1. What’s different when HR co-leads the digital workplace?
2. Why is HR late in social collaboration?
3. Call to action for HR professionals

HR says “engagement and belong” are primary goals for the DW

“Engagement and belonging” was defined as: help empower people, build trust across the organization, provide a place for people to “meet”, facilitate initiatives, recognize and celebrate accomplishments of people and of the organization.

So why is HR late to internal social media?

In July 2011 I wrote a post asking “Who has responsibility for social media in the digital workplace?” The low and late involvement of HR is startling to say the least. The data (from the second part of 2010) shows that the role of HR rises slowly as the enterprise gains experience in social and collaborative tools. However, even in organizations with 4 to 5 years experience in internal social media, fewer than 30 percent had HR involvement in 2010. It’s clear that HR is not a leader, at least, not two years ago.

My data from two years ago have been reconfirmed by a recent (free) report from the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) written by Silverman Research “Social media and employee voice: the current landscape” (immediate download) published in March 2013. It summarizes current literature on the employee voice and social media inside the workplace. Laura Hillman, Research Manager at Silverman Research, in a guest post on Social Media in Orgs, comments: “To date, much of the conversation within organizations has been about the risks and threats (especially to employers) that may be associated with social media. However, the perils of an open approach to employee voice and the benefits of more traditional closed systems are often overrated. Moreover, there is little organizations can do to stem the rise of social media. This reiterates the point that organizations should be designing their future in employee voice.”

Behavior and trust issues?

HR professionals say their organizations have specific concerns around social collaboration and two of these concerns suggest a lack of trust in people: “wasting time” and “irresponsible behavior”. They are expressed more strongly by HR than by Communication and IT professionals.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that HR professionals themselves feel these concerns. They are reporting what they believe their organization is concerned about, as are the other survey respondents from IT and Communication. Yet, I find it striking that the feedback from HR is so different compared to the IT and Communication professionals. I’m not sure how to interpret this.

Are you or do you know a proactive HR professional?

I received feedback (which I’ll soon be sharing) to part 1 in this series and would love to have more. I’d like to hear stories from proactive HR teams around the world about how they are helping prepare their people and organizations for the future. Please get in touch here or by email.

If you have a good story, and would like to share it, I’d be interested in interviewing you and, with your approval, publishing it here. Please get in touch.

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Reminder of data context: For purposes of this series of articles about HR, I focused on the 15 organizations represented by HR professionals in the digital workplace survey of Q3 of 2012 that served as the basis for “Digital Workplace Trends 2013”. This sampling of 15 organizations is representative of the full survey population in terms of range in size of workforce, wide variety of different industries, different international footprints and a mix of “desk-office” and “floor-field” organizations. The only difference between these 15 organizations and the others is that the participating organization was represented by an HR professional rather than a Communication or IT professional (who make up the large majority of the survey respondents). All survey respondents are key digital workplace players in their own organizations and, given their participation in the survey, I have worked on the assumption that HR co-leads digital workplace initiatives in these 15 organizations.

This is part one of a three-part series on the theme of “Is HR the missing player we are waiting for in the digital workplace?”

1. What’s different when HR co-leads the digital workplace?
2. Why is HR late in social collaboration?
3. Call to action for HR professionals

I studied the 15 organizations represented by HR professionals in the digital workplace survey of Q3 of 2012 that served as the basis for “Digital Workplace Trends 2013”. This sampling of 15 organizations is representative of the full survey population in terms of range in size of workforce, wide variety of different industries, different international footprints and a mix of “desk-office” and “floor-field” organizations.

The only difference between these 15 organizations and the others is that the organization was represented by an HR professional rather than a Communication or IT professional (who make up the large majority of the survey respondents).

All survey respondents are key digital workplace players in their own organizations and, given the HR participation in the survey, I have assumed that HR co-leads digital workplace initiatives in these 15 organizations.

At a strategic tipping point

Organizations with digital workplaces that are co-led by HR are at a tipping point where their actions are on the verge of elevating the digital workplace into a strategic position.

Three data points stand out:

• The digital workplace is more often positioned as part of an organizational transformation program.

40 percent of the organizations represented in the survey by HR report that “the digital workplace initiative is an official part of a higher level organizational-wide change program”.  This is much higher than the 10 percent of organizations represented by IT and the 12 percent represented by Communication. (The survey average was 20 percent.)

• More Digital Boards are being formed.

