Social Capital & Knowledge Exchange: Blogging Inside the Enterprise

You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.

Here is a taster:

Internal blogging can give us:

• The ability to get to know our colleagues as people and individuals encouraging give and take.
• An easier way of building networks of like-minded or useful people.
• An easy way to find out what colleagues are working on (and joining the dots with our own work).
• An easier way of finding out what people extracurricular interests and skills are (and harnessing them).
• The ability to scan the internal environment, take a reading of the organisation’s mood, and spot and pre-empt issues.
• An easy way to get a rounded sounding on ideas and test out theories or approaches – both by yourself by beginning to articulate ideas for the first time, and with others as a community of interest which helps to test and build the idea.

Read the full article.

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Engagement, Higher Education, Internal Communications, Internet, Warwick , OU, Unipart

Twitter: is it too limited?

This is a bookmark to Mat Mannion’s post:

Twitter is not fit for (my) purpose(s)

following this twitter conversation (as best as I can recreate it):

@mathewjm Having this sort of interaction 140 characters at a time is sub-optimal, for example!!! 5:50 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@mathewjm Or is it that people see a service and try and use it for something slightly different, and that’s when it doesn’t work? 5:48 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@caseyleaver Which is what separating work and play would prevent, of course. The problem is getting people to start when they don’t get it. 5:47 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to caseyleaver

@mathewjm & @steverumsby That’s what I mean. Ideally colleagues could get to know each other as rounded people and :. work better together. 5:41 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby When I’m not so lazy Mainly, it needs tags but nobody can be arsed (and multi-accounts is NOT the answer) 5:10 AM Jan 20th from Twabber in reply to steverumsby

@steverumsby Whether I am here or not doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is fundamentally flawed 5:07 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@mathewjm I’m not sure. I’d love to feature microblogging as part of a staff profile/directory effort. “Casey is (working on)…” 4:57 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby I know that – but lots of people don’t. Plus I am geekily committed to what I do for a living. 4:55 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@caseyleaver Unfortunately there’s no way around it, think Twitter will die off when people realise they don’t care what celebs are doing 4:51 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to caseyleaver

Worrying about how to use social media when people want to distinguish between work and play. Maybe Yammer is the answer? 4:45 AM Jan 20th from web

Filed under: Blogging, Engagement, Internal Communications, Internet, Social Media, Web Geekery

Cabinet Office Employee Engagement Kit

Writing about http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp

The Cabinet Office has put together an amazing pack on an approach on Employee Engagement (complete with survey).  The contents of this post, which is a draft of a paper that I am putting together for our Management Committee, is shamelessly stolen from the pack.

I should also add here (adhering to the Principles for Participation Online) that I work for Ofqual, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator, which, until Parliament passes the Children, Skills and Learning Bill, is part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

A programme of work is underway in the Civil Service to develop a cross-government approach to employee engagement. This paper proposes that Ofqual uses the Civil Service framework for measuring and increasing employee engagement. The framework includes a cost-effective staff survey. Adopting the common approach means that we can benchmark ourselves against similar organisation including QCA who are also considering using the scheme.

• Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19 ¹
• 70% of engaged employees indicate that they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs, while only 17% on non-engaged employees say the same. ²
• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged. ³
• 78% of engaged UK workers would recommend their company’s products or services, versus 13& of disengaged.⁴
• 78% of highly engaged workers in the UK public sector say they can make an impact on public services delivery or customer service, versus only 29% of the disengaged. In 2006 Towers Perrin surveyed 3,000 public sector workers in the UK. ⁴

 

Employees agreeing that:	Disengaged	Moderately Engaged	Highly Engaged
I can impact the quality of our work product	29%	56%	84%
I can impact costs related to my job/unit	10%	21%	43%
I can impact the overall efficiency of the organisation	11%	30%	68%

 Being engaged is more than just being satisfied or motivated. It is having a sense of personal attachment to your work and organisation which means that you want it to succeed. Increasing engagement is achieved by making changes that positively impact on how employees think and feel about their experience of work.

Key Drivers

The key drivers of employee engagement differ between organisations but they tend to fall into the following areas of policy or practice:

1. Vision and direction – creating and communicating a clear and motivating picture of the future for employees
2. Career development – opportunities for professional and personal development and advancement.
3. Recognition – acknowledging the importance of the role each individual plays and thanking people for superior effort and performance.
4. Line management – enabling managers to be advocates of the organisation and their staff.
5. Work itself and environment – creating absorbing roles and suitable and effective work spaces.
6. Organisational effectiveness and ethics – promoting competence, efficiency, innovation and openness in everyday operations.
7. Employee involvement and autonomy – making use of employee expertise and opinion in operating and managing the business.
8. Work-life balance – allowing flexibility in working arrangements to enable employees to meet personal commitments.
9. Reward – valuing employees through a total reward package of pay and a range of other benefits.
10. Information flow and internal communication – enabling easy exchange of information across the organisation and ensuring that internal communication is regular, consistent and targeted.
11. Resources – providing employees with sufficient and suitable resources for their tasks and objectives.
12. Corporate image and reputation – being aware of stakeholder views of the organisation and maintaining a good public standing.

Critical Success Factors

The breadth of factors that could drive, either positively or negatively, engagement levels across the organisation are wide and responsibility lies across several functions, but there are a number of critical success factors:

1. Meaningful performance goals – organisational outcomes linked to employee actions
2. Building commitment and confidence – securing senior leaders’ buy-in and supporting managers to confidently involve and support their teams
3. Leading by example – willingness among senior leaders to invest time and effort in demonstrating a personal commitment to the approach and do things differently if necessary
4. Measurement-driven decisions – using robust quantitative data to decide where effort will have the most value, evaluate progress against goals and evolve the approach.
5. Thinking ‘global’ – considering all business decisions in the context of their impact on people and performance across the whole organisation
6. Employee involvement – providing opportunities for staff to contribute ideas and feedback to improve the approach, and for leaders and managers to gain insight into the needs and motivations of employees.
7. Clear accountability – defining roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for employee engagement between leaders, line managers, corporate functions and peer group networks.
8. Effective communication – regular, tailored communication to explain the benefits of the approach, acknowledge challenges, recognise the efforts of employees and update on progress.

Process

 

Taken from the Cabinet Office’s Employee Engagement in the Civil Service document (http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp)

Although measurement is at the heart of the approach this programme is more than a staff survey. Aligning the process to the business planning and performance review can mean that information on what engages employees can be used to inform business strategies.

Recommendations

 

That OMG considers (a) adopting this approach to co-ordinating decision-making on issues related to staff, and (b) committing to improving the drivers of employee engagement. 

 

1 Gallup, 2003, cited in Melcrum, Employee Engagement: How to Build a High Performance Workforce, 2005.

2 Right Management, Measuring True Employee Engagement, 2006.

3 Corporate Leadership Council (Corporate Executive Board), Driving Performance and Retention through Employee Engagement, 2004.

^{4 Towers Perrin, Executive Briefing: Engagement in the Public Sector, 2007.}

Filed under: Engagement, Excellence, Internal Communications, Work

Apparatchik

So, a week in to my new apparatchik position, what have I done:

• Spent the inevitable half of every day on the phone to desktop support trying to get all my new systems working
• Conspired with the Learning & Development bloke and the Web bloke to made changes
• Sent out an all-staff email round up using the organisation’s only existing IC tool
• Taken part in a meeting about benchmarking and positioning the org’s website
• Taken part in a meeting about how to explain to people, in simple and non text-heavy terms, what it is that the org does
• Tried to map the org’s role amongst the many other orgs in the sector who all do slightly different and complimentary things
• Joined the Government Communicators’ Network
• Begun to understand the immensity of trying to procure anything around here (and the fact that doing it yourself doesn’t seem to be in the culture)
• Done a lot of listening to try and understand the organisation’s shibboleths
• Tried to understand the odd short-to-medium term situation (a kind of slowburn demerger and corresponding relocation)
• Tried very hard not to jump to quick fix solutions before having done a lot more listening (and persuading people)

This last is why I’m fighting the temptation not to list here all of the things that I want to get my teeth into… yet…

You watch – the list will be up within the week!

Filed under: Administration, Internal Communications, Me, Work

Thanks for Your Attention

With thanks to Gemma passing this on…. a genuine email from a Faculty email list.

Dear Colleagues

As some of you will be aware the XXXXX building has fairly narrow corridors and it is easy to collide with others. Please be careful when exiting offices, kitchens and toilets to avoid bumping into someone else.

Many thanks for your attention.

Filed under: Internal Communications

The Grand Unveiling

OU Intranet - 2000/01(?) - 2008

New OU Intranet - Live This Week

Ta da!  The IC benefits are two-fold, firstly vastly improved information architecture (for which I can take no credit) and a news and events system which now allows you to manage news as opposed to publish in a linear, chronological fashion.

We can now manage what appears on the homepage and in what order which was impossible before (other than by ‘republishing’ items to bump them back up to the top of the list).  This also ushers in a new era of professional management of what information appears on the intranet.  This requires tact and diplomacy as people are used to submitting what they like as ‘news’ and having it approved immediately and verbatim.

A particular bone of contention is events publicity – which is now firmly sited in the events section to preserve the news areas for, guess what (?), news!  Which leads us back to What is news?

Those Warwick people amongst you may perceive certain similarities.  And I won’t deny them – but there are also differences.  Each of the landing pages or links pages contains a series of feeds for relevant news, events, FAQs etc.  So while we are cracking down on what appears on the front page, we are offering up extra avenues by tagging all of these things.

I am missing decent stats though….  Especially since I campaigned to introduce permalinks for evey news and event item.

The purpose of all this is to help consolidate internal comms at the OU, to make the intranet the main institutional news channel, and to help with the air traffic control element of the internal communications function.

The next step, from an IC point of view, is to bring discussion and dissent online within the intranet – let’s give people an outlet and then use it to monitor staff opinion.  (Rubs hands together evilly.)

It is a good start, and a huge well done and pat-on-the-back to Nicky Waters, who has done a fabulous job of co-ordinating and project-managing the entire development of the new intranet, and is now dealing with the loud minority of people who dislike the change “change for change’s sake”, “nothing wrong with the old one” etc. etc.

Filed under: Internal Communications, Web Geekery, Work

Department-led Discussion on Staff Survey Results

Very difficult to get right, especially if your managers over-rate their own communications skills….

How do you provide enough backing that heads of departments don’t feel as though they are putting themselves up for a kicking in opening this line of discussion at a local level?

How do you get them to take some ownership of university-wide issues, rather than conceding (or vehemently agreeing) that everything is the fault of senior managers?

How do you help them to run a two-way productive discussion, rather than opening a defensive I’m-only-doing-this-because-I-have-to-and-I-want-to-get-it-done-before-my-next-meeting stance?

And, best yet, how do we do all this without patronising them?

This is what I’m mostly working on this afternoon…  not that I’m promising any answers mind.  But you never know, you might get lucky!

Filed under: Internal Communications, Work

10% Discount on Demagogy

dem·a·gog·ic   Audio Help   /ˌdɛməˈgɒdʒɪk, -ˈgɒg-, -ˈgoʊdʒɪk/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[dem-uh-goj-ik, -gog-, -goh-jik] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation

–adjective

of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a demagogue.

Also, dem·a·gog·i·cal.

---

[Origin: 1825–35; < Gk démagōgikós, equiv. to démagōg(ós) (see demagogue) + -ikos -ic]

—Related forms

dem·a·gog·i·cal·ly, adverb

der·ma·tol·o·gy   Audio Help   /ˌdɜrməˈtɒlədʒi/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[dur-muh-tol-uh-jee] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun

the branch of medicine dealing with the skin and its diseases.

---

[Origin: 1810–20; dermato- + -logy]

—Related forms

der·ma·to·log·i·cal   Audio Help   /ˌdɜrmətlˈɒdʒɪkəl/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[dur-muh-tl-oj-i-kuhl] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation, der·ma·to·log·ic, adjective

I’m quickly editing the OU Club Guide this morning (which includes listing of the discounts available to staff), have just had to substitute dermatological for demagogical in a Beauty Therapist’s listing!

Filed under: Internal Communications, Joke, Language

What Are You Doing?

Writing about Late Adopter

Hey, I take it all back, I think I’m beginning to get into the swing of Twitter.

Last week we launched OU_Life_News on Twitter and the number of followers that we have for it is slowly building.

Essentially it’s a news feed from our intranet news (which as regular readers will know will be changing in September anyway), but really it’s a bit of a test case to see whether or not it works before we start to do more with it.

Feedback so far:

1. Updates should contain a direct link to the intranet article (this will happen in Sept – but at the moment we do not have a way of creating a permanent URL for each piece of news – don’t ask!)
2. It adds no extra value to staff members who already receive OU Life news via RSS (it doesn’t yet but I think we could do breaking news – the Downing St twitter feed is my model).

Baby steps.

The Downing St analogy is an interesting one though, of late I’ve been starting to think that governmental public relations is like internal comms in macro.  Am I really stupid for not realising this sooner?  I suppose its because I’m so used to thinking of internal comms as a discrete discipline – but I think what they really means is that it’s a world apart from media relations.

So, now I’m off to think about how to crack the Facebook as a Corporate Comms tool problem – this one is still really stumping me…  50% of the time I think there must be a way to harness it,  and the rest of the time I’m convinced that there isn’t.

Filed under: Internal Communications, Web Geekery

What is News?

This is something that is crystal clear to most people who work in communications – yet a lot of people tend to forget it when thinking about their intranets.

This post is really about getting the basics right.

It’s easy to default to “Sticking it on the intranet” and (a) imagine that you are communicating, and (b) imagine that it is relevant to enough people to put up as news.  Both of these are easy traps to fall into but because you’ve fallen into them through lazy thinking they are quite hard to extricate yourself from.

I like to draw a distinction between intranet news content and what I think of as intranet notices (this is something that is second nature to me thanks to Varsha) but it is very difficult to explain my taxonomy of thinking to others.

Another distinction that needs drawing here is between News content and event publicity.  Where I work at the moment a lot of the information that people submit to the intranet is events publicity: research seminars, training courses, staff sports clubs etc. Because the intranet has not really been actively managed before they are in the habit of submitting this infoprmatioin as news and having it posted as such. 

The end result of this is that genuine news of organisational imprtance and relevance gets lost amidst the flow of events and notices.

At the moment I am trying to work out a series of questions to help my colleagues work to a set of defined types of News & Events content:

1. News
2. Notices
3. People
4. Events

The aim is to have a consistent editorial approach.

Filed under: Internal Communications, News, PR, Web Geekery, Work , intranets