Engaging employees by empowering them through authority

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Still on the SEO spin.

This time around though, SEO techniques (new and old) have the potential to have positive impact on employee effectiveness.

By promoting individuals to build their authority (author rank) related to a company product or topic or even just the company itself is brilliant. Why? If author rank (even the defunct version) is built based on the social aspects of the individual, allowing them to post ideas, thoughts, etc. is a way of empowering the employee.  And by empowering the employee, leads to a more engaged employee which leads to a more effective employee.

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1471

Classifying a Community

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Defining categories of communities can be done in many many different ways: e.g. by size (small, medium, large, humongous), types of people in the community (internal employees vs. external clients vs both), etc.

There are so many different types of communities that to be honest, it can scare away even the hardiest of requester for a new community. Last week I talked about the first step that must happen with requesting community managers, setting expectations. Inside that post, I mentioned that some well intended requests come without knowing much about what a community could do for them. So to help them understand what is available, I have often used the following examples to help the types of communities they could build

1. Pushy Community - Not much of a community, but still there is the need for them in enterprises (hopefully rarely). Success is defined as people reading the information) 
2. Interactive Pushy Community - This is the first real level of a community, where the push of information is accompanied with the ability to like, rate, and comment with the posts. The community can't post new messages, but they can interact with what is posted, allowing them to engage with the content and the content creators. Success is defined as people read the information and interact and engage with the content. 
3. Interactive Community - The community is built so that the community members interact with each other, collaborating on documents, asking questions, getting answers, and sharing information with each other. Sometimes email is used to get the community re-engaged or to get the word out on the most important of information. The success of the community is defined by people almost fully interacting and engaging in the community and occasionally relying on tools outside the community to interact with each other. 
4. Collaborative Community - The community is built so that the community members interact solely using the collaborative tools available, collaborating interacting, engaging with each other within the community. Success for this community is when the community members use the tools available to exclusively collaborate with each other and do not use external tools to collaborate. (e.g. no email).
5. Inter Collaborative Community - The community is built much the same way as the collaborative community, but instead of just collaborating within the community, the community members collaborate inside the community and with other communities and groups. This community knows they are successful when each of the community members are always using collaborative tools in their day to day interactions. 

You can classify communities how ever you would like. In the above examples, I have laid out some examples of types of communities and how the communities would work, with the hope that when I describe these to an unknowing new community manager, they can pick a type and drive their community to success. 

How would you classify communities to a new community manager?  Would you use the same descriptions or would you describe them differently?  If you used the above example, would you add or subtract from the list?  For each of the above types of communities, what would you say make these communities successful? 

Search in the Enterprise and HR Systems

Image: Eric Ziegler

Three weeks ago I started a series of blog posts about search engines in the enterprise.  My premise was that the search engines in the enterprise are not as good as the search engines in the internet.  I do have to say though, that this is most likely not completely the fault of the vendors that provide such tools, but more about the difference on how people create content for consumption on the internet vs. the enterprise.  This was the premise of my first post.  In the next set of posts, I started to propose that there are ways around the behaviors of employees for people on the internet and the search engines used in the enterprise could adapt to improve the search experience.  In my second post, I discussed how using the context of the employee can provide enterprise search engines a boost in providing improved search results. In my last blog post, I started to provide more details on what I mean by employee context by discussing connections of employees (e.g. following each other). I provided several ways connections can improve search results.  

In this blog post, I plan on discussing another part of how employee context can improve search results.  The Human Capital Management (HCM) profile is my focus for this blog post.  Companies have a wealth of profile information on each employee.  This profile information comes from the Human Resource or Human Capital Management (HCM) systems.  HCM systems contain data that captures who each employee works for and who each employee works with.  These systems also know what each employee's job title, where they are located (building, country, etc.) along with having the employees entire job history.   

HCM Connections : As discussed in my previous blog post, connections provide information that can improve search results. HCM systems provide many different types of connections.  The first connection is between employee and boss.  The second connection is the connection between peers on a team or within a department.   While the employee might not be following their boss or the people they work with, they still have connections with these people.  Bosses, employees and their peers all work together on projects, documents or presentations.   Using similar reasoning as the Directly Following example in my previous blog post, search results can be improved by these HR releated connections. The content created by a manager or by a peer should get bump in relevance because of the relationship between that employee and the person doing the search.

Location : Another piece of information that often comes from the HCM systems is the location of the person.  When I talk about location I mean, the country and city the person works.  I also mean where the office the person sits in, assuming they don't work from home.  If they work from home, this information is typically captured also.  Each of these locations can be used to improve the search results.  For example, if the employee is located in Belgium, and searches benefits information, search results should be returned in context, and not return a link to the Japanese benefits content.    Or if the person searches for what is being served for lunch today, the lunch menu for the company cafeteria that is closest to his building (if it is not actually in his building) should be the top result returned.  Again, search results in context.