53 percent of the HR-represented organizations have a Digital Board that is either “fully functioning” (13 percent) or “exists in theory but not yet fully active” (40 percent). Again, this surpasses the 40 percent of IT-represented organizations (8 percent and 32 percent) the 34 percent of Communication-represented organizations (11 percent, 23 percent).

• However, senior management resistance is higher.

70 percent of HR-represented organizations report considerably more resistance from senior management to integrating social collaboration into the way of working. Both IT and Communication report 55 percent.

So, strategic steps are being taken even in a context of ‘less than strong’ senior management support for social collaboration, a basic capability in digital workplaces.

Employee voice in communities and crowds

HR-represented organizations give greater space to the employee voice.

I wrote previously about the fact that the right to self-expression in the digital workplace is low in over half the organizations.

In the 15 HR-represented organizations studied here, people are more likely to have capabilities in place that let people converse, connect, create communities and participation in idea generation and open innovation.

• 47 percent of the HR-represented organizations provide people with the capability to converse, connect and create communities. The survey average is 38 percent. This capability was defined as “enabling people to ask questions, have dialogue, get feedback and create groups and communities around topics, using micro-blogging or social networking tools”.

• 40 percent have capabilities enabling crowdsourcing, ideation and/or open innovation. The survey average is 26 percent. This was defined as “enabling people across the organization to propose ideas in response to an issue, a challenge, a need, etc. and to interact with other people’s ideas by using crowd sourcing, ideation, social networking, enterprise jams or other tools”.

Mobile and personal

Investment in mobile is higher in the HR-represented organizations and there is greater freedom for BYOD (Bring your own device.)

• 27 percent say mobile “is high priority and significant investment has already been made” and another 55 percent say it is “considered important and some investment has been made.” This makes total of 82 percent that are actively enabling mobile capabilities. Survey averages are 15 percent and 54 percent, making a total of 69 percent.

• 36 percent have a BYOD policy and allow personal mobile devices, which is only slightly higher than the 30 percent survey average. However, what is more striking is that 45 percent of the HR-represented organizations are moving ahead rapidly in to define their BYOD policy compared to the survey average of 27 percent.

Is HR responsible for these differences?

The data above raises several questions:

1. Is the presence of HR as co-leader in the digital workplace a trigger for these differences?
2. Or, do enterprises moving ahead rapidly in their digital workplaces have more HR involvement than others?
3. Why are there so few HR-represented organizations visible in digital workplace initiatives and forums?

Are you or do you know a proactive HR professional?

I would love to hear stories from proactive HR teams around the world about how they are helping prepare their people and organizations for the future. Please get in touch here or by email. If you have a good story, and would like to share it, I’d be interested in interviewing you and, with your approval, publishing it here. Please get in touch.

There are some basic human rights of self-expression that are still out of reach for employees in over half the organizations if we base ourselves on what they can do in their digital workplace.

Organizations with the entire workforce co-located are rare. Most organizations have people in different sites and many have people in different countries. Digital capabilities therefore key way to communicating and collaborating.

Let’s take 4 very basic examples of what a person might need.

“I should be able to…

• Describe myself, share information about myself with others in the organization,
• Share my information and my ideas openly,
• React to ideas of other people openly,
• Participate openly in developing new ideas and innovations.”

These are pretty basic human rights! I’ve looked at my data from 7 years of research about intranets and digital workplaces and have seen that these capabilities still do not exist in the digital workplace of nearly half the organizations today.

Inching forward to reach stagnation?

We have seen some progress over the years, but seem to have arrived at a point of stagnation. Note that the figures below represent the responses “available enterprise-wide” and “available in some parts of the organization” and are survey averages for the full survey populations of the years listed. They do not reflect early adopters. The reference year is the year the data was collected.

• Describing myself: 47%

47 percent of organizations have rich profiles today, up from 22 percent 5 years ago. (Data from 2008 through 2012.) Rich profiles let people describe their experience, expertise, skills, interests and activities themselves.

• Sharing my information and ideas: 50%

50 percent of organizations enable people to express their ideas and share information in what is often referred to as “user-generated content”. This means there are tools in place (such as blogs or wikis) that let people publish information without going through official intranet publishers. The figure has crept up gradually but is now stalled at 50 percent (30 percent in 2007, 35 percent in 2008, 45 percent in both 2009 and 2010, 50 percent in both 2011 and 2012.)

• Reacting to other peoples’ ideas: 40%

40 percent of organizations offer people the capability of making comments on articles and posts published internally. This figure has remained constant over the last three years. (Data from 2010 through 2012.)

• Innovating with others: 25 to 30%

From 25 to 30 percent of organizations have implemented ways for people to contribute ideas through open innovation activities such as ideation programs, crowdsourcing and idea banks. (Data from 2010 through 2012.)

The digital divide is here

Do a bit of research in your organization. Ask the people around you if they feel they can do the following, openly and easily with colleagues in other locations:

• Describe themselves, their experience and expertise
• Share their information and ideas
• React to ideas of other people
• Participate openly in developing new ideas and innovations

We know that even if these digital capabilities are present, it can often be a challenge to evolve towards a way of working where people communicate and collaborate freely and openly. But the figures above illustrate the sad fact that in many organizations, people do not even have these capabilities.

I fear we have reached a digital divide where organizations fall into the ‘have’ or the ‘have not’ category when it comes to digital capabilities. Given how the world is moving today and using digital capabilities for amazing things, the slow majority need to speed up or be left behind.

Organizations that have not yet made a significant move towards a more collaborative way of working are running a number of risks. Information is increasingly scattered over different platforms and tools as people build their own solutions. The essential distinction between managed, validated information and “work in progress” gets blurred unless there are some fundamental governance guidelines in place. Business and customer actions may be taken (or not) on the basis out-of-date or incomplete information.

People need specific capabilities in order to collaborate with each other. Recent data shows adoption of social collaborative capabilities is far from widespread, there is still resistance and fear in most organizations and it often comes from management. (Data included in the article).

In this article I look at two real cases and share three fundamental principles for implementing social collaboration to alleviate business risks. The two cases are radically different, the two organizations have very different cultures and priorities, but the principles (inspired by John Paul Kotter‘s work) are the same.

• One: Build urgency statements and relate them to business risks.
• Two: Empower people to act.
• Three: Blend short and mid-term actions through quick wins and process improvement.

In a nutshell, people need a reason to change, the power to act, and visible results from their actions.

Social collaboration comes down to basic capabilities.

People need to be able to do some very fundamental things:

• Share their ideas and information within their enterprise (user-generated content)
• React to what others are saying (commenting)
• Develop ideas and information with other people in real time (co-creation of content)
• Describe their own experiences and expertise freely (self-declaration)
• Create self-managed communities (networking).

So why is it so hard for organizations to get it?

Based on data from my latest Digital Workplace Trends survey, very few organizations have reached enterprise-wide levels of adoption. Even the early adopters with broad deployment of social collaborative capabilities have low levels of adoption.

Is social collaboration a waste of time? Does it bring no business value? These are the top two concerns expressed by people.

Or is social collaboration being blocked by management? Early adopters say middle managers offer the most resistance. The majority of organizations, those that are less advanced in social initiatives, say top management is blocking.

It’s risky to wait too long. Why?

I know two real, very different cases where the need for social collaboration has become urgent for the organization.

Case 1: “We risk losing our added value, our unique expertise.”

I’m working with an organization whose “product” is highly specialized advice and consulting in a sensitive and strategic domain. Many of the people are researchers and experts. A senior expert has from 25 to 30 years of experience and is now nearing retirement age. In 2 or 3 years, around one third of the experts will retire. The intranet contains a lot of content but is structured in silos making it hard to find information and people outside a person’s immediate environment. New employees are building new wiki-based sites that they find easier to maintain collectively.
This consensus-driven organization has a strong culture of trust, works primarily in face-to-face workshop mode, and has a long multi-step validation process for documents because of the critical nature of the content. Most consumer-similar tools (Skype-like, Twitter-like) are forbidden but people sometimes use them internally anyway because the need to do something is greater than the need to follow policy.

Case 2: “We risk losing business because of a chaotic information environment.”

Another organization I work with has an intranet that is 7 or 8 years old, on old technology that’s hard to use. They have a thriving social network. People who use it love it, so much so that they are beginning to store documents on it rather than in the document libraries or intranet.
But not everyone uses the social network. Individual people in different parts of the organization have built alternative solutions mainly by using wiki technologies. In the meantime, reference documents are stored in different platforms and hard to find if you don’t know where to look. An entrepreneurial culture has long existed in this organization as it has a strong engineer-driven, build-it-yourself attitude.

So how do we build a sense of urgency?

Any major change needs to be propelled by a sense of urgency. Urgent does not mean fast. It means important. It means “We need to act now.” For John-Paul Kotter, former professor at the Harvard Business School and world-renowned authority on leadership and change, establishing a sense of urgency is the first step in making lasting change.

How does urgency lead to lasting change?

However it’s not enough to build urgency. The compelling emotion of urgency must be sustained over time. Change does not happen over night.

The strategies in the two cases described above are built around 3 principles:

• One: Urgency statements are more compelling if they are related to business risks. This ensures that management will hear the message and that it may even be possible to do some measurement.
• Two: People must be empowered to act. Depending on the organizational culture, empowerment derives from top-down mandated programs or bottom-up validated initiatives. If both exist in the same organization, that’s ideal, but usually one or the other starts the ball rolling.
• Three: Short-term quick wins and mid-term process improvements are both essential to success. The quick wins keep up the momentum and improved processes embed change in daily work.

Let’s look at our two cases again and step through the three phases for each: (1) building urgency, (2) empowering people and (3) combining quick wins with process change.

Relate urgency to business risks.

Case 1 – Risk of loss of expertise and added value

• “We need to find secure ways of sharing information internally in real time. The risk of breaching information security by using external tools is greater than the risk of implementing ‘revolutionary real time’ tools inside.”
• “Our added value is our expertise. We must find a way to ensure we do not lose our unique business value when the senior generation of experts retires.”

Case 2 – Risk of business errors and liability

• “We are running the risk of making business errors and incurring financial and reputational liability. This is because of two issues.
  • Our information is so fragmented that people sometimes use ‘work in progress’ information thinking it is final policy.
  • Sometimes people just give up when they can’t find the information they need and ‘do what seems best’.”

Empower people.

Case 1 – Top-down mandated

Senior management are responding to the urgency. Their biggest challenge is time. Three parallel actions have been identified in order to lighten the analysis phase and make change happen faster. The internal digital team has been mandated to carry out the actions.

Case 2 – Bottom-up validated

The entrepreneurial spirit has kicked in and an operational team has self-organized. Their biggest challenge is to bring a necessary minimum of governance to a culture that has long been operating with few constraints. Their initiative has been validated by their line managers who have in turn gotten sponsorship from a top manager.

Work from quick wins to better processes.

Case 1 – Start with the obvious, then delve into process analysis and improvements.

• (Quick). Immediately implement key new capabilities that they know everyone needs. Examples: real-time messaging and support for BYOD (bring your own device).
• (Quick). Identify what exists in the organization and, where relevant, extend the local solution to a global scope.
• (Process). Conduct a needs analysis based on creating personas and see how they interact on the major processes of the organization. See if social collaborative capabilities can help simplify and accelerate how information and knowledge are shared.

Case 2 – Clean up and clarify, then build a light digital workplace governance framework.

• (Quick). Define and implement automated scripts to clean up (removing documents from the social network, putting intranet pages not accessed recently into a temporary archive, etc.).
• (Quick). Identify a “human” governance framework. Formalize an operational digital board with two types of members: “platform owners” and “business owners”. Get sponsorship from two top senior directors.
• (Process). The organization has decided not to build a digital workplace on a single platform. Instead, their plan is to define and communicate simple guidelines clarifying which platforms should be used for which needs. The guidelines are high level along the lines of: “You want to get feedback on an idea …. Do it on the social network. You want to develop a document with your team…. Do it in a collaborative space. You want to publish a new policy…. Do it on the intranet.” The purpose is to optimize each platform’s strong points, make content and information more findable, and still leave people free to decide how they organize their collaborative spaces and communities.

People need a reason to change, the power to act, and visible results from their actions.

• One: Relate urgency statements to business risks.
• Two: Empower people either by top-down mandate or validation of bottom-up initiatives.
• Three: Blend short and mid-term actions through quick wins and process improvement.

Change depends on people. Don’t forget that deployment is not adoption, and adoption is best triggered by a sense of urgency. Otherwise, why change!?

• Why social intranets disrupt organizations.
• Five reasons why social intranets have not taken off and what to do about it.

In a nutshell:

1. Lack of urgency
2. Middle management forgotten
3. No real empowerment
4. Fragmented digital environments
5. A lot to learn about change

Take a look at the presentation and tell me what you think.

It’s becoming clear that outward-looking teams get better results than those that are inward-focused. What does this mean for the digital workplace? It means social starts inside.

Social business is for everyone in an organization. After all, why does an organization exist? To serve its customers, be they commercial customers, distributors, members, citizens or the public.

Rawn Shah, Forbes contributor and social business strategist in IBM Collaboration Solutions, reports back from the Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2013 in Austin  on digging deeper into social data and how it improves team performance.

“Deloitte Australia long held a belief: High performance and business success hinges on tightly integrated teams. Everything was driven around that view of the world. A couple of years ago, they developed a technology to analyze all their interactions by phone, email, and social networks, and were shocked to find that quite wrong.

