A Bottom-Up Approach to Communication

• Encouraging input from front-line staff may increase their acceptance of policy change… or at least their understanding
• Feeling valued increases employee satisfaction and retention
• Opens up dialog about other topics

What’s this all add up to? It’s simple: no matter what side of the business you’re looking at, communication is key. It holds huge sway over your bottom line, and that is a reason to pay attention.

As 2017 ramps up and we near the halfway point in Q1, this is a great time to breathe new life into your internal communications program. Rather than risk stagnation, why not try a few bold new initiatives to open up transparency or knowledge sharing in your organization?

At Interact we frequently discuss the finer points of of bottom-up communication and Enterprise Social Networks. Those are all wonderful topics, but this week we’re thinking a little further outside the box. So with that in mind, here are our picks for the 4 creative comms ideas you need to try.

1. Use personas

What are personas, you might ask? Simply put, they’re stand-ins for real users on your company intranet or any other communications network you use. These personas are constructed using the concerns and interests of workers from various departments and then used to post content on the intranet.

A couple things are important to keep in mind when constructing a persona. The first is to keep them human! You’re not trying to fool anyone per se – the purpose of personas isn’t to pass them off as real coworkers so much as to start conversations. Nonetheless, they need to have a human touch. Showing up in employees’ intranets, saying, “Hello fellow colleagues, please share your thoughts on the new health insurance policy” is less likely to start a conversation because it doesn’t feel genuine.

2. Make metrics the norm

It’s no secret that measuring internal communications is tough. In fact, it’s one of the biggest headaches associated with the profession. This is no reason, however, to assume that measurement is impossible.

Global shipping organization Maersk Line recently won a CEB Global Internal Communications Award for building an exceptional IC function because of their impressive effort in developing internal communications metrics. Their measurement tool is based on a survey sent out to employees for everything from the progress of strategy roll outs to simple emails.

By measuring and quantifying employee responses to these surveys, Maersk Line has been able to learn a great deal about their employees and put that knowledge to use by improving key internal initiatives.

An important takeaway from the story of Maersk Line is that employee opinions can be quantified, especially with a large enough sample size and consistent methodology. By combining quantitative data such as survey responses with more qualitative data, including intranet forum suggestions, comments and questions, organizations can gain a 365 degree perspective on what works well for their business. That leads to more effective decision making and ultimately benefits the business’ bottom line.

3. Make the most of your internal champions

Who are the key stakeholders for various communications platforms important to your company? Even more importantly, who are the most vocal proponents of your organization’s internal brand? Those are the people you want making noise on your behalf, and not reaching out to them is a wasted opportunity.

Your internal champions are anyone who has that critical combination of a mouthpiece, knowledge about what makes your internal brand special, and the drive to spread it. There are many avenues to learn who these people are – whether it’s noting their social media activity, talking with managers to find out who the most engaged members of their teams are, or putting out a message directly asking for potential champions to get in touch with you.

Once you have your internal champions on your radar, all you have to do is supply them with the tools to do the thing they’re already excited to do: talk up your brand.

Maybe someone has been eager to start a company newsletter – get them the resources. Does someone else blog in their free time about issues relevant to your industry? Ask their permission to share their blog with the rest of the company. The beauty of the internal champion is that they’re already eager to help you do your job. All you have to do is give them the means to do so.

4. Think visual

According to a study done by Hubspot, 55% of people finish videos they’ve started. By contrast, only 29% of respondents said they’d read a blog through until the end.

I think we’ve known for a long time that images are much more eye catching than text. That’s why almost all marketing materials include some sort of imagery and not copy alone. This is one area where internal communicators should be encouraged to steal ideas from the marketing team.

Images and videos work to get people’s attention. Whether they’re CEO video blogs or infographics, make use of the visual! Don’t limit creativity to individual communications either: look at the platforms you use and how these can be optimized to attract your audience. Investing into the visual appeal of your intranet homepage, for example, can have considerable impact on the level of engagement your employees have with your internal communications.

Of course, an important part of visual branding is knowing where to place your graphics. This will vary based on what message you want to convey, your intended audience, and your end goal, but there are a few constants you can count on.

One is that you need to make your imagery as accessible as possible. Don’t bury the lead! Keep those eye catching elements up front. Equally as important is giving your branding a human touch. Just as with personas, you’re trying to create something that employees can relate to. Don’t lose sight of that!

Your internal communications strategy can make or break employee engagement, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and so much more that is vital to the company’s bottom line. More and more organizations are recognizing this fact and responding accordingly.

Unfortunately, the same stale inside the box thinking has a way of surfacing all too often. Whether this is due to a lack of creativity or because communicators simply don’t think they’ll be able to execute big ideas, fresh ideas are needed to drive comms forward. You have the power to break the mold. Don’t waste it!

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The holidays have since passed, and the new year is in full swing. I, for one, wouldn’t blame anyone feeling the pressure of being back to a regular schedule. After all, January is more than halfway done, meaning we’re almost a third of the way through Q1! Oh, how time flies when you have goals to meet.

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This is not meant to inspire panic in anyone. Of course, we’re not actually that close to the end of the first quarter. However, there’s an important point to be made here: time can, in fact, get away from you. It has a way of doing so, and for that reason it’s important not to wait on undertaking any important initiatives for 2017.

Everyone starts out the year with an ambitious set of goals, but how often are all of those accomplished? Unfortunately, many of the ones to fall by the wayside are in the arena of communications.

Companies view communications and culture as two very difficult institutions to change once they’re in place. They find themselves stuck in their ways, though they know the benefits to changing.

Those benefits are well documented. According to one Towers Watson study, companies with highly effective communications practices see 47% higher returns to their shareholders.

Starting 2017 with action

There’s no better time than now to kick those communications ambitions into high gear and take action. Not only is it the beginning of a new year, but we’re living in a very exciting time for communications.

There are abundant new collaboration tools and technologies allowing us to communicate in ways that we never could before. We’re able to measure our communications’ effectiveness for the first time, thanks to big data analytics.

Not all of these developments are new, but the ways in which we use them have not been fully developed up to this point. Finally, we’re beginning to understand how a lot of these technologies and methodologies will be actually used in practice.

2017 is looking like a year when a lot of changes in internal communications, which have been on the horizon for sometime, come to full fruition.

Here are 8 of the trends we see in internal communications for 2017.

1. A new world of video

We’ve written about video before in our discussion about CEO blogs to inspire your internal comms. Video blogs from executives have been rising to prominence among internal communications circles for some time. They offer an innovative way to communicate with employees, existing in a much more bite sized format and allowing communicators to put a friendly face and voice to the information that’s being shared.

We also know a lot about the effectiveness of video communications. One Forbes study said that 75% of executives watch videos on business related websites at least once a week, while 65% said they visited vendors’ websites after viewing a video.

A separate study, from Hubspot, shows that 55% of users finish watching a video through to the end, compared with only 29% who report reading blog posts in their entirety. This is especially important in the workplace, where communicators feel the difficulty of competing for workers’ attention.

Add to this the fact that 2016 saw the rise of live video broadcasting over social media, from Facebook to Instagram. This adds a completely new dimension to the possibilities of video communications. Just as the position of video in general is being solidified, a new landscape of possibilities is making itself known. Who knows where this will lead in the future?

2. Workplace… Does it belong in the workplace?

2016 saw the release of Facebook’s new Workplace, originally called Facebook at Work. The platform is almost identical to the standard Facebook network, but there are explanations for how each feature can function in an office environment.

This has reignited the debate around the usefulness of purely social technology for work. There are notable shortcomings, and the format does not fit perfectly to its new use, especially without features actually adapting to better accommodate the platform’s new environment.

This year will surely see a renewed interest in Enterprise Social Networks in general and debate around Workplace specifically.

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3. Altruism oriented messaging

It’s no secret that Millennials are seeking out careers with companies that they see as furthering good, compassion, and altruism in the world. Working for a cause and not just a paycheck is extremely important.

In fact, 50% of Millennials say they would accept a pay cut for a job that aligns more closely with their values. That’s some serious commitment to ideals.

Internal communicators should take note here. Messaging that focuses on company policies and perks simply isn’t enough. Not that those are bad by any means, but in order to reach a large contingent of the workforce, you need to bring altruism into your messaging.

Making clear the company’s commitment to social good will take you far.

4. Beyond employee engagement lies experience

We know that employee engagement is an issue. This isn’t a buzzword of 2017 – it’s been on the lips of professionals for a few years now. Yet, this still seems to be something with which organizations struggle.

Let 2017 be the year that your company focuses not just on engagement but on employee experience. Experience is all encompassing, including aspects as diverse as physical environment, technology, culture, and more.

It goes beyond engagement, but make no mistake that engagement is profoundly affected by employee experience.

Moreover, thinking in terms of experience helps overcome one of the biggest engagement hurdles companies face. Namely, the struggle to measure engagement.

Employee experience as a broad category expands what companies can measure to things that are much more easily quantifiable, such as number of calls to IT about a particular piece of software to indicate its ease of use. Once work is understood as a holistic experience, it becomes clear that there are many things to be measured that will affect engagement.

5. The importance of mobile

As of 2015, 37% of workers were remote at least part of the time. There’s now evidence that the majority of those workers are more productive working remotely than they are at the office.

The importance of mobile has been evident for some time now, but it’s only going to grow in 2017. Partially, this is due to what we already mentioned with Facebook’s Workplace. A bevy of work related apps continue to change how teams operate, and more of them will be accessible over mobile.

In 2015, 40% of employees wrote in a Pew Research Center survey that they use their smartphones for work. Yet most of them did so without their employers’ knowledge. That’s an indication that while we understand the importance of mobile, not enough organizations are acting on that knowledge. Keep your eyes out for that to change in 2017.

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6. Remote work and the gig economy

This is related to the rise of mobile, but it’s bigger than that.

53 million Americans freelance, making up 34% of the total workforce. By 2020, it’s estimated that that number will rise to 50%.

Not only are more Americans working from home, more Americans are employed by contract as opposed to a full time position. This means managers need to work extra hard to be inclusive and make sure these workers know that they’re valuable members of the team.

Having a high number of contract workers on a team also means having new employees more often and adjusting the onboarding process accordingly. This all adds up to the communications practices for the average team changing drastically. This is an ongoing trend, but expect to see major changes over the next year and continuing into the future.

7. Emphasis on security

70% of companies have experienced or will experience data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses or fire. Yet, 75% of companies aren’t prepared to deal with a data disaster.

Much of the responsibility for preventing disaster rests on employees, and more data incidents are caused internally than many companies realize. This means that workers in every department need to have a very good understanding of cybersecurity protocol.

In addition to keeping their data safe, employees need to understand the procedure the company follows in case of an incident. This is necessary in order to avoid chaos.

Internal communications departments will have to work in tandem with IT to craft their messaging to include security in a way that not only engages employees but includes all the necessary information. This isn’t an easy task, but it’s a necessary one and will only continue to be more so moving forward.

8. The integrated digital workplace

The app economy continues to give us tools to address every obstacle companies face. From project management, to gamification, to chat, our computers and mobile devices are getting ever more cluttered.

These apps all have the potential to be extremely helpful, but when taken as a whole they present a problem not previously accounted for. With each additional app used, the energy wasted searching for information among them all increases. The potential for lost information and knowledge increases as well.

The solution to this that many businesses are utilizing is to have a single digital space where all of their apps are integrated – or better yet, one piece of software that accommodates all of their needs.

Intranets are an example of this technology. They also address all of the other trends in this piece. Intranets are likely to experience a renewed heyday in 2017, and I would highly recommend keeping an eye on that market.

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The post 8 IC trends for 2017: what’s happening to internal communications? appeared first on Interact software.

According to a 2014 study, data loss and downtime cost companies $1.7 trillion every year. For smaller companies the prospect of a disaster is potentially deadly, but bigger organizations shouldn’t take it lightly.

About 93% of companies with downtime lasting 10 days file for bankruptcy. That’s not 93% of small businesses – it’s 93% overall. Clearly, you can see that downtime is something to be taken seriously.

The fallout from a data disaster can include everything from lost productivity to an irreparably damaged brand if customer information is lost. The worst part? It’s not only possible but likely.

According to one study, 70% of businesses have experienced or will experience data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, or fire. That’s a huge percentage of organizations, and that should be enough to scare everyone into action. Yet, 75% of companies are not prepared for this type of incident.

With consequences so dire and an incident so likely, why would such a high percentage of companies neglect preparations? Establishing lines of action for a worst case scenario ahead of time could save not just a few documents but the life of your entire company!

Are companies failing to prepare because they have no choice? Because there’s nothing they can do but wait?

Absolutely not. There are many steps you can take ahead of time to minimize the damage from a data loss disaster. Some of them may require investment of time or money up front, but if that seems like a problem, then just remind yourself of what’s at stake.

Here are 5 steps to a painless recovery:

1. Have a plan

This should go without saying, but as the stats presented above indicate, many companies are planless in the face of disaster.

It’s critical that your plan cover several areas. First and foremost, your plan should include tech. We’ll get into that in more detail with the rest of the steps in this post, but the best offense is a solid defense when it comes to data loss and downtime.

However, tech isn’t the only area that your plan needs to cover. Even the IT department will need to hone their communications skills to plan for disaster preparedness. Employees and customers alike need to understand the situation, as well as the process and timeline for recovery. If not, the workplace could descend into chaos and the business could lose customers.

All of that means that establishing communications plans ahead of time is just as important as knowing what will happen on the technical side of the recovery. After all, if you complete your recovery but destroy the stasis of the company, the problems are going to follow you into the future.

2. Establish a Recovery Point Objective

Your Recovery Point Objective, or RPO as it’s commonly called, is essentially a measurement of how often you back up your data.

If you have a 48 hour RPO, that means that it’s unacceptable to lose any data from 48 hours or more prior to the incident. Likewise if you choose a one hour RPO, that means that losing data that’s one hour old may be inevitable but anything older is untenable by your business’ standards.

Not all RPOs are created equal, and they require IT staff to have a keen understanding of business objectives. Less forgiving RPOs, such as the one hour RPO in our example, are much more technically complex. They require different technology and are more expensive than longer RPOs.

Some businesses will naturally need less forgiving RPOs than others. These include businesses for whom data is especially sensitive – those who deal in financial, legal, and healthcare data, for example. Any amount of data loss is unacceptable to them, so investing in a short RPO is a good idea.

3. Establish a Recovery Time Objective

RTOs? RPOs? How many acronyms is too many?

Let me illustrate the difference between an RTO and the RPO we just discussed. While RPOs look into the past, at how often you do backups to protect against future data loss, RTOs look into the future.

An RTO establishes how much downtime is acceptable (obviously no downtime being ideal, but relying on that gets in the way of necessary planning). So an RTO of a half hour means that you need to have your systems back online within a half hour of the incident. A 12 hour RTO means you need to be back online within 12 hours of the incident. You get the picture.

Just like with RPOs, less forgiving timelines are going to be more complicated and more expensive but worth the investment depending on what type of business you are. It’s even possible to have an RTO of no time at all, with all your data duplicated so that in case of data loss, you can resume work with no interruption of service at all.

RPOs and RTOs are both important and both require liaising with others in the business to align IT objectives with wider business objectives.

4. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt

The threat of hacking isn’t the only thing to be cautious of when planning for a data disaster, but it certainly is a real threat. If you do get hacked, you’ll want to make sure that no one is able to use the data they get their hands on, stealing customer or other sensitive information.

It’s important to encrypt all your data, including all backup and replicated data. This means encryption of data both at rest and in transit. If you use any sort of cloud service, make sure you completely vet their security and encryption processes to ensure that they are up to your standards.

Encrypting data, ensuring that it won’t fall into the wrong hands, will save you a lot of grief in the event that you’re hacked. Think of all the high profile hacking stories from the past couple years. Customers were mortified. Compromising customer information alone is enough to place your business in serious jeopardy.

5. Got a plan? Good. Test it.

This step is just as important as having a plan in the first place. After all, what good is a plan if you don’t know whether it works – or its weaknesses?

It’s important not just to know in theory how you’ll react in a disaster situation but to play out those situations to see how your team performs. Test your plan periodically to ensure that it always stays up to date. Poke around for weaknesses and fix them.

This list only scratches the surface of disaster recovery preparedness, but accomplishing all of the steps will go a long way to making any data loss incident you face as painless as possible.

The post Planning for disaster: 5 steps to a painless recovery appeared first on Interact software.

In that span of time, we’ve developed a range of new technologies that make it possible to work from anywhere in the world without damaging productivity. Some studies even indicate that remote workers are more productive than office based ones, with 91% respondents to a TINYpulse survey stating that they “get more work done when working remotely”. The same study also found that telecommuters are happier and feel more valued.

It seems working remotely is an advantage for both companies and employees. The benefits certainly are wide ranging.

Remote work is not without its own challenges, though.

The biggest challenge for remote workers lies not with the employees themselves, but with the company’s management. Managing a team that consists partially, or entirely, of telecommuters requires finesse of communication unlike any that manager is probably used to.

Managing remote workers doesn’t require different communication skills per se, but it does use to implement those skills. To be an effective manager, you must be an expert at using those tools.

Poor communication on a team raises the risk of disengaged employees, missed deadlines, lower quality work, and more. Without addressing communication challenges, that’s what managers face when they work with remote teams. While totally avoidable, those risks call for a deft use of the technology available for positively engaging employees.

Mobile applications are a prime example of a technology which offers a route for organizations to engage telecommuters. Thanks to the booming app economy and the ease of responsive design, mobile technology now extends to intranets and desktop applications used in traditional office settings, as well as offering its entirely own set of tools.

The following is a list of four ways to engage a mobile workforce using smartphone apps.

Make the most of responsive design

At this point, most work takes place online. Employees use email to communicate, the internet to do research, intranet systems to share knowledge and documents with one another, and much more. Most knowledge or office based jobs require using a computer for nearly every part of the role.

You could say that workers very much depend on these systems, perhaps even more than they depend on face to face contact or other traditional forms of communication.

This is one of the most important facts to recognize in any discussion bout engaging a mobile workforce. Though the infrastructure on which employees depend is now mostly digital, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accessible to them. If systems can’t be accessed from anywhere, that places a burden on remote workers that’s bound to result in disengagement.

Moreover, even when systems are accessible remotely, that doesn’t mean they’re built for smartphone use. If an application isn’t designed in a way that provides a positive user experience for a mobile user, it can’t be considered truly accessible.

The reason is that remote workers value, sometimes even rely on, being able to access their work over a variety of devices. If someone needs to access their work on a smartphone but can’t, then that creates a huge obstacle for them as an employee.

With responsive design, this should never be an issue. Even if there isn’t a mobile app for a particular system, CSS frameworks like Bootstrap make responsive design much easier for any business. Of course, having a mobile employee app is the ideal solution. That level of accessibility puts remote workers on the same footing as their office based counterparts and lets them know that they’re valued and taken into consideration by the business.

Break down barriers to knowledge sharing

An advantage that offices sometimes have over remote work situations is that employees can easily stop by each other’s desks when they have questions. They are also more likely to know people in other departments, making that face to face interaction unrestricted by siloes.

With that kind of ease in communication, knowledge sharing can flourish. Employees across the company have access to all sorts of knowledge beyond what’s in their own span of experience.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to disappear when workers are based outside an office.

The primary mechanism companies are increasingly using to spark knowledge sharing, regardless of location, is their company intranet. Forums, blog posts, and intelligent search all jumpstart helpful discussions among workers, as well as saving the information that’s shared for future use.

Intranet apps for smartphones are becoming increasingly common among companies that make use of intranet technology. These are a blessing to remote workers because they ensure all the freedom of telecommuting without compromising knowledge sharing at all.

Provide a rewards system

Another way in which intranet apps boost employee engagement is through their use of recognition systems.

As a remote worker, it’s easy to feel disconnected from your fellow employees. This is especially true if you don’t have a direct way to see the value your daily tasks add to the company.

No one wants to feel like they’re not adequately valued, and they may become disengaged if they do. To combat that, managers need to pay special attention to reaching out to telecommuters and making sure they know they’re an important part of the company fabric.

A great way to do this is by using a recognition or rewards system on your company intranet. These let you give small tokens of gratitude, anything from a monetary reward to a written “thank you”, to workers who go the extra mile.

There’s no better encouragement than recognition.

Focus on achievements, not hours worked

It’s no secret that remote workers may not feel tethered to a traditional nine to five schedule. Trying to reinforce one will only cause friction on your team, and that will lead to disengagement.

Remote working is driven by the number and quality of tasks accomplished, not by number of hours worked.

There are lots of mobile apps that involve task management. From intranets to software like Asana and Trello, assigning and communicating about tasks is smoother than ever between workers and their managers. These apps also allow employees to upload documents and comment on tasks, ensuring a smooth collaborative process.

Using these mobile apps lets you manage your team by focusing on productivity and quality, without emphasizing employees’ schedule.

Remote work can be beneficial for both companies and employees. It has the potential to create productivity, engagement, and more. Unfortunately, it also risks the opposite if not done right. To guarantee that telecommuters stay engaged and productive, managers and their organizations need to make use of the digital tools available to them. This means not just email but the multitude of employee mobile apps designed to keep people engaged.

The post 4 ways to engage a mobile workforce using smartphone apps appeared first on Interact software.

Unfortunately, the holidays don’t usually play out like that. Blame it on the expenses, blame it on family fights, blame it on the overindulgence of too much food and alcohol. Whatever the reason, ’tis the season of stress: and for employers, the threat of a wave of notices in January is a major cause of concern. The question of how to maintain employee retention into the New Year is high on the board agenda.

Virgin Pulse’s 2014 survey, aptly titled ‘Tis the Season for Stress, found that a full 70 percent of employees report raised stress levels during the holidays, with over 10 percent responding that their stress levels are between 60 and 100 percent higher than during the rest of the season.

Since workers spend significant amounts of time and energy at their jobs, their organizations have a high impact on their overall health and stress levels. Moreover, high stress can significantly impact an organization’s bottom line. Not only is there a risk of high disengagement, lower productivity, and lower work quality – employee retention strategies depend on health as well.

As such, employers have a vested interest and responsibility to do their part in ensuring employee wellbeing.

64 percent of respondents to Virgin Pulse’s survey said that holiday related stress distracts them at work. A separate study found that 91 percent of employees who have high wellbeing are less likely to leave a job. Clearly, a stressful environment doesn’t help you retain employees.

As the holidays end and the new year begins, the trouble can all come to a head. Employees no longer have the prospect of time off as a buffer between them and their stress. The slowed down attitude of the past couple weeks is suddenly jolted into Q1 pandemonium as everyone goes back to being full steam ahead in their roles. This ungraceful transition can trigger extra stress, creating a recipe for high turnover.

So, what can you do to maintain employee retention after the holiday season?

Examine why employees leave their jobs in the first place

The stress of holidays is only the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s not the underlying reason why people look for new jobs in the new year.

70 percent of managers think that pay is the primary reason employees leave a business, yet research shows 88 percent of employees actually leave their jobs because of reasons other than pay.

According to strategic planning consultant Leigh Branham, there are seven main reasons why employees leave a company:

• Employees feel the job or workplace is not what they expected
• There is a mismatch between the job and person
• There is too little coaching and feedback
• There are too few growth and advancement opportunities
• Employees feel devalued and unrecognized
• Employees feel stress from overwork and have a work/life imbalance
• There is a loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders

These are all things that managers should know about their employees. For instance, they know if they are not providing much coaching or employee feedback. If they ask employees about their goals, they’ll also know about a desire for growth and advancement opportunities.

In other words, the first and most important step to increasing employee retention is listening. Your employees will tell you what they need, but you have to provide the opportunity or platform for them to communicate, and then you have to listen to them.

In the new year, make it a priority to have regular two way feedback sessions with employees. Let them know in a clear way what’s expected of them and how they’re measuring up, while at the same time ensuring that they have space to discuss all of their concerns and desires. In fact, don’t just give them the space for that discussion. Actively invite it.

Make the objective to maintain employee retention a New Year’s resolution

This year, resolve to create a positive and nurturing environment on your team: one that reflects your company values and aligns with your business mission. Commit to creating transparency and opportunity for every one of your workers and to let them know how valuable they are. Make employee retention a defined objective for your organization.

It’s often been said that New Year’s resolutions are much more likely to stick when they are as specific as possible. The same can be said for your professional resolutions. Merely saying that you’ll create a positive team culture in the new year is not the same as implementing policies designed to cultivate that culture.

Training and mentoring programs both help create the type of culture that will help to maintain employee retention. Employees are often looking to further their careers and learn new skills; giving them the tools to do so will be powerful motivation to get them to stay.

Employee appreciation plans are also very important. Your employees work very hard all year round to deliver results and meet goals. They deserve recognition, and 69 percent say they’d work harder if they had it. Create official recognition programs and back these up with unofficial recognition – be it a simple “thanks for that great report” or taking the team out to lunch following a big accomplishment.

Borrow some of that holiday cheer for the rest of the calendar year

Yes, the holidays can bring a lot of stress.. Yet there are lessons to be learned from the festive season.

Celebration, time off or anything that takes some time out of the monotonous work schedule makes it a little more special or fun. Those are important tools to relieve stress, allowing employees to recharge their batteries, engage with the culture of your organization or simply achieve greater work-life balance. Ultimately, these all make everyone happier and more productive.

According to one study, if employees each took just one additional day of vacation in the year, it would save the U.S. economy $73 billion

When employees don’t take any time off, they’re at high risk of burnout. This harms engagement, productivity, and ultimately retention as well. Encouraging employees to take vacation can go a long way to counteracting some of the worst effects of burnout, improving productivity and employee engagement while protecting your organization against high staff turnover and poor morale.

Even when workers aren’t taking time off, social get togethers such as monthly happy hours can provide a time to recognize your team’s hard work and blow off some steam. This can also help combat burnout.

The holidays: a time of potential, a time of risk

Ultimately, the holidays pose some amount of risk to employers. They can be stressful and push workers to look for new jobs come January. Yet they can also provide a template for stress relief – if you know where to look.

Making resolutions centered around improving office culture, listening to workers, and hanging on to some holiday cheer are all invaluable in combatting turnover. The holidays are, in some ways, what you make of them. This year, make them an opportunity to improve retention by keeping employees happy and healthy.

The post Maintain employee retention beyond the festive season appeared first on Interact software.

Defining collaboration

The first step toward taking control of collaboration and harnessing its full benefits is assembling a proper definition.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines collaboration as “a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefits.”

They also lay out the qualities in a person that are needed for high quality collaboration. Those are:

• Awareness – becoming part of a working entity with a shared purpose
• Motivation – driving to gain consensus in problem solving or development
• Self-synchronization – deciding as individuals when things need to happen
• Participation – participating in collaboration and expecting others to participate
• Mediation – negotiating and collaborating together and finding a middle point
• Reciprocity – sharing and expecting the same in return
• Reflection – thinking and considering alternatives
• Engagement – proactively engaging rather than waiting and seeing

The role of collaboration software

Over the last few years, the app market has exploded. Apps are now available for every task in a person’s life; from fitness to dating, in both mobile and online spaces.

The business to business market alone has become a phenomenon, and it’s impossible to count the number of apps available. Collaboration software has been a large part of that.

Collaboration tools make familiar processes quicker, smoother, more enjoyable, and possible on a scale that was never before imaginable. Importantly, they’ve introduced additional modes of collaboration that are revolutionizing the way we work.

Whether it’s a one-trick-pony-type tool like a task manager or something more robust, such as an intranet, collaboration is the stated goal of almost every business focused app out there. In a space that was dominated entirely by email until fairly recently, collaboration tools are in the midst of what we can justifiably call a digital revolution.

There are a few trends that helped to spark this flame. A recent SHRM study shows how liberal economic policies geared toward free trade are pushing companies toward a transnational existence. According to the study, 64% of workers at multinational companies work with virtual teams, and 52% of those team members are based outside the company’s home country.

Moreover, telecommuting is a growing phenomenon. Gallup reports that 37% of workers are now remote at least some of the time, up from 9% in 1995.

These globally relevant trends were made possible by earlier waves of technology, namely email and the internet. It’s the current explosion of business apps, though, that make the collaborative workspace thrive.

The ease with which developers can now create apps, and the emphasis on storage and global access provided by cloud technology, has allowed the creation of software that addresses every niche of collaboration and communication, empowering employees and managers alike to embody all of the characteristics AIIM calls for.

The need for a centralized workspace

There is a downside to the success of the app economy. While all of those collaborative niches are being filled, our digital ecosystems are becoming more and more cluttered.

95% of all the mobile apps a person downloads are abandoned within a month. That’s a big issue where collaboration software is concerned because all the business knowledge you accrue on those apps will be lost when usage stops.

Moreover, using disparate tools negates many of the benefits the tools bring in the first place. Collaboration is much more difficult when you’re going back and forth between apps or when some information you need for a project is stored on one, while the rest of what you need is elsewhere.

Multiple user logins and the search for information can actually slow you down and hinder productivity, whereas these apps are meant to reduce friction.

So what can be done?

A centralized collaborative digital workspace is the most important tool a business can have these days, in a climate of globalization and remote work. These aren’t just tools, they’re networks of tools.

A great example of a centralized collaborative workspace is an intranet. This provides all the benefits of a suite of collaboration tools, filling any niche you might need, without the clutter or multiple logins.

Our own research at Interact has shown that the best collaboration tools don’t actually tackle collaboration alone. Those which involve a mix of collaboration, communication, and business processes are the strongest for helping to further overall business goals. They’re also the most liked by employees.

Get employees collaborating

Once you decide to use a centralized collaborative workspace, it’s actually best not to jump right in and deploy your software. Understand that this is a bigger commitment than a simple task management app, which is why the payoffs will be larger as well.

Success with your new workspace takes advance planning. You need to consider what goals your company is supporting by using the software. Believe it or not, collaboration doesn’t qualify in and of itself as a goal. There are many goals for which it will be invaluable – one could even argue that every goal has a collaborative component – but an audit of areas you want to improve is still necessary.

One key component you’ll have to consider is what motivation employees will have to utilize your new workspace. They may know objectively that collaboration is a positive thing, but that knowledge alone won’t get everyone using a piece of software.

You’re also likely to have employees who are ambivalent to, or even suspicious of, new technology. They might feel threatened or resistant instead of excited.

Start engaging employees by setting a strong example. Be the first and biggest champion of your new software, posting blogs or questions to a forum. Put documents on there and show everyone how much easier it can make their lives.

Providing adequate training also helps assuage fears and gives employees a reason to be using your platform. Before they know it, it will be a regular part of their work day!

The Make-A-Wish Foundation wrote a blog for us about their experience in implementing a new intranet and the impressive success they’ve had in getting employees collaborating. They are an excellent model for the type of planning and implementation I’m talking about.

Conclusions

Collaboration is a necessary tool to master for any organization. Powerful collaboration means raised productivity, knowledge sharing, and engaged employees. The reasons to invest in collaboration are myriad.

As we look to the future, it’s likely that collaboration will continue to evolve as a result of the tools we use. It’s important that we learn to harness its powers according to those tools to stay ahead of the curve.

Tools like an intranet remain the strongest for collaboration, thanks to their inclusion and integration with different business tools and applications that fill many different niches. Though the investment in one of these workspaces may require a larger upfront cost than for some less robust solutions, the return on investment is far greater – and therefore, well worth the effort.

The post How to understand collaboration tools in 5 minutes appeared first on Interact software.

In 1975 Bloomberg Businessweek published an article called The Office of the Future. In it, they quoted Xerox’s then Head of Research, George E. Pake, speculating that within the next 20 years he would have a television monitor at his desk.

“I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he said. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy I’ll want in this world. It will change our daily life, and this could be kind of scary.”

It’s easy to see how Mr. Pake might have come to his conclusion, with television already revolutionizing so many other areas of life at the time. The reality of work contained many inconveniences, cruel step stones placed in the path to productivity. It’s no surprise that people were hopeful about the power of a new technology to overcome them.

Prophetic or not, his predictions came to pass, as we all know. Computers are now synonymous with office work. Pake also predicted the prevalence of email in his Businessweek quote, though the first email was actually sent four years before that article.

We’ve come a long way since 1975 and even since computers became commonplace in businesses around the world. Today, it’s impossible to keep track of all the digital tools available to us.

These tools make our lives easier in just the way that Mr. Pake predicted.

Documents, messages from colleagues, and more are available with a few clicks. Beyond simple email and word processing, we can now collaborate on projects from across the globe, share and preserve knowledge, and strip away all the inefficiencies that impede productivity.

In that journey toward digitizing work, intranets have played a large role. They’re not always recognized as much as their more famous or flashy colleagues, such as email and the current round of social networks, but they are as relevant now as they were decades ago, if not more so.

The history of intranets is a winding path that spawned many other technologies and internal communications tools along the way, but it’s defining features have remained constant since the beginning. Those include connecting and engaging employees, enabling knowledge sharing, and reducing inefficiencies.

What is an intranet?

The question of “what is an intranet?” is a difficult one to answer, so let’s start by examining it from a purely technical perspective.

When looking to define intranet platforms, Wikipedia refers to them as “a private network accessible only to an organization’s staff. Generally, a wide range of information and services from the organization’s internal IT systems are available that would not be available to the public from the Internet.”

Here we see the words “private” and “public,” and this gives us an important starting point both in defining intranets and tracing their history. As most people know, the internet is something of a wild west of content. You can post nearly anything, and most people in the world have access to all of it.

Intranets, by contrast, are designed only for use by computers that are connected to a shared network. No computer that isn’t on that network should have access.

Right off the bat, that shows us how lifespan intranets can be useful to businesses. Once they were introduced, companies had a way to host information for only their own employees in a medium that also wasn’t cluttered with the rest of the content from the general public’s internet.

In their first incarnation, company intranets were very simple. They didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity presented by a shared private network. Mostly, they consisted of a single page of general information applicable to everyone at the company. As you might imagine, this didn’t make inspire employees to check them on a regular basis.

Soon, however, that all would change.

Intranet Genie

The year was 1996. Ask Jeeves, one of the internet’s early day question-answer and search platforms, was launched. Nintendo introduced the Nintendo 64 in Japan. And a little company called Frontier Technologies changed intranets forever.

Frontier Technologies’ product, Intranet Genie, was not just another company homepage. It featured applications for document sharing, messaging, and more, designed to facilitate corporate communication and collaboration among employees.

In a sense, this was the beginning of intranets as we know them today.

Yet, you wouldn’t recognize it as such.

Intranet Genie was a bundle of applications that were shared among computers in a company. It technically took place “online,” but it wasn’t accessed through a web browser in the way that lifespan intranets of today are.

Intranets evolving

By all accounts, Intranet Genie was not an attractive solution. It was difficult to install and offered an unfriendly UX.

Within a decade, however, the World Wide Web would be vastly expanded and used for a growing list of everyday tasks, both in and out of work. The internet boom had a long-lasting impact on intranets.

As online applications overtook desktop ones, intranets kept pace by moving to the web to the point that “intranet” now is synonymous with a program that is used through an internet browser. The days of application bundles like Intranet Genie are now behind us.

The functions that Intranet Genie brought with it, though, have hung on. Those include document management systems, forums, and all other manner of collaboration and communication tools. In fact, those make up the bulk of what a company intranet now is, rather than the bare bones dissemination of corporate information that once characterized them.

Tools for the modern era

Intranets have spawned a variety of tools that represent smaller parts of their functionality and which have recently become very popular. As such, the definition of intranet software has evolved – and occasionally become mistakenly synonymous with other tools., which don’t necessarily do all that an intranet does.

Enterprise Social Networks, or ESNs, are a great example. ESNs are much newer than intranets and can be viewed as stripped down versions of them. They arose with the recent popularity of social media and attempt to replicate that technology for purely corporate purposes.

ESNs typically include many of the social features of an intranet, such as timelines and “like” or comment buttons, but they do not include any of the other features. They are excellent engagement tools but are limited in their collaborative capabilities as most do not offer document management systems or tools for carrying out other HR and business processes. Facebook’s recently launched Workplace is one example.

Task and project management systems are another type of tool that has become popular, and we’ve seen a surge of products of this nature from Silicon Valley. They allow managers and teammates to create projects and assign tasks to one another, creating chains of responsibility and transparency, as well as helping workers stay organized. What they don’t do, however, is allow for much of a social component.

As we can see, intranets have spawned ideas for numerous helpful products. ESNs and task management tools are undoubtedly improving productivity and engagement in the working world. Unfortunately, using them in isolation will never be a substitute for the whole package.

