Toyota's nerve system

There’s a great example of best fit people management in this month’s Harvard Business Review. The article proposes that Toyota’s ability to manage contradictions (along with the Toyota Production System) is the main source of the company’s success.

I don’t deny that dealing with paradox is an important capability, and in fact it is increasingly so, but my reading of the research identifies Toyota’s development of social capital as the engine of the company’s growth.

So I could have posted on this here, but the case study is a great example of best fit HCM as well so I actually did so here.

Do take a look.

Rehumanising the workplace / BT

Contrasting with the Microsoft case study, this was an example of social media being introduced ‘under the radar’.

I’d come across the case study earlier on Melcrum's blog and have also subscribed to Richard's.

The case study means quite a lot to me because of some earlier involvement in BT, which included writing some content on performance management for their intranet. I also had several conversations with Margaret Savage while she was at BT about liberating employees from over controlling managers – social media seems to have been one way that BT has been achieving this. (I would have said achieved if it wasn’t for the 20 calls and 3 different attempts to get a BT phone line installed recently)

BT have 160,000 active users on BTpedia and 215,000 different people have published content. They have had to give 100% access because all BT’s processses and systems are online and this includes the whole extended enterprise – in fact there are more contractors than employees on the intranet. So it has been a successful initiative to democratise communication.

I think one of the things that has made this so successful is Richard’s belief that it’s all about participation. In his view, and in mine, social media is about an ongoing dialogue, about creating a conversation rather than channels.

Richard explained that people tend to shut down facets of their personality when they put their suit on – to feel that they can’t say what they don’t like – to have to sit on their hands – that we expect people to be totally different at work. Social media rehumanises the workplace. People have personality – why can’t they have personality at work? What does it matter if people talk about their dog?

I thought this was a great point, that reinforced some of those made by Ethan at IBM - it doesn't matter if social media is used for personal information as this is important and part of the business too.

And social media isn't about managing, but facilitating communications. Tobias Huebscher from eBay argued that content is still key. But social meda shouldn't be about pushing content. Even a CEO blog isn't really about communicating messages but connecting him or her with their employees. I think IBM, Microsoft and BT have been so succesful in implementing social media because of their understanding of this point.

Microsoft Academy Mobile

I thought this was a great case study of social media implementation - and the opposite of the "sneak it in" approach.

The implementation started slowly with pilots, the development of some content, getting management onboard and identifying champions, but then took place through a very major launch. People were provided with podcasts on SD cards and were supported to try podcasting out. To take it forward, Microsoft provides 'podcasts in a box' - all the equipment someone needs as long as they produce 3 podcasts a month.

More thoughts on employee communication (part 2)

3. Trust your people and use social media

Presenters gave some great examples to show that organisations have lost control of the conversation. Employees are going online to join interactive conversations about our companies – we need to enable this.

The best web based communication combines web 2.0, the research web by giving people access to data; web 2.0 - the social web by giving access to tools, and what Steve Crescenzo termed web 3.0 - the multimedia web by entertaining people.

We saw some great examples of web 2.0 in organisations including (as well as IBM), Microsoft, BT and ebay. It’s a shame these are e all technology companies but as Marc Wright pointed out, we’re still at a very early stage in the development of social media – things will be very different in five years time. So it’s important not to codify approaches and to keep aware of trends and changes.

But we’re not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. People are using social media in their personal lives and are increasingly going to expect to be able to do so at work as well.

So how do you get your organisation interested? Mark recommended searching out the people with both power and enthusiasm and through this approach, seeking senior level endorsement. Don’t force people who are resisting the technology to say no – once they do they won’t say yes.

A couple of presenters recommended down playing the new aspects of the technology (“sneak it out”) – for example by talking about allowing people to publish and comment, rather than using the word ‘blog’. (However, this isn’t the approach used by Microsoft and I’ll post on this separately).


4. Measurement

I didn’t get much out of Susan Walker’s formal presentation on measurement but Ethan McCarthy from IBM; Paolo Tosolini from Microsoft and Richard Dennison from BT all talked intelligently about it.