While I highlight only two types of data from the HCM system, there is the potential for a log of other information that could be used to improve the search results for the employee.  Of course there are concerns that need to be addressed.  If there is personal information about the employee, there are privacy or security concerns.  But if careful planning occurs and the correct legal and security teams are consulted, the data from the HCM system can dramatically improve search results for each employee.

What other types of HCM data could be used to improve search engines in the enterprise?  What other types of connections can make search engines better?

UC And Social business

(P. Shanks - Image)

When you think of social business does unified communication jump to mind?  When you think of unified communication, does social business jump to mind?  No?  My guess is that you are not alone but for me, they do go hand in hand.  Why?

Social Business is about improving communication and collaboration and sharing in real time, near real time, and non-real time.  The typical mechanisms used in social business include activity streams, discussion forums, question and answer, ideations, etc.  All tools that improve collaboration and communication. And these ideas translate very well into working with clients and customers.  But they don't provide every mechanism that people use to communication. 

So this is where unified communication fits in.  Imagine a scenario where an two employees are collaborating on a document.  Let's call them Jim and Judy.  Jim is actively working on the document and runs into a problem.  He needs to contact Judy to ask her opinion.   What does Jim do today?  he looks Jill's name up in the company directory, and calls her using his desk phone.  Or maybe he opens his chat application find her name in his contacts list and starts a chat session with her.  Or maybe he opens his video chat application and starts a video chat with her.  In each of these scenarios, Jim had to find the information or open the application to start the real time communication.  But why?  

Why couldn't Jim click Judy's name, which has been associated with the document and start a chat session her?  or call her?  or start screen sharing session?  or start a real time collaboration / co-authoring session with her?  If unified communication was integrated into the base system, this could be possible.

Let's imagine a second scenario.  Imagine that Jim is working with a client/customer named Jawad.  Jim and Jawad is a highly valued client / customer and has an initiative that requires both Jim and himself to work together on multiple documents and have many interactions together.  Today they use email and phone calls to make this happen. The documents that need to be edited are sent via email and versions are created on top of versions - with each keeping their own set of "versions".  The job gets done, but only after 40 - 100 emails and several phone calls that had to be scheduled. 

Why couldn't Jim and Jawad work together on a shared and secured social  business site?  Imagine them working on the documents.  The system provides presence awareness, allowing Jawad to see when Jim is available.  In fact, it provides more transparency, by providing not so common status' such as away from my computer, on the phone, or in a meeting.  Imagine that Jawad is working on a document and requires input form Jim.  He see that Jim is available.  Jawad clicks Jim's name to start "communicating" with him.  The system indicates a phone call will start (the system knew to call Jim on the phone rather other communication methods because of a set of rules defined by Jim, indicating that he didn't have video chat capabilities because he was working from home.  Both Jawad and Jim's phone ring and they start talking about the document Jawad is working on.  In the middle of the call, Jim suggest they convert the conversation to an online-coauthoring session, so he can show Jawad to get his point across.  

Social Business is about providing engagement between parties, employee to employee and employee to client/customer.  But it doesn't bridge the gap completely as there is always the next step.  Combining unified communication with social business provides that next level of communication to provide a better experience for everyone, employee, client and customer. 

Engagement

Engagement is a hot term in many organizations. Everywhere I turn, I see someone mentioning or talking about it, or reporting on it. For instance, I was reading Jacob Morgan's blog recently and one of his blog posts references Modern Suvey's most recent 2012 Spring national norms study on employee engagement across the U.S. workforce. While Modern Survey polls on only 5 results, the results they received are simliar to results reported by Gallup and other industry thought leaders on engagement of employees.

While these results are interesting, I have questions that I believe would help me understand more about the data and help me make a better decisions related to what engagement means to me and how I manage the people that I manage. My questions range from the simple, to the indepth. 

For instance, what types of companies actually used Modern Survey's poll? How about Gallup? Are these polls from groups that are statistically random enough that they prove that this is an overall trend or were these organizations self selecting, and have the risk of skewing the data and analysis? If I were to want to look at what is really happening in the industry or within one company, can I compare against an industry trend line on engagement? What are the trends associated with engagement? Over a period of time, are they going up? Are they going down? Are we measuring and comparing over a 3-6 month time period or has the data been analyzed over a 5-10-15-20 time period? 

The reason I ask for a longer trend line is to guage if companies are really worse off now than they were before, or have we been muddling through poor engagement for a long time and the hope is that engagement will improve overall performance. 

Also, can we prove a company actually has the ability to impact engagement, or are their other factors that play into the final result? I am sure the answer is yes, companies can impact engagement of their employees but there are many other factors that also influence engagement, which are outside the control of the organization. For instance, did engagement scores drop when the economy dropped or gone up? Are there other real life incidents that impact engagement results? 

Maybe the data is available that I am asking for. I am sure that someone has something they can show me that would provide me more information; that would provide me the answer to the questions I have asked. 

 
If it appears that I don't agree with engagement in organizations, I want to be clear. I do believe in engagement and the power it has. My question is more about, how much power does it have and I always believe in a healthy does of fact checking to ensure that the amount of value anything provides is fully vetted.

Thoughts?