Employee engagement communications

Building on a previous post about using social media for business engagement, I’m going to narrow this discussion to internal communications.

Businesses tend to be focused on ROI. And why not? If you’re going to be spending money, it should be purposeful and provide tangible results. There is a ton of discussion online about ROI calculations of social media. In fact, I’d suggest that horse has been beaten to death and kicked one too many times. But if you want links, here they are, and are, and are, and are, etc.

Here’s a bit of a case study: first the outline of the problem.

I worked in a medium sized corporation not too long ago. It was connected to a larger professional organization but tended to isolate itself as an arms-length entity. The employees there had created a culture over the years that was somewhat disjointed–different but the same as their wider peers across their professional organization.

Like many corporations, this one is caught in the grips of perpetual change: leadership shifts, organizational moves, staff growth in some business areas, retrenchment in others. The business has the tendency to silo due to the nature of the work and the organization of business activities–some employees are skilled professionals while others would be considered front-line service workers–teamwork across business areas is crucial to the success of both the business deliverables and the well-being of the organization.

Like all organizations of its size, this one has communication and knowledge transfer issues. I’d hesitate to call them critical problems; that said, a clear employee engagement strategy to create an open, multi-directional dialogue between leaders, managers, supervisors and employees would be beneficial. As would a well-defined plan to create an open source platform for business knowledge to be captured and spread throughout the many knowledge workers who depend on the expertise of long-time employees and leaders to do their work.

Much of the corporate written knowledge is contained on the corporate website and intranet. The intranet is problematic because it hasn’t seen an upgrade or redesign in years. As a result, some workers tend to shy away from using it as their primary source and prefer to create meetings and shop around documents to get what they need. This is a costly and time-consuming practice that often results in a logjam of product development. Two business areas even have regularly scheduled knowledge transfer sessions that resemble an undergraduate lecture.

Here’s my pitch:

Knowledge transfer

A corporate wiki on the intranet site edited by chosen subject matter experts regularly and published by designated approval actors. Initial content development is a minor issue as much of the content necessary to make this resource purposeful already exists. However a team of communications experts will need to organize the content in an intuitive, hyper-linked environment. Meetings scheduled for knowledge transfer should include clear wiki-deliverables: that is, if we’re meeting to hear about corporate knowledge, write it down and upload it to the wiki. The wiki becomes the default location of knowledge in this case–every subject contains the most recent version of the specific associated knowledge. Version control risks are minimized when knowledge is contained in one central location and format.

Engagement communications

This is a bit more tricky. Should you use Yammer–a closed Twitter-type community–or something like Ning, a closed Facebook-like community platform? I can understand the draw of Ning, as most people are familiar with what Facebook is and does. However, Yammer, to me at least, is so much more powerful for creating organizational conversations–streamlined, search-able and horizontal. The problem with Yammer, as I see it, is the lack of an intuitive application client to make it easy to keep the conversation flowing and organized.

Here’s the solution, laconi.ca plus twhirl, (solution find courtesy of Chris Brogan).  You get the benefits of a Twitter-client with a closed system like Yammer.

Like all communications efforts, these require careful planning and implementation. There should be research, development, testing, implementation and evaluation phases.

It all starts with buy-in at the top. It’s up to the internal actors doing the planning to convince the decision makers of the relevance of an internal conversation creating effort. My recommendation is to start with a baseline: answer the question “Where are we having corporate conversations currently and how do we measure their effectiveness?” Present those findings, pitch the additional conversation creating qualities of any new tools (we’re not replacing what we were doing previously, we’re building on those practices) and counter the initial negative reaction (if there is one) by asking “How do you evaluate the ROI of knowledge transfer meetings, corporate newsletters, employee events and whatever else our organization does to increase employee engagement?”

I think you’ll be surprised at the response. Or lack there of.