2020 Social: Because Business is Social

Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb’s Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist – Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What’s new? I’m game for anything. Training approach – Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector – Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I’d like time to think about this. Training approach – Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist – Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach – Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist – Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach – Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

It is our belief at 2020 Social that social technologies can provide each employee with their learning content that suits their overall approach and help in better retention of learning. Hence the proposed solution will have elements that cater to all the above.

Part 1: Consists of static content that would help people to discover the “must know” aspects of what is to be learned

Basic Content focused on the Subject Matter that every new Executive/Manager would go through when they join the organization. It would cover the following

1. Basics of the subject expertise – Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge
2. Additional Reading Material – Documents that people can download
3. List of Resources – Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at one point.
4. List of People (yellow pages) – employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to contact them (email, Skype, IM)
5. FAQs – A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know
6. Best Practices – e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above can be edited by certain key people. Other employees can add comments below the content.
Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey tool – acting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt

Part 2: Dynamic Learning

What’s new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firm’s products/services/ operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence

This would consist of a stream of constantly dynamic news and market/competitor intelligence that would get updated on an employee’s dashboard that he/she can click through and view the detailed content if he/she wants.Personalised Dashboard for each Employee which can be customized to follow information and news relevant for his/her own needs

1. RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market name.
2. RSS feeds of thought leaders’ blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the employee’s desktop
3. Twitter updates of the who’s who of subject matter so that employees can track and even interact with them. Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/
4. Competitive Intelligence – A dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific regions.
5. New videos and Slideshows – Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like “Financial marketing” or “Consumer Behavior” or “HR Trends”) would be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

Part 3: Collaboration

Enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with each other.

This part would focus on how employees can use social software to connect with each other and work together to create strategies, tactics, execution. This would consist of the following parts:

1. Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, product on initiatives
2. Status updates – would let other people know what the employee is working on so that if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.
3. Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and what worked and best practices learnt from them
4. Sharing project plans for campaigns and getting peers’ feedback on them.
5. Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants – which are archived – and after some time some which are basic can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part.
6. Discussion around events like conferences, trainings that some employees go to – can share learnings, videos, slides with the rest of the peer group – resulting in richer and more learning

(Cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

Employee’s Participation in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

I can see whatever the issues that were there during Knowledge Management also getting repeated when it comes to sharing and collaboration in the Hyper-Linked Organization aka Enterprise 2.0

During the turn of the century – when KM – and the dream to let employees share what they know – was directed , the KM advocates (like me!) suggested that knowledge sharing should be given rewards. The thought was that if a person does not see a benefit for himself why would he share his knowledge with the behavior.

I have changed my belief – in part due to analysing my own behaviour on the social web.

Behaviours like sharing and collaboration are Organizational Citizenship Behaviors – and are a product of Employee’s Engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay.

Highly engaged employees who would indulge in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors follows the Power Law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.

So what are the ways that such employees can be recognized?

1. Public Acknowledgement – A leaderboard style table of key frequent contributors is a dynamic public assertion of who is helping and creating content
2. Social Voting and Curation – Like the rating system it shows the people whose content has been deemed most useful by the users.
3. Collaboration – When a person shares content about a certain domain area it reveals his/her interest in that area. Involvement of the person in that domain would be a dream.

What are the other ways in which such contributors can be recognized?

(cross posted on Gautam on Organization 2.0)

Welcoming Puneet and Arushi – Interns at 2020 Social

Posted on 28. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

Over the last week we had two new people who have joined the team at 2020 Social.

Puneet Singh (Twitter) from Fore School of Business, Delhi and Arushi Gupta (Twitter) from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi have joined us as interns. For the next couple of months they will work on specific live projects that will impact.

Puneet would be working on a project in which he would be looking at Business to Business (B2B) Communities – and finalising on what are the various types of B2B communities that can be leveraged by organizations to engage with their clients.

Arushi would be working along with Karthick and Freddie on what goes into building private community of young trendsetters – a community focused on observing trends and also on how marketers and organizations understand and engage these trendsetters.

How Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Can use Social Media

Posted on 23. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Events

I was at the 4th Indian Marketing Summit today on a panel discussion with luminaries like Mahendra Swarup who founded Indiatimes.com, Bikky Khosla of Tradeindia.com, Prof. Govind Hariharan from the Michael J Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University and Rajeev Karwal, Founder and CEO of Milagrow.

The presentation I made is here:

The other panelists chose to speak rather than present, so I can’t share the presentations here

There was a lively Q&A session where some students asked me interesting questions on cloud computing, ranking users on Twitter and how Social Media could help small enterprises recruit employees.

Overall a great learning experience for me!

Thinking about Social-ERM

Posted on 13. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

Many business leaders and HR professionals I meet and talk to take stances that are either on the lines of “Oh, Orkut and Facebook is such a drain on my company resources and time ! I need to ban such stuff – or at least regulate it – so that we can do our jobs better”

Or (and this is a smaller number) some CEOs, COOs, HR professionals and many Marketing professionals – the ones who are more open-minded, say – “Hold on, here are some things that are changing at a fundamental level in the way we engage with the external world, and our employees are out there on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut, Twitter – talking about their jobs, our products, answering questions from their friends and strangers. If we can’t ban this, how can we channelise it?”

Welcome to Social ERM

Yeah, I just coined the phrase Social ERM – and I take this off from the concept of Social CRM that Gaurav blogged about.

So what would Social Employee Relationship Management do?

1. Listening - Monitoring of the social web to keep track of what your employees are saying on various platforms about their work/ industry/market/ customers/ organizations/ other employees.
2. Profiling - This step would involve trying to classify your employees in the following ways -
   1. What kind of postings are they carrying out?
   2. Do they respond to user queries?
   3. Do they post about new stuff that is happening in the industry/ market ?
   4. What is the influence they have built?
   5. Who is their audience?
3. Sharing and Connecting - This would look at building an online community within the firewall amongst the people you have profiled so that they can share and curate the content each of them create on different site
4. Collaboration - The next step would be for these online innovators to create content jointly or ideate on what they can work together – or to reach out to each other when faced with a external query not in their area of expertise.
5. Converting and Supporting - When one does steps 1 and 2 – one would also discover disgruntled employees – This step looks at how HR and Operations can respond to the source of that negativity so that the at least become neutral if not positive. However, I foresee companies still not being open enough to do this, but one does hope!
6. Energising and Retaining - Clearly employees who engage in social media in the work arena are excited by other rewards and recognitions than employees who are not vocal about their work. HR and Operations needs to think new ways to energise and retain these employees – and giving them augmented roles with social media responsibilities

So CEOs, COOs, HR professionals – are you ready for Social Employee Relationship Management?

Great Reading on Building Collaborative Organizations

Posted on 12. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides

Came across some great posts on driving collaboration within the organization

First there are cases studies of Heinz and Bayer where Social Media meets the Employee Handbook

For Bayer Corp, social media has become one more way for employees to share ideas within the organization or for the company to communicate with customers.
However, the company — like many others in the social media space — also recognize the need for formal policies or guidelines governing these online activities.
“It’s not as if there are brand new guides or instructions to employees, but this is another vehicle that, if they are representing the company, they need to be mindful of what proper behavior is,” said Bryan Iams, head of strategic and external communications for Bayer.

But before you take Bayer’s road here’s a insightful post which will cause you to think – Is your company ready for social media?

Social media has the power to democratize information and provide real-time, meaningful feedback on products and services. Are these the kinds of features that would increase your speed-to-market, improve innovation and engage your employees? Or do you worry more about threats to management structure, the security of your information and hierarchical protocol?

And this great post,  6 questions to ask to build a collaborative organization reminds me of my own post

The collaborative movement is not new – think Margaret Wheatley,  think Peter Senge, think Chris Argyris and the organisational learning movement. What’s changed is the technology, particularly anything 2.0 is now simple enough, and accessible enough for people to get it.  Before, people needed to have a really high interpersonal competence to achieve this goal of collective dialogue. Now, the norms of social communities online have introduced sharing and providing content as a given.
Bit as evidenced by the  increase in blogs, and discussion groups on the topic of why is it so hard to introduce a collaborative culture, why introducing enterprise software is fraught with challenge, why internal comms teams are struggling with uptake on collaborative tools, it can be argued that this really is just a pretty standard culture change challenge.

And why CIOs should encourage collaboration

A survey by analyst Pierre Audoin Consultants and the IT Service Management Association in September last year suggested that 68% of IT buyers now turn to their peers as their preferred source of advice on potential IT systems. That is almost double the second most popular route of searching for information on the web.
As US technology blogger and former Gartner analyst Vinnie Mirchandani recently wrote on his Deal Architect blog, “In the 1970s CIOs turned to IBM for advice; in the 1980s to Accenture (Andersen); in the 1990s to Gartner. In this decade they rely on each other – unbiased peer input.”

As S Sivakumar CEO of ITC IBD tweeted what is needed is Communication 1.0 to enable Web 2.0 in the workplace

Do check out the Social Media in India wiki for examples of brands/organizations that are using social media. It has these directories:

- Directory of Indian brands on Twitter
- Directory of Indian brands on Facebook
- Directory of Indian brands on Orkut
- Directory of Indian brands on YouTube
- Directory of Indian brands on Flickr
- Directory of Indian brands on SMSGupShup
- Directory of online communities by Indian brands
- Directory of consumer generated content contests by Indian brands

More on the Hyper-linked Organization

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

JP at Confused of Calcutta is musing about what the Facebookisation of the Enterprise means for IT departments. Here are some of the posts we have done at 2020 Social on the same issue: How to Build a social organization and Making of the Social Organization

As he says:

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department

Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Here’s what I think: 

The biggest benefits of the “Facebookisation” is higher employee engagement – hence it is not the IT department that would take a step ahead with that – but the Ops, Strategy and HR groups that would be asking the IT department to follow FB’s lead to create a truly hyper-linked organizaton.

The other big benefit (and this would need to be taken a call by Org Design and CEOs) is do the other systems and processes in the organization support the openness and transparency that the Facebookisation would bring. – if people are rewarded for individual behavior and if the Peformance system does not incentivise a culture of sharing and connecting – the phenomenon would be limited to the “social innovators” within the enterprise alone.

What do you think?

What Social Media Taught Me About Management and Leadership

Posted on 28. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

I started my career in HR in 1999, and I started blogging here in 2002 – so in my mind both of these are linked in some way.

In my career in moved from KM to e-learning, to Training to a HR Generalist stint and then to HR Consulting – and parallel to this I was discovering more and more tools as they got invented and went out of fashion – from Yahoo Groups to Ryze to Linkedin to Orkut to Facebook to Twitter.

Looking back at my career and social media journey over the last decade I thought I’d point down my thoughts on what social media taught me that an MBA in HR did not (or maybe I didn’t pay attention to it)

1. People have a lot more in common than their differences. Social media gives amplification to the basic desire of human beings – to connect and to express. Some people like to express more and some like to connect more. Leadership is going to mean more about giving them tools and work that meet that need is the key.
2. Conversation is key, if you want to persuade someone – influence someone, you have to talk to them. Sometimes, conversing is hard, with the volume of connections we all have, hence the prioritisation and knowledge of whom you have to convince-is imperative. The age of leading by command and control is truly on the way out.
3. Learning happens by doing and sharing – We all learn in different ways but the key to learning something in today’s ever-changing world, is to “learn in practice”. Learning Officers need to understand that simulations would be key to actual learning and not “classroom” or even “e-learning” in the way it exists today. As a leader and manager
4. Keep connected to innovators and the Average Joe. Hanging out with social media types one can get lost between the excitement for the next shiny new thing. Not hang out with the experimenters and you might miss the next big trend. HR people have a similar dilemma, focus on the high performers or the average performers. They are as different as chalk and cheese. The answer is “both”
5. Give to receive. Social media is the epitome of the giving it away thinking. Giving away ideas, thoughts, links. Telling people “here’s how that other guy/website/community can be useful for you” makes them come back to you and drives your influence up, ironically. It’s time for managers and HR people to admit that sometimes they don’t have all the answers, and to know who the experts are and send queries to them. That would build better trust.

What has social media taught you?

The making of a Social Organization

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

At 2020 Social one of the things we believe is that we are a our own petri-dish. We experiment with technology and processes to convert ourselves into the kind of organization we think is suitable to be called social.

So not only do we have a blog, a Facebook page, a twitter account, a twitter list showcasing all our tweets – we’ve also now started a wiki to focus on building a repository of social media successes in India – and will invite participation from like minded folks soon.

On the other side of the seriousness spectrum we have started a Fun page where we publicly talk on the lighter side of life at 2020 Social

Internally we are driving online collaboration using three tools, Google Apps for mail, document sharing and calendering - Socialtextfor internal conversations and collaboration on a wiki – and Basecamp for project management.

As social media enthusiasts we have noticed that internally even we need to see a business/behavioral benefit to using a tool – and we understand that more traditional businesses would need to see it more.

One of the way to showcase this is look for external cases where ROI has been calculated – but we believe that using the tools showcases a greater commitment and a better story for any client.

What do you think?

If you’re in the advisory business how many times do you apply your advice on yourself?

(Cross posted from Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

How to leverage Social Technologies to Build Online Talent Communities

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Some thoughts I put together – on how the Recruiting function can leverage Online Talent Communities to build a pipeline for future workforce.

I know there are no great examples of “real” Talent Communities – and that is why I think the first organization that gets it right would benefit the most!

Thoughts? Send me an email ! View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh