2020 Social: Because Business is Social

7 Social Roles for Employee Communities

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides

An employee community is a closed community within the firewall of the Organization 2.0 – where employees connect and build content along with each other to build relationships and knowledge.

At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. One of the key parts of the framework is the 7 types of social roles are lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.

Let’s try and put together an understanding on what these roles can be in employee communities:

1. The Lurker is a new employee or a late adopter who arrives at the employee community as someone who has heard good things about it – but is uncertain about what to do. Lurkers may be held back due to either being intensely private people or being technophobes. A lurker needs to be coached by the community manager and exposed to content that evokes a response from him.
2. A Learner is a person on the community who is interested – but often finds it over-whelming to navigate the conversatoins or to jump into conversations. Learners need to be directed to “how to start” documents and supported when they start making small but significant contributions.

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.

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.

How to Build a Social Organization

Posted on 10. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

This post was collaboratively written on a wiki by Gautam and Abha.

How would 2020 Social engage with organizations to build collaborative, open organizations

At 2020 Social we understand that while business is social – organizations must change internally to be truly authentic and social externally.

We have posted earlier on the changing nature of leadership in the age of social web within organizations, as well as some of the deeper trends driving this reality in organizations.

As the nature of work itself changes from personal productivity to group and team work, organizations need to have better tools to get work done between people.

Knowledge work can often get to be frustrating in most organizations because information is passed around in emails and often a lot of to and fro happens when two or more people try to collaborate on it. The problem gets compounded when people are in other locations

Social Technologies can address the issues that challenges communication and collaboration within organizations. It takes the focus away from information and puts the people in the centre of the conversation. Collaboration and internal networking can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also build trust and foster team and group bonding.

Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides

BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

Three Scenarios: How Can Indian Firms Leverage Social Technologies Within the Workplace?

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.

A TYPICAL CONVERSATION

Ever since Gautam joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.

The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”

During initial discussions with Gautam, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.

In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.

Finding Experts within Organizations using Social Technologies

Posted on 07. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

‘Interesting article in the WSJ how social technologies can help tap into and be aware of an organization’’s expertise systems.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

While I agree with the premise – let us agree that social tools won”t just enable adoption – specially if the organization has treated external social networking with a different standard (i.e. by banning access and firewalling them

My view is that adoption of tools will also be slow in organizations where automation is being viewed as something to be suspicious of, or if it entails duplication of work and effort.