The system created a map of all these interactions that was mashed against the performance data and key metrics of the consultants and teams involved. It turns out that tightly integrated teams, the belief they held paramount, were not the high performers. Rather, it was the teams consisting of people that reached out broadly across the organization and interacted more diversely. Asking the right question of the social data allowed them to drive improvement on a new level.”

The enterprise social network enables “network teams”.

This is a very useful insight. We already saw this from the MIT Sloan study “Why project networks beat project teams.” (The original article is now behind a paywall.)  I’m a subscriber and reported it here in 2011 when it was published.) The teams who used their social network to reach out to experts in their organization, people who were not on the team, and involved them when their experience was useful, outperformed teams that remained within themselves, working on the project as a tightly knit unit.

We need more studies like this, showing the business value of social networks when they extend across the enterprise.

I’ve been asked to give a 15-minute talk about the state of the “Social Intranet” evolution – as the “new” maturity stage for Intranets. I’ll be sharing data and insights from “Digital Workplace Trends 2013” report. We’ll then spend 25 minutes discussing the key questions among panel members and  participants.

The European Enterprise 2.0 Summit takes place 20 and 21 March in Paris. It brings together a wide range of practitioners and experts for 2 days of debate, sharing and fun! The focus this year is very much on change and adoption of what many call “social business”, but I prefer to call “collaborative ways of working”. Recent studies, including mine, highlight that this is the next big challenge for organizations. Key questions are being raised by many, including Dion Hinchcliffe, who is keynoting the Summit.

Panel members:

• Stéphane Aknin, Head of Group e-Communications, AXA
• Marie-Ange Bertrand-Levy, Directrice des opérations, Talkspirit
• Na-Young Kwon, Microsoft

Stephan Schillerwein, Research Principal & Digital Workplace Advisor from Infocentric Research and Schillerwein Net Consulting will moderate the session and document the results.

See you in Session 07 “Social Intranet Evolution” Wednesday 20 March at 14:50.

The report is available for purchase. You can read full reviews and the table of contents. You can also download a free sample.

Excerpts from some of the reviews:

• Susan Scrupski, CEO and Founder, Change Agents Worldwide: “At $530, this is the most undervalued research product in the market.”
• Bill Ives, professional blogger and business writer: “If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.”
• Paul Miller, CEO and Founder, The Digital Workplace Group: “This year’s Digital Workplace Trends 2013 Report is ground-breaking.”
• Martin White, Intranet Focus, consultant, author and blogger: “This is the benchmark report on the development of digital workplaces.”
• James Robertson, Step Two Designs, consultant, author and blogger: “Figures and findings that matter to senior management.”

The digital workplace is disruptive for 3 major reasons:

• It breaks silos and structures.
• It challenges the traditional roles of HR, Communication and IT.
• It empowers people.

Concerns and approaches?  Take a look at the presentation below.

This disruption triggers two major types of concerns:

• “Wasting time” and business value
• Information security

How to advance the “digital workplace mode” in your organization? Three approaches are proposed at the end of the presentation.

• Make it real through personas and linking them together through common processes.
• Work on the big picture. A model is proposed.
• Leverage people: co-workers, champions.

Please note that the slides are talking points for a 45-minute presentation. In the preconference workshop ‘Defining your digital workplace” we worked in much more detail on these approaches, specifically on the DW model. More will be published on this later.

The answer is a resounding yes. There is more trust. There is more dialogue.  Both are fundamental to transforming how people work.

• Nearly 80 percent of early adopters say they have cultures where there is great trust across their organization even with people who do not know each other personally.
• Half say management consults people on certain issues before making decisions.
• Sixty percent say people in their organization are free to express their opinions even if they disagree with official policies and strategies.

The figures are far lower for the majority of organizations as the chart below shows.

My question to you: Did the culture of trust, sharing and dialogue already exist thereby letting the digital workplace thrive? Or did the move towards a digital workplace have a strong impact on the culture? The answer surely lies in the middle, with a strong correlation between the two.

How do you interpret these findings? How can the digital workplace help  build trust across an organization?

 For reference: these are the statements to which respondents indicated their agreement or disagreement:

• We have a feeling of trust across the organization, even with people we do not know personally.
• We work primarily in silos and have little interaction with people in other parts of the organization.
• Historically, our culture is one where sharing information and knowledge is encouraged.
• Sharing information and knowledge is encouraged, but this is something relatively new for us.
• Regularly, for certain issues, management consults people before making decisions.
• People feel free to express opinions even if they disagree with official policies and strategies.