function grouping, business flow grouping, etc.  All of the sudden, communities are created for anything under the sun and even worse, there’s no hierarchy or structure.  Companies literally end up with duplicate communities for the same discussions and sharing of resources.  Community creators mean well, but the magnitude of available communities ends up being overwhelming and many of the spaces lack interaction and useful information.  Sound familiar?  It’s the same story of a bad intranet from a few years ago that we all know so well - too many sub-pages with static information.

Fixing the problem before it starts

So how do you go about not letting this community weed patch overgrow and smother the real social garden you’ve dreamed up?

1. Get to know your organization:  Take a step back and holistically review your company to find the common and natural threads.  For example, if your company is segmented by different businesses, yet has HR Business Partners residing in each business, create a community for all HR Business Partners company-wide.  This way, all of the HR Business Partners can share and network throughout the company, not just within their business unit.  Remember, communities allow for great networking based on shared interests.
2. Create a plan:  Start with a long-term strategy and then create a plan for today.  For the long-term, think about what you want to see in a year or two from now.  Also, what value do you expect to grow from creating over-arching communities?  Once you’ve determined what you want in the long haul, create your short list plan of tactics to get you started.  Plans that include month-long objectives work best for me in projects like this.  I suggest starting one or just a few communities and getting those right first. 
3. Connect the dots:  Just like when you create organizational charts for your company, build a similar template for your communities.  Which communities will be on the top?  What will the sub-communities be?  Communities can be more than just connected top to bottom.  Connecting communities by relation is also helpful.  Related should be used when a community doesn’t speak to the same subject of another community, but may share some of the same ideas or concepts.  This will help employees find other spaces of interest.  Think of that phrase we always see when registering for a conference, “You may also be interested in”.
4. Who will create the communities:  There are two schools of thought here.  You can choose to let only a select few community managers own the process of setting up communities.  If you do, I suggest building in a process for employees to request new spaces to share and chat.  If employees are not involved in creating their own social world, you’ll have less engagement.  The other option would be to let all employees create communities.  The negative here is a giant mass of communities that may not work.  The positive to this option is possibly more employee participation.  I would challenge you to find a happy medium. 
5. Be nimble:  There will undoubtedly be communities that have not been set up.  In fact, it should be part of your plan not to know everything.  You should be asking yourself, how will these communities grow and stay current?  As community requests are received or the current community structure seems out of shape and misguided, take a fresh look at your social garden.  Maybe you need more of one thing vs. another.  It’s normal to adjust and tweak as you go.  Just like your company, your communities will take new directions.    

As you can see, it’s not rocket science at all.  Of course, these are my thoughts based on my experiences.  I’ve seen bad examples and I’ve seen some good successes.  The real trick is creating a strategy, laying out the community outline before you start to build, and be part of the success.  Repeat after me, plan and be nimble.

The Intranet: Communication Portal or Employee Toolkit?

Over the last year or so, I’ve seen a quiet war waging between communicators and employees.  Communicators passionately want to share breaking news, org changes, evergreen stories and the not so timely letter from the CEO.  On the employee end they say yes, keep me in the know.  But there is another want, not yet verbalized. They are really asking for a place to find what they need.  Employees want to get their hands on the ever elusive employee policies, org charts, and all of the tools that will help them be good company citizens while allowing them to focus on the job they’ve been hired to do.

Yesterday’s Intranet
The typical intranet seems to have all the basic offerings with obvious issues.  Your navigation may look good, but at closer inspection one will notice the cryptic link definitions based on departments and project areas.  Somewhere in this labyrinth lies useful information. But first you have to figure out the department that manages the form you need.  Now throw in a dash of the public and internal (if you’re lucky) company news.  Then there's a showcase of a new employee or new project in the company.  As you scroll down further you’ll find hidden gems like about us, bad clip art, a pointless integration of SharePoint or similar tool, and way too many animated graphics – all not updated in months. Lastly, if you’re a larger company, you may have invested in an enterprise software that allows employee self service via your intranet. These functions will be somewhere clickable in navigation, hopefully.

How about search? Do you suffer from a case of badsearchitis? Have you ever surfed the intranet looking for an HR form or IT policy?  Or maybe you need to use the enterprise system to log in your hours worked, file an expense report, or view your paycheck.  These and many more tasks have filled company intranets for the last few years.  No longer do employees log on to the company homepage just to find out the company stock price or view the world clock.

We communicators have worked diligently on our editorial calendars, giving departments a voice, and creating a home for employees.  But that was yesterday.  Today came a while ago and it’s time to take the best of our world and combine it with enterprise software, collaboration apps and tools “to get the job done”.  It’s time to make the shift to an Employee toolkit.

Employee Toolkit – key essentials
Admitting the need to evolve from a communication portal to a blended approach is the first step of bringing real business value to your intranet real estate.  It’s time to load your space with all of the key essentials.  Here’s a list of the core basics that companies may find useful.  Based on the needs of your company, you may need to cherry pick the options.

1. Easy to use navigation & organization – make it simple, make it clear, and make it meaningful.  Do away with department pages and define the links by subjects.
2. Search – It should work!  This is the starting spot for most employees.  Make sure your meta data is correct and that your search tool is crawling all of your spaces (intranets, SharePoint, etc).
3. Resources – Group key forms, policies, guides, finance information and the like.  Imagine having a one-stop shop for all the things you need.  Life would be amazing. (It’s ok to have separate sections for benefits and large categories as long as they truly are large – remember, simple navigation)
4. Enterprise tools – This is an important one. If you use something like SAP or Oracle for self service, make it easy to find and use. Have a great user interface – it’s so important.  Employees want this to be a no-brainer and they will love you for it.
5. Company News – Share important news and share it timely. Employees shouldn’t have to read about key company changes in the external news.
6. Interaction/Collaboration – Create a space (as part of the Intranet) for employees to have a voice in the news, resources, and to also continually shape their intranet. Plant and tend this garden.
7. Mobile – Everything is becoming mobile. Your intranet should be the same. If you can’t make it all function on a smart phone or tablet, aim for core tools like highly used self-service functions, company news, and collaboration. More and more, employees are bringing their smart devices into the office.
8. Customizable – Let employees choose what is important to them. I’m a big believer in providing framework and the main elements. But let employees have a voice in their home. As consumers (yes, employees are consumers), we see this everyday with iGoogle and MyYahoo.
9. Help – Share contact lists, phone numbers, and email addresses for your help groups – HR, IT, Legal, Finance, etc. Employees will call the IT help desk if they do not know who to call. Talk about frustrating for everyone.
10. Emergency Information – If you’re company is large, you’ll need a space to share what’s happening if an emergency arises. Think real-time and easy to see. Employees should and need to be safe.

The trick here will be in placement and design. If you make 3/4 of the page news, then you’ve lost the Employee Toolkit idea. Intranets should not be the CNN of your company.  Design the page so it’s truly the place to find the tools and information employees need to stay informed and get their job done.  Your home should be a resource employees want and need to visit daily.

Questions to stir the pot

What other essentials would you add to the list? What are your barriers in making the right intranet change? What has worked and what has failed?

Filtering Through The Social Media Noise

I've been hearing a lot of chatter throughout different companies lately. It's not just happening down the hall. It's online and it's noisy. 

Have you noticed the noise that accompanies social media? There is a lot of good, even great information to be shared in the social space. But to find it, one still has to find their way through the chatter maze. When I started seeing this happen behind the firewall, I realized that this is going to impact employee adoption and make the all important executive buy-in, nearly impossible to obtain.

So how do we filter through the noise and find real business value? It's best to organize the approach by a few categories and tactics.

• Take an assessment of the tools in place for social medial. Find out where the noise is coming from. For example, are employees micro-blogging on tools like Yammer? Do employees share blogs and photos on an internal social networking site? The noise may be in different places or in just one place. Employees may be sharing lots of information in a big way. But is it organized?
• Discover what employees want. Do employees want to collaborate on creative work? Do they want to find job opportunities? Maybe they want to stay connected to real time changes. Assess their needs and use these real-life examples to teach. This will also please the executives since you'll be better able to connect these needs to business goals and ROI. 
• Document and share the best practices and education around the tools in place. How about creating a course for your employees to learn the ins-and-outs of Yammer? Teach them how to use tags/hashtags, topic groups, and narrowing the viewable feed. Each tool offers ways to manipulate the data and it's visibility. Help employees find what they want and teach them to organize their sharing.

Are there methods you've tried that have quieted the noise? Are you offering official training in social media? If so, what do your classes look like? Are they in person or online?

YouTube Goes Round

What would make YouTube even better? Making the video screen round of course. Who doesn't want to see videos shaped like a Oreo, a plate, or even a record. Yep, now it's easy to spin me right round (like a record). The characters in the video are awfully cute. Soon to go viral? We'll have to see. 

Thanks to Cadbury, YouTube has a promotion that changes the video shape and offers some entertaining videos. Cadbury Dairy Milk is marketing their Rollpack. Clever idea. Only issue with the videos, they cannot be embedded. So just click on the picture below to see the videos for yourself. 

If You Build It, They Will Come

You just finished the final preparation to launch your company's new intranet. Even better, you've built it with all the social media functions, including employee blogging, status updates, discussion forums and the list goes on. You're beaming with excitement for the world to see your hard work and to finally give employees what they've been asking for. Confidence will lead you to flip the switch, send the welcome email, and see employees living on their new site.

Two months later, blogs have been started and stopped, status updates are stale, employee profiles are still incomplete, and all you can think is, employees lied - they are not using what they've asked for.  

Sound familiar? Maybe it's not the same project for you, maybe it was the creation of a company event, an upgrade to a company tool, a new communication vehicle, etc. I've seen it happen a lot and I've even experienced it. Just building or delivering social media to our employees, even if it's great, isn't enough to get them to engage. 


The culprits

• Strategy: For a few different reasons, you may be launching your project without a complete strategy or plan to support this new space. Maybe it's because your executive has told you, "we just need to get it out there" or "we just need to deliver on time". The only answer here is, strategy is a must. Otherwise how can you answer the question, why am I doing this project and what will it solve?
• It's not social: Have you ever compared internal social media to Facebook and Twitter? If so, stop. Leaders and employees both usually think of these platforms as social. As in, for fun,  to keep up with family, friends, share memories - nothing to do with networking and employment. Try explaining the new social media tools with real examples. Speak to the power of networking, breaking down company hierarchy barriers, extending knowledge, and collaboration on documents with a larger audience. Employees need to understand why social media is not extra, it's part of their job, just like email. Help them learn the "why". 
• Guidelines: Employees need to know more than just what's new. They need to know how to interact. A lot of companies are publishing social media policies. These are great to tell employees what not to say. But how about teaching employees how to say it. Help them answer the question, what's the difference between a blog and a forum. Teach them the tool, share the best practices and build easy to understand guidelines.
• The company says it's OK: While some employees are early adopters and embrace technology change, not all feel the same way. I've heard from employees that they are not comfortable sharing information so publicly when the company hasn't officially said it's OK to do so internally. Yes, send the email sharing the news that the company embraces their opinion. But also, get the executives in the space. Employees are looking for their voices as an OK to proceed.    

These often overlooked ideas will help guide you in the right direction. Mark these off on your project planning and you'll be a step ahead. 

Of course, there are many other factors to think about. So I ask these questions of you:

• What has helped you reach your communication goals in a project or launch?
• If you've rolled out social media for your employees, what's been the biggest challenge?