#advintranets10 Architecting Participation with Enterprise Social Media

Employee engagement can't be forced and in most cases, the experts say, it just can't be expected. Here are a few lessons learned by the intranet managers of British Telecom, KPN and MARS. Each company is seeking to raise engagement levels of between 40,000 and 140,000 employees — it's no simple task.

I spent the day today in charming and chilly Amsterdam at the Connected Meetings Advanced Intranet & Portals event, where intranet managers from organizations like BT, KPN, Nestle, Nokia and Phillips gathered to discuss burning Enterprise 2.0 topics. Front and center was the question of how to raise employee engagement levels using a mixture of social media tools, openness policies and what amounts to a significant shift in the culture of modern enterprises.

Start by Setting Realistic Expectations

Many of the projects discussed were young and many were the first of their kind in the given organization. Pitching ideas to senior management and/or boards of directors has been challenging, especially with little previous experience or internal success stories to draw upon.

To expect 100% employee participation is to fail before starting. Jerzy Karpel, the Intranet Program Manager for the candy and beverage producer MARS, reminded us that most employees are participation couch potatoes — they are unlikely to contribute much and will mostly likely not even notice there's a conversation happening.

If you are going to sell your project up the chain, stakeholders need to understand this up front and hold appropriate expectations. Otherwise, they'll be little chance of project "success" and smaller chance of future budget approvals.

Intranets — Stakeholders Must Appreciate the Participation Realities

The Business Case and Prioritizing Investments

Mark Morrell (see blog) of British Telecom is running a three year old project, increasing the engagement levels of BT's 140,000+ employees. According to Mark, "if you have to build a business case you're in trouble." Your strongest possible argument is a real success story. This is what you need to justify further experimentation and budget.

This recommendation of course presents a chicken-and-egg problem. It is therefore key to get strategic and light-weight projects off the ground as early as possible. You need to create an environment where you can quickly experiment — build, test, tear down, re-build — creating the opportunity for serendipitous successes.

Intranets — Selecting Strategic Engagement Projects

Jerzy Karpel of MARS used the image above (sourced from Hutch Carpenter) when talking about success and experimentation. Hutch's original revelation was:

You don't need a high level of adoption to get value from some Enterprise 2.0 apps. Others require broad participation.

The point here: Understand how much participation is required for each tool/application/process to be deemed a success. Choose your projects wisely. Early on, the low hanging fruit is probably a smarter option. Once you have some success stories, the projects requiring larger amounts of participation are going to be easier to sell to the purse-holders and more likely to succeed.

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Tags: advintranets10, connected meetings, enterprise 2.0, enterprise collaboration, enterprise social media, intranets, portals, sharepoint, sharepoint 2010, social media

Employee engagement can't be forced and in most cases, the experts say, it just can't be expected. Here are a few lessons learned by the intranet managers of British Telecom, KPN and MARS. Each company is seeking to raise engagement levels of between 40,000 and 140,000 employees -- it's no simple task.