Paolo explained how Microsoft measure their Academy Mobile system (their “enterprise you tube”) using reach and awareness (downloads, reach) and operations (number of podcasts on Academy Mobile, number of podcasts produced, number of profiles).

However, he emphasized, supporting Ethan's perspective that it is very difficult to calculate a ROI so they, like IBM, focus on the use of testimonials which are sent to the CEO. He believes it’s about belief rather than a hard business case: they need to “go for it because we believe in 2.0 / social media”.

Richard’s perspectives on measurement are included on his blog. Readers of my HCM blog may recognise some of these points from some of my previous posts.


For further perspectives on the conference, check out:

http://www.krishnade.com/blog/2008/international-employee-communications-summit-2/

http://talkingic.typepad.com/foureightys_lee_smith_tal/2008/06/view-from-the-summit-day-two.html

More thoughts on employee communication (part 1)

Here are the rest of my key learnings from the Internal Communication Summit that I have been attending over the last two days.

One point that was made several times is that there are increasing challenges in delivering communication that gets read by, and leads to new understanding or actions by employees. Firstly, it is growing harder to get people’s attention, particularly when they are picking up their emails on blackberries and other devices. Secondly, there is increasing cynicism over use of business-speak. People are sick of hearing from ‘suits’ who aren’t seen as authentic and end up playing bullshit bingo.

Organisations can respond to this new environment by:

1. Revising the way they talk about themselves

Organisations need to communicate using the normal language of employees. Jim Ylisela from Ragan pointed out that senior managers often think and talk in terms of long, fancy titles; a lofty vision statement: a set of core values: circles, pyramids, Greek temples.. Employees simply want to know what does it mean?; what does it mean to me?; what do you want me to do?; why should I care? And how can we help?

The 2006 Annual Edelman Trust Barometer explains that a “person like yourself or your peer” is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed.

We trust…
• Each other
• Independent subject matter experts
• NGOs

We don’t trust…
• Business
• Government
• Mainstream media

So we need to make the impersonal more personal. Organisations need to close the disconnect between what the strategy requires and the way organization works now.

This is particularly important while going through change. Marc Wright from Simply Communicate talked about: Disphasing between the CEO and employees going through the Kubler Ross change curve. It’s important that organisations don’t use the boss’ language with people when they’re in this position.

But changing the way we communicate isn’t enough – to be authentic, we also need to change what we’re communicating.

So, for example, Marc talked about Vodafone moving away from discussing its competitive positioning (“We want Vodafone to be number one”) to defining itself based upon what it is – looking into its soul and trying to identify its DNA (see my posts on meaning LINK).


2. Structured and creative communication planning

Communication professionals tend to focus on ensuring copy is safe and that it gets in on time. The result of this is that nobody reads it.

Jim’s process to avoid this is:

1. First, listen to your audiences. Learn what gets their attention
2. Next, create a strategy to reach them
3. Then, figure out the best way to deliver your messages

· Print explains “what” and “why” but not “how” and not information which needs to be timely
· E-mail alerts people to timely information and pulls them to the web
· Intranets allow you to provide timely news, link to more information, interact with the audience and use multimedia tools like podcasts and video
· Social media generates ideas, solves problems and gets people talking about what the organization is trying to do and how they can help.

Ellen Coomber from Cognac also emphasised the need to use visual communication and William Amuris from American Electric Power talked about emotional communication: “Design the personality you want your intranet to have”.

4. Finally, make sure it’s working. When it doesn’t, make adjustments.

The mother of all intranets: IBM’s w3

A couple of days ago I was listening to an interesting Business Week podcast featuring the journalists who recently updated the magazine’s article Blogs / Social Media will change your Business.

Talking about IBM, the journalists explain that the firm is developing their own versions of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Wikipedia to develop not so much an intranet, but an intra social net. They see the key to getting their 400,000 people on this as making the tools corporate without loosing the magic and appeal that comes with using them when they’re outside and free.

The tools are giving IBM employees new ways to communicate with others, to engage with others and to build new types of team. And they’re seen as the key to innovation.

In addition, it helps IBM to appeal to the best and brightest of the 23-27 year old graduates they want to recruit, who would otherwise see IBM as a bit clueless.

And they help the company to look at its workforce – to study peoples’ behaviour, to see who is networking with who, who is communicating with who, what knowledge and areas of expertise they have. All of this will help them optimize their workfoce.

All interesting stuff. So I was very pleased yesterday to hear from Ethan McCarthy at IBM describing the development of the firm’s intranet.

Firstly, this was a direct response to the company’s workforce transformation strategy which included the goals to:

· Move from organisation centric to employee centric model
· Bring the marketplace inside
· Drive flexibility and productivity through new tools
· Collective knowledge
· Dynamic manager / employee relationship


Given these objectives, the intranet was built around the employee, and is based on their user profile, populated from the HR system and the individual themselves.

71% of employees say that the intranet is their preferred sources of information (above co-workers, their manager, senior exec letters, IBM.com and external media). See also this article from Ragan and IBM's blogging guidelines.

We also talked about IBM’s corporate directory, ‘Bluepages’. This includes much more than just someone’s phone number – it includes a lot of personal stuff – about what someone has been doing and which is vital to help people to connect in a knowledge based business.

There is also a social network, ‘Beehive’which enables people to connect through shared content. This includes both personal and professional information and IBM is fine that some of the information is personal because “this is business as well – it’s sociological and therefore important”.

In fact the personal stuff gets more interest than editorial so there is a need to use this strategically.

IBM also have an internal wikipedia (‘Bluepedia’) and enables people to set up their own wikis.

They have also socialised search: by using tagging so that people can see how other people have tagged information, and who these people are.

Ethan emphasized that given the size of the business, all these tools are essential to connect people who would have otherwise never had met and to build on the ‘weak ties’.

We also talked about three further areas that were particularly interesting to me:

1. Using communication to provide meaning

As IBM continues its move from products to services and consultancy, there is an increasing need for people to understand not just what IBM does, but the impact of these activities. They are therefore publishing a series of articles under the title “What does IBM make?” (for example, greener hospitals) and is seen to support peoples’ for self actualization.

2. Selling the benefits

Ethan still faces some challenges about whether people are wasting their time blogging, but he hears this a lot less now than he did a few years ago.

This is partly due to the way the intranet supports IBM’s strategy and values. One of these values is that ‘innovation is inherently collaborative’. Sometimes it may happen through people working in ivory towers but this is the exception not the norm.

These values were developed in IBM’s online innovation jam held in July 2006 and in which over 100,000 employees plus customers, contractors and the employees’ family members brainstormed ideas around the future of business and the world supported by videos and background information on some of its most intriguing technologies. So the values are deeply embedded in the organisation.

Ethan explained that he can’t measure the success of blogging but he does track anecdotes and there are examples of where blog posts led to adding value to customers.

Employee Communciation Summit

I’m attending Simply Communicate’s Employee Communcation Summit today and tomorrow.

It’s an interesting conference, and I sort of wish I’d decided to live blog it (when I’ve done this before, at last year’s CIPD conference, I’ve found it very valuable to my learning as it forces me to internalise each presentation and articulate my perspective on the topic that’s been presented).

I’m not live blogging this conference however, possibly because I’ve got lazy, but also because I don’t find I’m yet as clear in my own thinking on communication and web 2.0 as I am on HR.

However, I am tweating on it, and here are a couple of other thoughts on some of my main reflections so far (I’ll do a couple of more substantive posts later on).

Firstly, there’s a big focus on web 2.0 in the presentations – so for example, I’m currently listening to one on Microsoft’s Academy Mobile (described as an internal you tube).

But there seems to be less familiarity of web 2.0 in the audience. I think only Krishna De and I are blogging (she is live blogging). And judging by the last question (upon hearing that Microsoft don’t moderate people’s podcasts: “But that means they can post anything!”) - Steve Crecenzo’s point that now we can only facilitate not control the conversation about our organisations doesn’t seem to have hit home.

I’d sort of expected a communication conference to be quiet different to an HR one (in the UK at least I know that most HR attendees are probably never going to have even visited a blog) – audience tweats up behind the presenter and that sort of thing.