Toward an updated intranet definition

We live in a world where new social tech tools come out every single day. They all have slightly different uses and purported benefits, even those whose platforms are strikingly similar. Because of that, we’re fast approaching a world in which businesses can fill every niche need and process with different tools.

Yet a world of multiple sign-ins and information living on several disparate platforms ultimately leads to more clutter than it’s worth. The tipping point comes when businesses begin to lose knowledge and information rather than manage it, or they begin to slow processes rather than streamline them.

The key benefit of an intranet is that it doesn’t cause you to run into this problem. Intranets are more than just a tool – they’re a toolbelt. They have everything you could need for your digital workplace – or serve as the centralized gateway to all your applications.

That’s why intranets are best defined not using the technical definition we utilized above but as a sum of their parts. Intranets are defined by the range of features they can include or applications they can integrate with, as well as what those features or applications can do for you as a worker.

The social features of an intranet are becoming one of its hallmarks. Blogs, forums, and timelines connect employees and keep them engaged. More than that, they help share knowledge and equip everyone at an organization to excel in their positions.

Document management makes seamless collaboration another integral piece. Rather than sending edited documents back and forth over email, version control on intranets lets teams keep a single version of the truth.

HR and business processes now exist on intranets as well. The more time-consuming portions of HR, such as getting employees to fill out forms, are now automated, and Human Resources is free to concentrate on nurturing talent and improving retention.

The latest generation of intranets now utilize data from users’ search and browsing behavior to create what are called intelligent intranets. These display helpful content to users on an individualized basis, furthering the knowledge sharing component that has long been a part of corporate digital tools.

The best intranets are those who do their core functions well, but don’t necessarily seek to be a ‘jack of all trades’. Every business uses a multitude of applications or systems to perform everyday functions. You may have a dedicated HR or payroll system, for example, or use external cloud storage providers to host documents. Intranets now typically offer integration functionality with third-party applications, enabling them to serve as a central point for the modern-day digital workplace.

In conclusion

Intranets have been a quiet, yet resilient component to the technological development of businesses for the last 30 years or more. The further we move into the future, and the more mature our technology becomes, the more intranets evolve to suit our needs. They have proved adaptive and useful at every turn.

What is the intranet of the future? With developments like intranet intelligence and data analytics, we have a glimpse into where intranets are headed. They are sure to continue their journey and help companies in ever more impressive ways. Only one thing is for certain: intranets are here to stay.

The post Why is lifespan of an intranet important? appeared first on Interact software.

Workforce judges companies in seven categories including workplace culture, employee benefits, diversity and inclusion, employee development and talent management, human resources innovation, leadership development and talent acquisition. They source their data from a number of agencies that rank organizations in those categories, as well as partnering with Glassdoor to ensure that employee feedback is taken into account.

An editor for Workforce interviewed several of the HR leaders at some of the companies that won again and again in order to figure out what they have in common and what others can learn from them. Predictably, many harped on their practice of putting employees first. According to Cynt Marshall, Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer at AT&T, “At AT&T, we believe that every voice matters, and we want to give our voices access to our leaders so the employees feel they are being heard and so their ideas can be put into action.”

Marshall’s sentiment represents the ambitious goals of every company focused on employee engagement, and it’s no surprise that with an attitude such as hers behind the HR helm AT&T reached number five overall.

Human Resources is one of the most important pieces of any business, though it’s often overlooked in favor of the flashier side of a company, namely Sales or the product itself.

Yet without Human Resources, companies would cease to function and open themselves up to a variety of legal issues. Even small startups that don’t yet have a full time HR employee have to roll out the department’s core functions.

The fact that the CEO or others in such organizations have to fill the role of HR themselves should not be cause for alarm. In smaller companies this may be necessary, and managers in every size company should understand core Human Resources issues.

Great HR practices can add to companies’ bottom lines through increased employee engagement, productivity, and reduced turnover. Unfortunately, the flipside of that is that when Human Resources makes a mistake, it can cost their organization big time. Because it’s infused into the lifeblood of every single department, mistakes from HR ripple throughout a company. All eyes are on them to perform, even though the observers may not realize they’re looking.

Most Human Resources mistakes are easily avoidable. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that all companies are doing all they can to stamp them out, and many are still all too common.

In this article, I want to talk a bit about some of the most common HR mistakes companies make and why exactly they are such egregious offenses. Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, and many HR issues are going to be company-specific. After reading this article, I strongly recommend you go out and learn more about HR best practices and what you can do to combat these errors. For now, I’ll stick to some of the most common and overarching problems that lots of businesses face.

So without further ado, here are 7 common HR mistakes you should be watching out for.

Bad hires that turn into worse promotions

Picture this scenario. Your company has just lost an essential member of a very important team, lured away by promises of a bigger salary and better benefits elsewhere. This is the worst possible time for them to go because a new initiative is launching for which they were supposed to play a huge role.

What happens now?

Unfortunately, lots of companies enter panic mode and hustle to fill the empty seat as quickly as possible. They’ve got no choice, and sometimes they’re so desperate that they rush through the interview process only to find out later that their new hire has far too little experience and doesn’t fit in with the company culture at all.

According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, the cost for recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee averages $4,000 – and jumps to $7,000 if that person is a manager. Employee turnover is even more dire, with total costs for needing to replace someone coming in at up to 150% of that person’s salary.

With that kind of investment in an employee, it’ necessary to vet them well. To do this, you need to make sure that interviews are good indicators of future performance. That means focusing on how past accomplishments and struggles will translate to this job. No trick “gotcha” questions and no excess questions that don’t assist your judgement.

On a similar note, hasty promotions are also bad news. The trap that lots of companies fall into is recognizing managerial and leadership skills as separate from job performance. Just because someone is great at their job doesn’t mean they’ll be just as good at managing others. By all means, encourage and reward them, but maybe come up with a reward that doesn’t involve management if that’s not appropriate.

Disregarding training and onboarding

Companies that wait for a new employee’s first day to start getting them acclimated are shooting themselves in the foot. It takes months for a new hire to be fully functional or to reach the productivity of their coworkers.

Improper training only exacerbates the situation, and the sad thing is that many companies’ onboarding process is lackluster. Having a few standardized modules for workers to run through in their first day or their first week, maybe in addition to showing them the best place for lunch, won’t cut it.

Poor onboarding has far reaching effects that go beyond just the time it takes to make employees productive. As Interact’s Head of Talent, Amy Needham, says, “I think it can be hugely detrimental to employee engagement levels if this is done badly or not at all. This is the first real employee experience and, as such, needs careful planning and execution.”

Their data scientists, some of the best in the world, determined five actions managers can take to speed up the onboarding process by up to 25%! HR at Google now sends all managers a checklist with these items prior to their first day and encourages things like having discussions around roles and responsibilities and matching the new employee with a buddy/mentor.

The key to Google’s strategy is that they encourage managers to begin this process before an employee’s first day. Having important discussions and beginning to include new hires on team emails from the time the offer letter is sent gives people an idea of what will be expected of them and builds a sense of camaraderie between them and their new teammates. It also lets them get any questions they might have out of the way before being thrown into the deep end.

Not thoroughly documenting work history

This one is applicable for all sorts of reasons. For instance, when performance review time rolls around, you’ll want to have lots of materials to draw from. Documenting someone’s work will also let you know if they’ve reached an appropriate time for a promotion. But this paper trail comes in most useful when you hit that least fun of all HR related duties: firing.

Just because your company is an at will employer and can terminate someone for almost any reason does not make you ironclad. Lawsuits for wrongful termination are unfortunately common, and you never know who is likely to take you to court.

An ex-employee can say that they were fired for being a member of a protected class, which is a serious offense. In a case like this, you’d better hope that you as an employer have their work history well documented so you’re able to demonstrate the real reason why they had to go.

This is important because bad employees cost companies lots of money. That’s no secret. If someone is a real problem, is dragging down the rest of the team, and is causing the company to lose revenue, they’ve got to go sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, if you have poor documentation, this is easier said than done.

Incomplete employee handbook and policies (or none at all!)

All companies need rules of conduct. What many companies don’t do effectively is update these rules on a consistent basis. Small companies also may have the problem of not having their policies written down at all. Maybe they feel they’re too small to need this, or maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it.

This is a big mistake. All it takes is one employee causing problems or one case of harassment to completely change the mood at an organization. If this turns into a legal issue, the ramifications can potentially be dire.

If and when someone is disruptive or negative in a way you need to address, it’s paramount that you already have policies in place. This means not just rules of conduct but procedures to follow when those rules are broken.

Not sure of where to start? No problem! Xenium, a Human Resources consulting firm out of Portland, Oregon, recently put together a podcast on the subject. In it they go through what’s typically in an employee handbook, how often employers should update that handbook, and what types of policies and procedures to include.

Lack of adequate management training

Remember how we touched on the need for proper onboarding and the consequences of not having it? That doesn’t just apply to regular employees.

Managers need training too. In fact, if their performance isn’t up to snuff, that will arguably be felt in a much bigger way than other types of employees.

When employees are promoted to a managerial level they need to be trained to handle the new responsibilities, even if they showed excellent leadership beforehand.

