JIVE BEST PRACTICES/ SOciAL INTRANET

WHy YOuR TRADiTiONAL INTRANET Is KiLLiNG YOuR COMPANy

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN CMSWIRE, MAY 7, 2013. Your Intranet is Killing Your Company.
Every day it saps productivity, innovation and engagementthree key ingredients that drive higher employee performance, and in turn, revenue gains. Step back and think about it for a minute. In order to be a high-performing employee, you need to be focused on the right tasks, have access to the right information and skills to get things done, and work as efficiently as possible to get the job done. This is especially important for knowledge workersyour most experienced and expensive employees. So, what do you do to help these knowledge workers be more effective and engaged? Here are ve key behaviors typical of high performers. 1. Understand the organizations strategy, and how they contribute to that strategy

2. Informally learn from others in similar roles 3. Find experts and their knowledge to improve their work 4. Collaborate with others to create and deliver great work 5. Share their knowledge with others What do these have to do with your Intranet? Unfortunately, traditional intranets dont help encourage those key behaviors. Lets take a look at each in turn, and give each a simple grade. 1. Understand the organizations strategy, and how they contribute to that strategy Grade = C How do most organizations communicate about corporate strategy? Typically, someone in corporate communications writes an article that appears on the Intranet home pagea place that gets great traffic (because it is the browser default home page), but no attention. To combat that, execs are asked to cascade email messages out to their direct reports. Eventually, the plan goes, everyone in the company will read and buy into the message. You know how that works out. Even if the message is seen, employees have no way of providing feedback, ideas or asking for clarication. Feedback is paramount to buy-in and execution of company strategies. A key way to gain buy-in across the company is to give your most expensive and skilled employees a voice in developing it.

Copyright Jive Software, Inc. 2013

SocIAL INTRANET
2. Informally learn from others in similar roles Grade = B In many intranet environments there are communities of practice dedicated to specic job functions. Many of these are thriving communities, both on and offline. But, consider how long it takes a newcomer to nd these communities. Do their hiring managers introduce them? Do they nd them weeks later through word-of-mouth? Does the intranet gure out who they are and recommend communities to join? Not likely. 3. Find experts and their knowledge to improve their work Grade = CTake a look at your intranet. Do you have quick access to what colleagues are working oneven colleagues you dont know well? Imagine if you could easily see what people are working on and passively learn from them (meaning you wont have to interrupt them at all). Maybe youve got a microblogging tool or an HR app that helps people ask questions, or nd experts. But does it show you what people are working on? Finished projects? Does the system learn from the ongoing activities? Or is it just another way to ask questions to people that arent paying attention? 4. Collaborate with others to create and deliver great work Grade = D Employees are often stuck using many disconnected, non-mobile collaboration apps. Its difficult to keep track of decisions made or actions needed. The system of record often becomes email. Document-centric applications are a step in the right direction, but they still lack the ability to see the conversations, actions and decisions that were needed to create the document, or the discussion and renements that happened after the document was created. 5. Share their knowledge with others Grade = C Organizations with thriving knowledge management cultures do this best, and likely deserve a better grade. But most companies dont have such a culture. Theres the age-old problem of trying to force people to share information, when the best knowledge transfer happens in the moment, in context. All too often, people dont know the information they have is worth sharing until someone asks a question.

Copyright Jive Software, Inc. 2013

SocIAL INTRANET
So, how do social technologies address these problems? A complete social intranet solution should do four things: 1. Modernize your intranet to leverage the effects that consumer social networks deliverget your corporate and executive messages and information moving further and faster through the organization.

2. Connect people across geographies, divisions, functions and every other organizational siloask for the wisdom of your crowd in the same place theyre getting their own work done. 3. Evolve your collaboration tools with a social networking layersurface work-in-progress for others to nd and leverage, and provide a contextual record of decisions made and actions taken. 4. All of the above should be completely mobileit goes without saying that companies need to provide employees an interactive way to access information, collaborate and share knowledge regardless of their location.

To learn more about how social intranets can energize collaboration, liberate knowledge and unleash productivity in your organization, visit: http://www.jivesoftware.com/resources/whitepapers/the-intranet-is-dead-longlive-the-social-intranet/

JIVE. FIRST IN SOCIAL BUSINESS.

Copyright Jive Software, Inc. 2013

Jive is the worlds leading provider of social business solutions. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com