Massive corporations will always be more opaque for their employees than smaller ones. Working in a small team, you can take the time to learn your colleagues, speak with them about the projects, understand the motivations behind every decision. It is impossible to do the same in a company employing thousands of people. Most of large organisations understand this is a weakness, putting at risk employee engagement, creativity and consistency between departments. Tactics to mitigate these risks are common practice. But they are hard to implement and rarely successful. Internal communication becomes often a mistrusted campaign where information is manipulated at the convenience of the stakeholders agenda. Supposedly informal Q&A sessions between employees and their direction leave often a feeling of dissatisfaction, becoming merely a practice exercise for the direction to repeat their ready-made answers and for employees to face the reality of top-down corporate decision making processes. In this context, intranet websites encouraging the participation of employees are for most unsuccessful and based on wishful thinking.
The conference room of PICNIC 2009
The presentation by Gentry Underwood at PICNIC 2009 was useful because it gave some hopes that employee engagement could truly be improved using the intranet. The key is to stay focus on the practical objectives of the employees and the core priorities of the organisation. It is illusionary to believe that employees will really share their thoughts on the intranet just for the sake of the organisation, and for colleagues that they never met. It is insulting the intelligence of employees to believe that they would participate in internal forums thinking they are taking part in a democratic process. I see the knowledge sharing system developed by IDEO as one that acknowledges that employees have personal ambitions and are all well aware of the competitive environment they are working in. If writing something on the intranet has no implication for my career, why would I do it? If reading the intranet doesn’t help me in my personal goals, why would I bother? In an intranet platform that IDEO developed for its own internal use, employees can create their personal pages on which they can list all the projects they worked on and why. When a new project is about to start in the company, the manager can search on the intranet for employees that are potentially either the best suited or motivated for the project. The intranet becomes a tool truly improving the efficiency of the organisation, employing the best people for each task, and an effective way for employees to influence their career within the organisation. It is furthermore much more motivating and efficient to put in touch people having complementary expertise than to ask them to write down their knowledge on an intranet document. Writing down documentation is long and boring, why would I do it for the benefits of people I don’t know? The approach requires obviously much more than the creation of a new intranet website, it changes the way the organisation operates. Intranet tools need for this reason to be adapted for the goals and culture of each organisation. It seems to me an essential step if one truly wants to motive his collaborators with practical opportunities. An Intranet based on a wishful but only superficially executed democratic model becomes a dangerous daydreaming which demobilizes people because it doesn’t offer them any realistic mean to prevail.
Another illustration of wishful thinking are intranet websites that encourage employees to post their brilliant ideas for the company, and how often they end up being broken for years because no one ever use them. If a politician or an entrepreneur has an idea, he will exploit it in order to obtain more power or revenues. What could an employee hope to get in exchange of his ideas? Nosco developed a software called Ideas Exchange in which participants not only share ideas, but can also invest virtual shares in ideas from others. Not only it makes the process more exciting, it also helps identifying good ideas, the ones considered as being the best investments by the employees themselves. If coupled with the right incentives, such as real life returns on investments or opportunities to participate in the direction of the projects, the system could also lead to a higher level of engagement.
Great post! I give a lot of talks about our system at IDEO and the underlying philosophies behind it and rarely do I feel like a blogging summary does it justice… Too often it sounds like a bullet point list jotted mindlessly by someone writing a book report. In contrast, this was inspiring to read.
Finding solutions that simultaneously meet the needs of the organization while motivating individual participation is hard work. At IDEO we feel we’ve still got a long way to go in this respect, but we know there’s no possibility of a successful system otherwise.
Thanks for your presentation, it was great! And by the way, you also did a very good job for your @gentry tweets from PICNIC, I remember they were spot on.