Enterprise 2.0 & HR: People, Culture and Behavior #e2conf

By Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) Nov 10, 2010

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Yesterday I attended a session on people, culture and behavior as a part of the HR track. The session was led by Jon Ingham (executive consultant) and Margaret Schweer, a VP at nGenera Insight. These are the key points from the session.

Social Capital is About Culture

An organizations capabilities can be broken down to various types of capital that it possesses:

Human capital
Organizational Capital
Social Capital

When most people talk about culture what they are really referring to is social capital. Social capital can best be expressed in many ways but the four most common ways that social capital is expressed are around:

Social Learning
Social Innovation
Social Collaboration
Social Speed

Knowledge management, engagement, retention and a few others are also important but they are not as large as the four mentioned above.

Social Capital Influences E2.0 Activities

Enterprise 2.0 is really about understanding activities and outcomes, and then the business impact of those outcomes. However, social capital should influence and affect these activities. It’s also very important for organizations to focus on the organizational value of Enterprise 2.0 activities but most importantly to focus on the social outcomes of people, culture and behavior.

Enterprise Collaboration is Not About Technology

Collaboration is not a baseball game, just because you build or deploy something doesn’t mean that people will come and use it. Technology should never be the primary driver for successful collaboration with an organization. You can build a lot of capability into a technology solution but in order to really see success you must put this into the context of an existing workflow that employees are used to, they should be “familiar” with it. If they are not familiar with it then it becomes difficult to get employees to adopt new solutions.

There are three elements that are the most important for successful collaboration within an organization. These are:

1. Is it easy to use? (peter rabbit simple)

This means:

That the platform is intuitive
Allows for single sign-on
Provides for integration with mobile technology solutions
Provides powerful search and filtering capabilities
Is a versatile solution that will allow you the flexibility to adapt as you go.

2. Does it help me do my job better?

Value based on saving time
Incentives that align with knowledge sharing and platform use

3. Organizational culture should be:

Highly engaged
Built upon trust based relationships
Should allow for the prevalence of networking opportunities
Should be led by Leaders with both task and relationship skills
Should employ executives who model collaboration and “walk the talk” so to speak
Provide for clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities with the organization

It’s important to remember that trust is essential for collaboration. For most people trust develops through relationships and does take some time to manifest.

But Technology Is Important

Some of the key areas where organizations need to make a significant investment are in:

Physical architecture
Technology
Process design
Forums-sponsored events

TSA is an example of a company that was able to deploy collaboration strategies internally. Management developed a collaborative process and platform to solicit and discuss ideas from 43,000 employees. They started with simple issues as discussion starts and advanced to tackle more complex issues over time as the employees become more “ready”.