HR Advocacy via Communication

Satish Kumar pointed out in a recent post that HR could and should be the advocate of employees as well as just serve the executives. Beyond processing documents (virtual or real), he recommends expanded roles:
"Fostering effective methods of goal setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility, builds employee ownership of the organization. The HR professional helps establish the organizational culture and climate in which people have the competency, concern and commitment to serve customers well."
It strikes me that social media are excellent low-cost methods to help HR become the "employee advocate" as well as the "change champion." Support of social media sends a message (McLuhan would agree I think) that HR is not just a rule enforcer. Think of a blog / wiki as a continuously running employee survey.

Building Trust

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share knowledge and add to social capital. Improved organizational climate fosters better productivity. There is plenty of evidence to support that claim.

These are the main references to trust that I found:

Geoffrey Corb at Johns Hopkins: “We have found that people involved in our projects are more well informed than ever before. Trust has strengthened between project participants and stakeholders since our operations are more transparent than ever before.”(Mader, 2008, p. 39)

“Wikis shift the social balance away from control and closer to trust.”(p. 49)

“Closed systems implicitly assume that people can’t be trusted and technology has to be relied on to control access to information. This encourages an organizational culture where people don’t trust each other and are concerned with maintaining control over information access. . . .

“Fundamentally open tools such as the wiki encourage just the opposite. Their design assumes that people can be trusted with the information they have access to, and will use it responsibly to further shared goals. This encourages a culture where people do trust each other, and involve others in their work to build the best possible end product in less time and with less unnecessary back and forth effort. . . .”(pp. 50-51)

“A wiki thrives on active participation by as many people as possible, and in turn brings greater value to each individual user. It relied on transparency, trust, and willingness to share information more openly, work more collaboratively, and see information as more valuable when more people have access to it.”(p. 121)

I believe the benefits claimed for wikis and my research needs a few (anonymous) firms where I may add some social media use questions to employee surveys to test my hypothesis on the subject of trust.

Reference

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Gas at $4/gal.: Time for TheBus

No danger yet of not getting a seat starting at about 6:15 a.m. Bused to work putting the bicycle in the rack (on the front of all the buses in Honolulu) and then bicycled home after work
Got an excuse to read some of another neglected book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Michael Banks. Details soon.

Social Media Guidance Big and Small

Social Media Guidance Big and Small: Two Book Reviews

Two recent good books on social media provide theoretical and practical advice while implementing the open source principle of giving away the ‘source code’ that attracts consulting business, and support sales. We may also see the books and the authors as providing a “bigger picture” and a “smaller picture” contrast in approaching social media.

I’ll start in the order in which I bought the books and read them on some recent long airplane trips. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies provides advice on selecting social media based on survey data that is used to construct “social technographics® profiles” of target demographics. The authors are analysts with Forrester Research, Inc. copyright holder for this Harvard Business Press book. Thus we have the benefit of both data and consulting experience, i.e. case studies, across many firms. The groundswell is defined as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions like corporations.”(p. 9) Mentioning blogs, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay, Craigslist, MSN Messenger, and more, the central advice to companies is that they better get on board soon in a smart way – even jump on the moving train -- with the new way of communicating with customers and employees. Or lose them! This is the book about the bigger picture of social, collaborative media in business.

Groundswell is organized in three parts: Understanding the groundswell, Tapping the groundswell, and the groundswell transforms. Understanding provides the motivation paying attention to social media, calls for new approaches, and introduces the social technographics profile. More on that later.

Tapping’s first chapter is on strategic planning: POST – people, objectives, strategy, and technology. After planning, the company strategy would include elements – each a chapter -- of listening to (e.g. monitoring your brand on the ‘Net), talking with, energizing, helping the groundswell support itself, and finally, embracing the groundswell. Note that those are social phenomena, not technological ones. Each chapter is well-illustrated with case studies, practical advice on approaches and resources, and applications of social technographics. The goals is to learn about the firm’s audience and get prepared to use social media most appropriately. (I propose that we create non-proprietary acronym for a social use of media profile (SUMP) in place of social technographics. Alternatively, the more intuitive SMUP for social media use profile has some drawbacks because it is used in neurology and has some questionable associations on the Web.)

Transforms features chapters about outward-facing transformation, inward-facing transformation, and finally the future with some concluding advice. The outward-facing transformation is about becoming more customer-centric and using customer input to the advantage of the firm. The inward-facing transformation is about empowering employees, benefiting from their experience and knowledge, changing the culture, trusting employees and engaging workers at all levels. To paraphrase some of their key advice on getting started, “find and encourage the rebels” with small efforts that may fail fast but also fail inexpensively.

That said, the book is not about thinking small; numerous ROI estimates show that if the small initial experiments and risk-taking work out, hundreds of thousands of dollars may be required but with excellent returns.

The technographics or SUMP analytic approach is a definite contribution to social media measurement because appropriate, parsimonious measurement of social media usage is still a challenge to business and social science. Whether involving customers and/or employees, the authors’ technographics classify the target group as being creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactives relative to some target demographic’s use of social media. Critics, for example, would have in the past 30 days done one or more of the following: Posted ratings or reviews of products or services, commented on someone else’s blog, contributed to online forums, and/or contributed to or edited articles in a wiki. As they describe it, “ . . . it’s similar to demographics and psychographics but focuses on technology behaviors.”(p. 41). People may fall into more than category. As an organization you then select a particular type(s) of social media appropriate to the group. For example, 25% (index = 100) of the U.S. respondents of all ages and genders in the Forrester database are critics. For females 18-24, 38% are critics, a relative index of 149 so you might try to engage them by inviting evaluations or to comment on a product blog.

For age group, country and gender, dynamically-created profiles are available on their website (Forrester Research, 2008). That’s a useful tool. (If you want more details or your own survey, talk to the sales department.) Three of the many case studies, for examples, compare Fujitsu (more active on social media) and NEC PC owners in Japan, Republicans and Democrats (a little above average in all categories but inactive), and Toys “R” Us (generally higher on all social media) and L. L. Bean shoppers. In a similar vein, the book’s literature references are linked through the Forrester website http://groundswell.forrester.com where of course comments are encouraged.

In summary, there is plenty of useful advice such as start small, educate your executives, get the right people, technology and plans, etc. But of course the essential elements are human relationships that happen to be facilitated by technology. So their concluding advice is how to be: Focused on person-to-person activity, a good listener, patient, opportunistic, flexible, collaborative, and humble.

In contrast to Groundswell, Wikipatterns is a smaller, more practical book by Stewart Mader (2008) primarily about adoption of one Web 2.0 technology, the wiki. The subtitle is “a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization.” A website of the same name (wikipatterns.com) continues the discussion of and addition to the book’s content. Mader is a Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, a company that licenses or hosts its wiki software. Mader has practiced what he preached as he set up a wiki to write Wikipatterns as well as edit a prior book, Using Wiki in Education (2006), that is only available online for purchase in paper or PDF.

In my reading of the book, there are two main themes: The benefits of adoption and the patterns of adoption, growth and maintenance. The book, based on Mader’s experience and case studies, points out key benefits including shared knowledge and information on a wiki, facilitation of collaboration, reduction in email – particularly of multiple often differing copies of documents, encouragement of participation, and efficiency and speed in creating and editing documents.

Patterns of adoption are the key theoretical and practical contributions distilled from the case studies. The key word in the title is patterns. There are four large classes of patterns: People patterns, people anti-patterns, adoption patterns and adoption anti-patterns. Here are just a few examples:

People Patterns	People Anti-Patterns	Adoption Patterns	Adoption Anti-Patterns
90-9-1 Theory Champion Welcoming Wiki Charter . . . and more	Bully Do it all OverOrganizer Vandal	Agenda Overview pages New Starter SingleProblem	All wiki all the time Empty pages PageOwnership Training

Of course not all patterns are of equal significance. My list, particularly to get started would highlight Champion, Sponsor, Wiki Charter, Single Problem, Fly under the radar, New Starter, Clean Permissions, and the like. Mader is in full agreement with Li & Bernoff about the importance of pilot projects – they usually take about six months -- and clear goals and policies. He is much less optimistic that an ROI for a wiki can be calculated. (There are plenty of other people knowledgeable on social media who also are willing to calculate ROI’s for email reduction. See the websites of Jon Mell, or Luis Suarez for examples. Jon Mell points out that for a pilot the ROI for email reduction may be enough but for a big effort, more dramatic evidence such as innovative ideas emerging may be required to justify the wiki.)

Other important discussions include the differences between your upstart corporate wiki and Wikipedia and the importance of people in managing knowledge and feeling in control. Ward Cunningham, creator of the first wiki in 1995, wrote the Foreword noting among other ideas, “It’s natural, after all, for people to collaborate. The wiki will serve as your community’s short-term memory.”

I recommend both books for people implementing or studying social media. Li & Bernoff cover more types of media and applications with more data – they are more “quantitative.” Mader is more “qualitative” getting into some detail about the sociology and organizational experiences of wiki adoption.

References

Forrester Research, I. (2008). Profile tool. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston MA: Harvard Business Press.

Mader, S. (2006). Using Wiki in Education. from http://www.lulu.com/content/2175253.

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Mell, J. (2008). Wiki ROI. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://jonmell.co.uk/2008/03/wiki-roi-final-thoughts.html

Suarez, L. (2008). Email reduction. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.elsua.net/

wikipatterns.com. Wikipatterns. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.wikipatterns.com