We are using Crystal Response systems for asking questions, voting and providing inputs, but in the main, the style of delivery is still very much 1.0.

Web 2.0 in the Learning Ecosystem

I attended a very interesting Saba webinar a couple of weeks ago.

This featured Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Carol Rozwell who covered some of their market and customer research about how organisations are capitalising on the collaborative nature of social software to facilitate learning.

Two main things for me:

1. most companies are investing in social media to increase efficiency (doing more with existing resources) rather than improve effectiveness (creating channels for collaboration). Few are investing to transform their organisations.

2. The most common specific activities they want to include are communication, teamwork and problem solving. I wish I knew more about what they had asked about in terms of 'relating' here.

Gaining social capital by losing good people

A bit late on this but there was a really interesting article on some research into social capital in April's Harvard Business Review.

We know that moving to a new organisation will generally increase an individual's social capital (if they retain contacts with their last employer / colleagues). And that this should mean the new employer's social capital also increases.

But did you know that the old employer's social capital may rise by the employee leaving as well?

"An inventor who switches companies obviously brings previously acquired knowledge the new employer. We also found, though, that after an inventor moves to a new firm in a different country, subsequent patents from the inventor's old firm are 36% more likely to cite patents granted to people at the inventor's new firm than to cite patents granted to people at other comparable companies. In effect, the old firm gains knowledge from the new firm. However, this phenomenon is not evident for inventors who move within the same US metropolitan region or the same foreign country. That's probably because in those circumstances, the old country and the new firm are likely to have other existing ties, such as shared customers, suppliers and acquaintances."

Blogging a book

So what am I trying to do on this blog?

Well, I don't think I had ever come across web 2.0 when I wrote my book on HCM (human capital management - or the management of people in a way than enables the accumulation of human capital). If I had, I think I would have tried to write it in a very different , and collaborative way. And I think this need is particularly strong when writing anything to do with social networking using web 2.0.

Please note, I'm not thinking of writing a book on web 2.0 - there are plenty, absolutely plenty, of people who know much more about this than me. I am, however, thinking of writing something on social capital, and I will need to refer to web 2.0' significant impact on this.

So I want to write this new book in a web 2.0 oriented way. What I'm referring to has been well described by Debbie Weil in Blogging your book is a must:

"You gotta have a book blog to create buzz around your book. I knew that when I set up this blog.

But it's confirmed in yesterday's New York Times in an article, Dear Blog: Today I Worked on My Book. The article quotes three nonfiction authors on their blogs and their books-in-progress: John Battelle ("The Search"), Chris Anderson ("The Long
Tail") and David Weinberger ("Everything is Miscellaneous").

The article wisely points out: "Authors' blogs also change the solitary mission of writing into something more closely resembling open-source software."

My favorite quote: Battelle "calculated that last year he wrote 74,000 words for his book, and 125,000 words on his blog." As he puts it: "It is very satisfying to write something and get an immediate response to it." Yeah, I know what he means. I'm awfully simple minded that way. A blog is so, well, satisfying: scribble your idea, read it over, edit quickly... and click Publish Now. Then hope you get some Comments. Positive or negative, doesn't matter. It's the feedback that writers crave.So... why a book blog? It's a way to draw on the "collective intelligence" of your readers to get feedback, ideas, tips on who to interview, pointers to articles to read, etc. It can build
buzz for your book after it's published. See Seth Godin's All Marketers Are Liars and
Susannah Gardner's Buzz Marketing with Blogs.

However, a book blog may or may not mean that you are inviting readers into the writing process. Some authors are more willing than others to post drafts of chapters. Robert Scoble and co-author Shel Israel have been postings drafts for months to Naked Conversations (the blog for their book about business blogging). In contrast, David Weinberger, a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, tells the NYTimes reporter that he's not going to seek so much input from readers this time around. It made the rewriting process cumbersome and time-consuming.

Count me in the "a bit shy" category about this. I'll see as I get further along..."

Personally, I'll try to get as much input as I can possibly get.

Oh, also just to note that the New York Times article is well worth reading too.