Joseph DiCarlo, HR Director for a medical group in Westchester, New York known as WestMed, recently gave an interview to Westchester Magazine in which he touched on this as well as a number of other HR issues. The magazine describes WestMeds approach to management training: “At WestMed, that means a formal, in-house, management-training curriculum that covers both ‘soft’ skills, like how to assess different personalities and how to develop and be aware of your management style, as well as ‘hard’ skills, like understanding the legal implications of management, based on state and federal laws.”

Not developing and rewarding good performance

No one wants to feel stagnant at their job. That’s a recipe for low engagement. Yet not everyone is ready for a promotion either.

So how can you make sure that all employees stay engaged and satisfied in their roles?

Employee recognition here is key. When someone does a good job or progresses in their abilities, show them that you noticed. Talk to them about their goals, about where they want to go with the company, and about skills they want to develop! Don’t be afraid of a raise if the company can afford it and they deserve it.

Maybe a promotion is the right move for this person, and maybe it’s not. Regardless, make sure they know they have forward momentum. When they express a desire to move to a certain position or learn new skills, make sure they’re provided with the resources to make that happen. That means access to learning materials and the time to spend honing their talents.

Thinking that an “open door” policy is enough

Every company, every manager, and every HR department likes to think their employees trust them. They see themselves as people their employees will come to if there’s ever a problem and they need to speak out.

Unfortunately, that’s the case far less often than most people in positions of authority care to admit.

People are naturally wary of telling on a peer who’s causing problems or expressing concern with their boss’ conduct or decisions. We have this engrained in us from an early age. We think that speaking out in this way has consequences and that those consequences won’t look good for us.

That’s why companies who rely on an open door policy, the idea that employees can come forward to speak to management or Human Resources, probably miss a lot of issues they shouldn’t.

Rather than putting an open door policy in place and moving on, establish a path for your employees to anonymously report HR violations. Keep your ears open as well. You can’t count on yourself to catch every issue, but you can certainly be proactive.

Human Resources is one of the most important jobs in any business. It’s also one where it’s easy to put policies in place and then let them play out without oversight. You should be constantly auditing yourself, keeping abreast of relevant laws, and making sure your policies and procedures are updated when they need to be. If you do that, you’ll learn what mistakes beyond the ones we just discussed are relevant for your company. More than that, you’ll learn to avoid them.

The post Do you make these 7 common HR mistakes? appeared first on Interact software.

Given the gains, it makes sense that businesses would do everything in their power to focus on and improve communications, especially with the breadth of tools available to them online.

There are now tools that focus on improving every aspect of communications and productivity. Many agree that an integrated digital workplace, especially an intranet, is the most powerful of these tools and can greatly benefit a company’s communications practice. Intranets function as “best of all worlds” solutions, combining social, communication, HR, and other tools all rolled into one.

One of the key questions that companies who deploy intranets ask is who the stakeholders in their intranet project are.

This question is, of course, not limited to intranets and is a staple among project managers. Stakeholder identification and engagement is extremely important; it helps you identify who will be concerned with the project’s final results and how those people may affect the project or larger business outcomes. If you can’t answer those questions, there is no guarantee your project will be successful.

There are abundant resources online explaining how to identify stakeholders, many written by and for project managers. For companies that employ project managers, this makes sense because it’s in their job description to carry out the planning and execution of all significant initiatives.

Intranet projects, however, are unique in many ways. Firstly, project managers aren’t always the responsible party. Instead, that duty often falls on internal communications or IT. For this reason, stakeholder identification is different for intranet projects.

So how can those charged with leading an intranet project identify stakeholders? Let’s start by defining our terms.

What is a stakeholder?

According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) guide, a stakeholder is defined as:

“An individual, group, or organization who may affect, be affected by or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project.”

Companies unfortunately often have very narrow views of what a stakeholder is. For instance, stakeholders will sometimes be limited to senior management, executives, or other decision makers for a project.

However, it’s easy to see how employees and entire teams would be affected by or perceive themselves to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. This places them firmly within the definition of what a stakeholder is. The other side of that coin is that senior management, and even third parties, can’t be forgotten about if they too are accounted for in the PMBOK’s definition.

This casts a wide net for those who may be considered stakeholders. However, this definition comes with a few caveats. Number one is that there is no guarantee that employees, management, and third parties will all be stakeholders – rather, the definition seeks to not cut off the possibility of any of these.

The second caveat is that not all stakeholders are created equal. If a CEO and a front line employee are both stakeholders for a project, there’s a large chance that they aren’t stakeholders in the same way. While they may both affect and be affected by the outcome of the project, those effects will be wildly different for the two of them.

Once identified, stakeholders must be treated according to their reason for being a stakeholder. What to do with the knowledge of who your stakeholders are could be the subject of a whole other article, but noting that they won’t hold that role in the same way is just as important in identifying them as it is in actioning that knowledge.

A different identification

Articles written on identifying project stakeholders, such as the myriad pieces geared toward project management professionals, often make use of very formal tools for doing so.

The PM Study Circle blog (which also published information on the definition of a stakeholder as per the PMBOK) explores several of those tools, explaining how they can be used to identify stakeholders. The places they suggest searching for possible stakeholders include the project charter, the contract documents, the organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors, interviewing experts (highly influential stakeholders), and conducting brainstorming sessions.

The first three of those tools are concrete documents to review and pull names from, and only conducting brainstorming sessions is completely independent of those documents. Since interviewing experts involves already knowing who highly influential stakeholders are, it cannot be considered independent.

The reason why intranet projects differ greatly from other types of projects in stakeholder identification is because some of the most important stakeholders for an intranet project cannot be discovered through contracts and charters.

The purpose of an intranet is always employee-centric. It may be to boost engagement or to share knowledge more efficiently. Maybe a company needs help in connecting field workers or employees in disparate locations. That makes all of these employees extremely important stakeholders, yet their names will not appear in any key documents, such as a contract.

The brainstorming portion of identifying stakeholders for an intranet project can then be understood as having disproportionate weight as compared with the rest of the tools suggested by the PM Study Circle. But what do we need to consider while brainstorming? How can the brainstorm help to identify stakeholders?

Asking the right questions

Asking questions is the key to identifying intranet stakeholders.

Knowing which questions to ask can be tricky, as there is no fixed set of questions and they may differ from organization to organization. However, there are some which offer an excellent starting point and are likely to be common to the majority of companies.

First and foremost, it’s important to ask about the goals of the intranet. This isn’t only important for identifying stakeholders, because intranets cannot be successful if they are merely implemented without putting in proper planning effort. As was previously mentioned, the goals of an intranet can be everything from employee engagement and retention to better knowledge sharing.

Your organization likely has multiple goals for its intranet rather than only one. Laying out and understanding these goals is important to identify stakeholders. Once you know, for example, that you’re looking to connect employees who work in field locations with one another, you know that the key stakeholders include all those employees who work in the field and are not already connected.

Another important question is who is involved with the project and exactly how they’re involved.

End users will be an obvious answer to this question. Once the project goals are defined, the end users who are most directly involved in the project will be clear, as will their exact involvement. As we mentioned earlier, internal communications and IT are two of the most likely departments to be leading and managing an intranet project. They and other decision makers must be included as well in this calculation.

The other questions that the PM Study Circle blog proposes are:

• Who is directly involved with the project?
• Who is indirectly involved with the project?
• Who may be affected by the project?
• Who may be affected by the project’s outcome?
• Who gains or loses from the project’s success?
• Who wants to complete the project successfully and who doesn’t?
• Who are the suppliers?
• Who is the user of the end result of the project?
• Who are the competitors?
• Who are the shareholders?
• Is any local community impacted by the project or its outcome?
• Who has the authority to influence the project or its outcome?
• Who has the authority to make the project succeed?
• Who can make your project fail?

These are all very important questions and are all relevant to intranets. Identifying intranet stakeholders is a necessary part of creating a successful intranet project. Done right, the benefits to your organization can be astounding.

The post How to identify your intranet’s key stakeholders and their needs appeared first on Interact software.

According to a Gallup poll, the average number of hours worked in the U.S. is 47 per week, almost a whole day more than the expected 9-5 schedule. 39% of working adults say they work 50 hours or more each week, making work the main life focus of nearly half the employed population of the country. This is not new, and the amount of time spent at work has remained steady for a long time now. However, long work hours have combined with other fresh realities.

Globalization and the rise of mobile workers are two factors that are much more recent phenomena. The International Data Corporation predicts that by 2020 mobile workers will make up 72.3% of the American workforce. This includes those who work part of their time in a corporate office and part in a home office, as well as those who work in field locations instead of an office environment. These numbers may also be pushing the number of hours worked higher than officially acknowledged – mobile workers are often productive outside their “normal” working hours.

The rise of the digital workplace is a third factor influencing the new reality of work. The app economy has made electronic tools for all manner of problems available in abundance, enterprise tools in intranets, project management software, HR automation software, and much more to assist the day to day internal operations associated with running a business.

All of these realities add up to form an entity that dictates much of the success or failure of a business: employee experience.

What is employee experience?

A recent article in Forbes explains that employee experience is different from just a company’s culture. The article elaborates:

“Employee experience is the combination of three distinct things that exist within any organization regardless of industry, size, and location. The other parts of employee experience [aside from culture] are the technological environment and the physical environment.

“The technological environment is the tools an employee needs to do their job, including the user interface, mobile devices, and desktop computers. An organization should provide relevant and modern tools that allow employees to get their job done.

“The physical environment includes anything that can be seen, heard, touched, and tasted like the desks, chairs, art, and meals. This is crucial because employees spend most of their time inside the organization so it should have a positive effect on them. All three of these aspects should be focused on to create an environment where people want to show up!”

With many thought leaders emphasizing employee engagement, it’s worth explaining how that differs from employee experience. An engaged employee is one who is enthusiastic and proactive in their job and their company in general. There are many factors that contribute to engagement, but it’s fair to say that the elements of employee experience directly influence engagement. In other words, engagement is not the same thing as employee experience but is rather a consequence of it.

Why does this matter?

Employee engagement clearly is an important issue for companies to follow. Not only is disengagement at nearly 70% but it has remained there for years, despite the prominence of commentary around it or the focus on engagement in HR departments. The cost of this trend is dire. Disengagement costs American businesses between $450 and 550 billion dollars per year, and replacing a disengaged employee costs up to 150% of that employee’s annual salary.

Companies still struggle with how to attack the employee engagement problem, and an issue they continually come up against is the difficulty in quantifying employee engagement. How do you eradicate a problem if you have no way of measuring the level of its existence or nonexistence?

Most companies that do measure engagement do so through annual surveys, which ask employees directly whether or not they are engaged. While surveys are helpful, they’re not as scientific as most organizations have grown accustomed to in an age of data. They are far from a perfect tool in improving employee engagement, and this is evident in how engagement numbers have not budged since the issue reached the national spotlight.

The fact is that employee experience is the cause, and engagement is the effect. Attacking low engagement, aside from being difficult to measure, fails to effect long term change because it doesn’t address experience.

Moreover, experience can be much more easily measured and tested than engagement. Because experience is two parts environment and one part culture (which can be further broken down into policies, management styles, and more), the individual components of this are easily switched out and compared with one another. As companies continually improve the employee experience by using those pieces that work the best together, employee engagement will naturally rise as well.

It’s clear that employee experience goes far beyond engagement. Not only that, but experience is arguably much more important for companies to be monitoring closely. If understood as one entity made up of smaller components and having wide ranging consequences, employee experience can be used to positively affect many parts of the business, engagement included.

What can you do?

Luckily, employee experience is more easily actioned than engagement is. We’ve already discussed the three pieces that come together to build it, and we’ve touched on the fact that each of them can break down into smaller component parts. For example, an intranet would be a part of the technological environment of a company. Number of vacation days is part of the company culture. Whether an office uses an open floor plan or cubicles falls under the physical environment.

Break down your company’s employee experience into those component parts, being as thorough as possible. Then, establish goals for the business and connect each part of the employee experience to one or multiple goals. Next, you’ll establish KPIs to show whether or not the components you identified are performing the way you need them to.

For instance, if your intranet is a key piece of your technological environment and you don’t feel that you’ve been getting its full benefits, you might make a KPI intranet participation. The number of people who post on your intranet at least once a week would help you to know how your technological environment is performing and whether or not it’s improving. You can now measure experience and establish initiatives to improve it. This in turn will boost employee engagement, productivity, and have many other positive consequences.

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Communications are taking on a central role and facing new challenges in a world where office workers no longer necessarily see each other face to face every day. We must empower employees to collaborate powerfully in this new global climate, which is not only expanding geographically but moving at a quicker pace each day.

After all, good communication is only a stepping stone to great collaboration, and both are necessary to support larger organizational goals.

Enterprise social networks: the holy grail?

But are enterprise social networks enough? Can they be a silver bullet, creating awesome communication and collaboration wherever they are implemented ? Do enterprise social networks alone support your company’s bottom line?

The answer is no, they do not. Enterprise social networks can be a piece of the collaborative puzzle, but in order to function properly and support company goals, they need to work in conjunction with other types of collaborative tools; such as document management and project management systems. In fact, research shows employee uptake and preference leans towards collaboration platforms such as intranets, rather than ESNs – due to the range of functionality and tasks they support.

Even more importantly, all of those digital tools need to be deployed strategically, with specific goals in mind and metrics to measure how well they achieved their purpose. Without that, the benefits of enterprise social networks cannot be realized.

In fact, when implemented carelessly, enterprise social networks can actually harm worker productivity.

Are your ESNs damaging your productivity?

There are a number of ways in which social tools can hurt productivity – which is why your company must first consider its own corporate culture and goals. Here are 6 ways social networks could be damaging your productivity.

1. They create a culture that encourages being “always on”

Collaboration can be an invaluable tool, connecting a person with one set of skills to someone else with a different set and enabling the two of them to finish projects together with impressive results – or simply helping spread the burden of large projects so that the majority of the work doesn’t fall on a single individual.

However, there are also instances in which companies push “collaboration for collaboration’s sake,” asking employees to be available on multiple social tools (whereas it was once only email) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The thought is that pushing employees to connect over these social networks will enhance the benefits of collaboration.

In fact, it forces them to be in the workplace mindset when they should be recharging their batteries. Even in the office, pressure to collaborate may push employees to extra tasks when they already feel the pressures of their regular, every day jobs.

This pressure has dire consequences. It’s widely accepted that too much stress is bad for overall health and can have long term health consequences. As it turns out, it harms productivity as well. According to the annual Global Benefit Attitudes survey by Towers Watson, employees experiencing stress and financial worries are significantly less healthy and significantly less productive.

Pushing employees to collaborate instead of simply making tools available and facilitating them not only makes them less healthy, but negatively affects your company goals and bottom line.

2. They cause employees to focus on tasks other than work

Enterprise social networks can provide workers with tools to be more productive and achieve impressive goals. Unfortunately, they also provide something for employees to focus on that isn’t related directly to their job description.

Another word for this phenomenon? Distraction. In other words, for all the hype that enterprise social networks don’t distract employees and have the power to boost productivity, it’s hard to escape the fact that no one’s job is to go on social media at work (unless they’re a social media marketer) – yet that’s exactly what they’re being asked to do.

According to the technology research and strategy organization Altimeter, only 25% of enterprise social networks in use have employees regularly utilizing them. This is in contrast to 36% of more inclusive collaboration platforms, such as intranets. The reason is likely that when employees are at work, they want to actually do their jobs.

According to another study, it takes an average of 23 minutes, 15 seconds to refocus once a person has been distracted from a task they’re performing. That’s a huge chunk out of an 8 hour work day, especially if those 23 minutes and 15 seconds come multiple times every day!

If employees are pushed to use a social tool and it turns out to be a distraction instead of a helpful collaboration tool, it isn’t fulfilling its purpose – and may in fact be removing a large portion of their productive hours.

3. They add extra steps to otherwise simple tasks

The best digital business tools reduce the number of steps an employee has to take in order to complete the tasks that make up their day to day jobs. Digital and social tools that aren’t correctly used, however, add to the number of steps an employee must go through. This is often because all the old systems are still in place; when another is added, it doesn’t replace any inefficiencies the organization had before.

One common example of this is when companies install software that boasts its ability to reduce email volume, but the company keeps its email system intact. Communications are duplicated or tasks are assigned using both the new tool and email. Employees must now respond using both media, lest they appear to be ignoring a communication from their manager.

In reality, no efficiency has been added in these situations. On the contrary, time has been taken away from that employee that they needed to do their job and support organizational goals. Add to this the time it takes to refocus after a distraction (doubled or even tripled from the use of new systems!), and it’s easy to see how enterprise social networks could potentially harm overall productivity levels.

4. They push employees to collaborate on tasks that don’t call for it

Collaboration isn’t always the answer. Yes, it has many uses – when an employee is missing knowledge that is essential to their job but has access to another person in their organization who has that missing knowledge or skillset, collaboration will enable success. Some tasks, however, are best completed on one’s own. This is what’s known as the “too many cooks in the kitchen” phenomenon.

For any given project, there are bound to be many parties who either have a stake in its completion or are simply interested in giving their feedback. Receiving feedback from many sources at once makes it extremely difficult for a person to do their job well or quickly. They must sort through all the comments, reconcile the ones that contradict each other, and make sure their final product can satisfy all parties. This doesn’t take into account projects where multiple people are working on them before they even reach the feedback stage.

In contrast to the situation mentioned above where an employee might need the expertise of another person in the organization, what about the employee who has all the knowledge they need? What if that employee isn’t pressed for time and doesn’t need the support from other members of their team?

According to a recent survey, 86% of people feel most productive when they work alone. Enterprise social networks add many new points of connection for each task in a person’s day to become a collaborative effort. In many cases this goes beyond supplying tools for workers to use as needed and forces them to collaborate when they’d be able to easily accomplish a task on their own. In the case of a larger project, this can add not just minutes or hours but days onto the time it takes to complete a task. Talk about a burden on productivity!

5. They force people to multitask

Using an enterprise social network inherently forces a person to multitask. The idea behind them is that they become a part of an employee’s day to day life, folding themselves into every task that employee performs. That’s why they supposedly raise productivity. They are tools that help complete work quickly and effectively. Supposedly.

In fact, participating in an enterprise social network constitutes a series of tasks in and of itself. Because of that, using one means that employee is trying to concentrate on both the social tool and their task at hand.

A study from 2013 found that high cognitive load negatively affects a person’s performance, while another study demonstrated that forcing the brain to focus on many things at once causes bottlenecks that result in lost information and reduced decision making ability. Regardless of the positive intention of collaborating on an enterprise social network, multitasking harms productivity. There’s no way around that fact, neurologically speaking.

