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.

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.

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.

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.

Leadership in the time of Social Media

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

(Cross posted from Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0)

As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.

In such times – specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds – what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.

Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.

They are:

1. Openness and Transparency – In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity – both within and externally
2. Conversation – It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else – they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA

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.

Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Shared in the flow workspaces to enable Team Work Effectiveness

THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

Trends towards Open Organizations

Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus and wrote it in his book The Living Company. These days, however, now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.

We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today’s culture.

Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:

1. Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don’t have access to information that they need to really do it well.
2. Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition

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.

Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice

Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by gaurav in Announcements

I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.

2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.

Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.

Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –

1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges?