Enabling Trust in the Organization

Apr 1, 2009 | blog

'trust' by Jerry Vo We’ve all been there.  You’ve got a great idea that you wish you could find a way to share with the appropriate team at your company.  You’re not able to, because you’re not part of that team. Or that department.  Heck, it’s not even a field you’ve specialized in or worked in much, but you’ve got that idea – a good one – and you’re sure that it’ll help in some way.

How do you share that idea? How do you get a chance to talk to folks on that team or present that idea without someone saying “gee that’s great” and then ignoring it because you work in another part of the company? How do you make your voice heard?

Unfortunately this is all too common in corporations today because of various institutionalized barriers.  Different departments, protective fiefdoms, overzealous paperwork, and draconian process and procedures.  These all contribute to the problem we have today of large, slow, companies that make incremental improvements rather than large bold ones.

Cut Out The Middle Man

This is where cutting through the organization from another angle is beneficial, and while it’s not a new idea, its facilitated by social media tools.  Call them “Enterprise 2.0” or some other Gartner approved term if it helps you out, but it’s all web 2.0 tools and with social interactivity built into the technology.

These new tools foster that important cross-organization conversations that help promote sharing the institutional knowledge that is part of each employee.  Allowing them to forge new relationships and new communities within the organization.

This lets people – the most important resource of any organization – to feel more welcome to share and trade ideas, just like sharing anecdotes and stories.  The workplace becomes less rigid in it’s communication allowing everyone from the bottom up, or the top down, to be more receptive to comments, ideas, questions, and suggestions coming from other parts of the organization.

Getting There

Getting to that point is a lot of work, and simply making the executive decision to try something new is a large step in the right direction.  That first step is a doozy though, because its all about trust.  Not just trust in a new CFO, or in a Director of “This Or That”.  Its trusting every employee at every level.  Trusting that they’ll do the right thing.  Trusting all those intelligent folks that were hired to do those jobs in the first place.

That’s the first step… the next is almost as hard.  Accepting feedback.  But that’s another post.

Photo credit: Jerry Vo

Enterprise workers don’t have the bandwidth for social media

Jun 16, 2008 | blog

'Ben Considered Working from his new Balloon Cube' by ShadowStorm In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.

It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.

Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.

So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.

Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.

Photo credit: ShadowStorm

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