6. They act as a communications crutch

For all that’s been said about the dangers of over communicating and over collaborating, it’s no secret that communication and collaboration both are a necessary ingredient to any company’s success. Without them, productivity would be astronomically lower. It’s important to reiterate that enterprise social networks can’t be considered a silver bullet to this problem.

Often, when companies introduce them, they’re used as a crutch. The idea is that just by deploying social tools, communication and collaboration will skyrocket. However, it’s the people using the tools and the overarching company culture that make social tools useful.

Before implementing them, companies need to carefully consider a strategy, including the goals they expect social tools to help accomplish and the metrics to be used in measuring their effectiveness. Enterprise social networks on their own are not enough, but with the right planning and effort, they can be a boon to productivity.

Is it time to throw out our Enterprise Social Network?

Despite the arguable disadvantages of enterprise social networks, they continue to hold a place in the office – and are growing in popularity. Ultimately in order to serve their true purpose, ESNs must be strategically deployed and monitored. Before pulling the plug, it’s worth performing a ‘health check’ on your own:

• Does our ESN integrate or complement our existing business tools and processes – for example, connecting to our cloud storage provider or collaboration platforms?
• Is engagement with the platform business-wide or are there silos of adopters and shirkers? Do those individuals require more training and support, or do they have an alternative preference?
• Does our ESN hinder or help with collaborative processes? Is use a streamlined and efficient process, or do we need to remove some of the unnecessary stages or steps?
• Do we have usage best practice guidelines to govern out-of-hours communications or potential productivity-damaging distractions?

An enterprise social network is just one piece of the digital workplace puzzle – and rarely an all-encompassing collaboration or communication tool. Rather, they can serve as a valuable addition to your existing platforms and processes. Stop viewing your ESN as the workplace answer to Twitter or Facebook: by removing focus from the ‘social’ element and regarding your ESN as a link or connector between your collaboration and communication tools, you can realise its true value.

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Nowhere is this clearer than in the modern workplace. 83% of respondents to a recent ATD poll stated that communication is the most important skill for success as a manager. What’s more, a Gallup poll cited employees as being three times more engaged when managers held regular meetings with their teams. To put the importance of communication at work in terms of the bottom line, a Project Management Institute study found that for every $1 billion spent on projects, $75 million of that is put at risk by poor communication.

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The changes technology is bringing to the workplace are making a focus on communication even more necessary. 37% of US employees now work from home or telecommute at least part of the time, according to a second Gallup study. That means that far fewer communications are face to face, as the norm used to be. Email and other forms of online interaction, such as using company intranets, are emphasized much more as a result of those circumstances. Because of that, what constitutes “good” communication also has changed. Tone of voice and body language are no longer available to assist in conveying meaning. In addition, the globalized work environments that have been become the new normal mean interacting with coworkers from a wide variety of cultures, who may have different expectations in the office. Communication savvy workers are more necessary than ever as they need to understand the intricacies of interaction in order to properly navigate the uncharted territories of the modern work environment.

Communication permeates the office, and almost every situation imaginable benefits when it’s done well or suffers when it’s done poorly. That’s the reality of working with others on a team. Here are 5 situations that arise every day, when communication is especially important.

1. Transparency

Transparency is the key to trust, and trust is fundamental to engagement and collaboration. This means letting employees see the warts on the organization and the constant work of self-improvement. Making sure everyone has a behind the scenes look into how the organization functions, how decisions are made, and what their results are is fundamental as a leader. Even as a junior level employee, ensuring that one’s processes are as transparent as possible maximizes the potential for learning and growth. When done well, transparency can also assure everyone in your organization that they have a voice and that they’re valued. There are some very simple steps you can take to ensure transparency. They include keeping an open door policy and informing others of the steps you’re taking in any projects with which they are also involved. Have faith in your employees as well – you never know what groundbreaking suggestions they may have once they are comfortable with the amount of transparency that’s been introduced!

REI, the outdoor recreation retailer, makes use of social media to promote transparency among its employees and management. They hold “company campfires” in which high level executives and senior staff discuss their ideas and initiatives. Importantly, all other employees are encouraged to share their views and ask questions during these events. This creates a dialogue among all members of the organization about its inner workings and shows employees that their views are valued.

2. Developing new employees

Interact offers a custom homepage for all new starters

Onboarding is essential in building good collaboration habits. Every new employee has a learning curve, but getting them in tune with processes that are important to your team from day one will ensure that they quickly mature into high impact contributors. Be understanding of their position, but give feedback and nudge them in the right direction. The onboarding process ideally begins even before the start date, with managers reaching out to new employees and including them on all team communications. By the time a new hire’s first day comes around, they should have already been briefed and partially trained so that they can hit the ground running, learning as they work.

Having a mentor contributes greatly to an employee’s ability to assimilate seamlessly to a team and become productive quickly. In this case, communication between the new hire and that mentor is invaluable in answering the new hire’s questions and setting an example for them of how to fit into the team as a powerful contributor. Mentors need not be senior to the new employee, and they need not even be from the same team. What matters is that they exemplify the company culture and brand, understand organizational goals and how each department furthers those goals, and that they are able to make themselves available to build a relationship with the new employee.

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The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has an impressive mentoring program for younger employees. They help those workers to define and further their professional goals, as well as connecting them with colleagues who may be important to their careers down the line. In this way, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center uses communication from mentors to expertly invest in their newer employees. They understand that these employees are the future of the organization, and they equip them with all the tools they need to make that future meaningful.

3. Operating in a globalized office

Cable and Wireless use their intranet to facilitate communication between their global offices

As we previously discussed, the modern office is globalized and operates across borders in a way that was never previously possible. This is thanks in part to email but also to enterprise social networks, intranets, and cloud technology. The cloud in particular allows for instantaneous communication and collaboration. Now, a worker in Hong Kong can collaborate in real time with their colleague in New York City. The pitfalls of this new type of communication and collaboration are not to be taken lightly – written communications must be very clear to make up for the lack of face to face interaction, and cultural differences must be understood and accounted for so as to avoid potentially serious conflicts.

At the same time, the risks of this new reality are outweighed by the fact that productivity has benefitted greatly. Employees no longer are tied to their desks and therefore have fewer restrictions on what makes them able to productively collaborate. A greater pool of talent and knowledge are available to all organizations, as are the tools to harvest them. Quickly finding a coworker who is an expert in tax law or fluent in German is possible, whereas it would have been an unrealistic feat in past years. As long as the knowledge exists at a company, it is accessible regardless of geography.

SoundCloud, the online audio distribution platform, makes use of an intranet to connect their own globalized office. While the company has its headquarters in Berlin, Germany, they have offices in four different time zones and continue to be one of the most successful companies in their field. Their communications team is able to ensure that each office has its voice heard and that employee engagement initiatives are consistent and hold the voices of all workers in equal esteem. Moreover, they are able to initiate smaller and more intimate conversations among offices through their intranet. An intranet that has a Teams feature enables this kind of communication, which is crucial to working well with distributed offices.

4. Communicating company news (good or bad)

An intranet homepage provides the ideal platform for important employee communications

This point goes hand in hand with transparency, which was mentioned earlier as point number one. At a very basic level, employees all have the right to know how their organization is performing and any major changes that may be on the horizon. They may wish to get updates not only about their own department but about others – this is a sign that they care about the overall health of the company beyond their own position, which should be encouraged. Outside of the right of employees to company news, keeping everyone informed of performance and major changes means they are better equipped to understand the company’s overall goals. When they know company goals, workers and managers can tailor their performance and tasks to support those goals. In that way, keeping employees informed is good for the short and long term overall performance of the organization.

Oscar Suris, Head of Corporate Communications for Wells Fargo, recently answered some questions for PR News Online about internal communications at the banking giant. He says, “Each year, we survey thousands of team members to gauge their satisfaction with internal communications. They’ve been clear: When there’s news, good or bad, they want to hear it promptly from their employer via the company’s internal communications channels.” Suris goes on to explain that delivering their news in a timely manner is very highly correlated with employee satisfaction with internal communications.

5. Change management

Every company goes through changes at some point. That’s the hallmark of organizational growth, something that every business strives for. Beyond simply communicating that there will be change, successful organizations will practice good communication throughout the process of change and make it a hallmark of their change management strategy.

Jamie Sandys, the National Communications Specialist at Make-A-Wish, wrote a recent blog post for Interact on the change management strategy they used when deploying a new intranet. Sandys wrote, “With the advisory team in place, we turned toward communicating with the rest of the Make-A-Wish employees. We developed a tiered communication strategy that provided different levels of detail on the project to different groups, depending on the group’s involvement and relevance. The Senior Leadership Team might receive a monthly update with timeline and budget information; whereas the larger employee group may only receive quarterly updates as reminders about the project. Overall, the communications goal was two-fold: 1) to make sure no one was taken by surprise about the project and 2) to educate everyone on why the site was needed and, most importantly, how it would benefit them.”

Ultimately, their Communications team’s effort led to impressive overall adoption, and their intranet continues to be used today. Their story is illustrative of how powerful communication can be used to accomplish a variety of organizational goals.

Regardless of what type of initiative a business is introducing, communication has to be a piece of the strategy. From the smallest components, such as every day collaboration, to introducing organization-wide changes communication is nine tenths of the battle.

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