One of the most
frequent pieces of advice I offer to organisations considering a social
collaboration initiative is to be clear why
your organisation needs to be more collaborative. It's not enough for your
goal to simply be "better collaboration", you need to unpick exactly
what advantages better collaboration will bring you, and how these relate to
your organisation's broader strategy. Not only will this make it much easier
for you to convince key stakeholders that this is a worthwhile investment, it
will also help you plan and focus your strategy for bringing about the
necessary business change involved.
When I'm writing
case studies about early adopters' success with social collaboration, this is
one of the areas I try to draw out because it’s this that underpins the
ultimate value that the organisation is able to demonstrate from its
investment. I have a healthylibrary of case studies now, and it's an interesting exercise to identify
the key themes across them. Here are some of the most common or interesting
business drivers, along with examples of them within my case studies.
- Better
connecting a distributed workforce. This is an extremely common raison d'être for social collaboration
initiatives, where there is a need to create greater unity across the
organisation, helping different parts of the business to recognise and
understand each other, and to expose their commonalities to enable the
sharing of knowledge and best practices. Two great examples of this are IT professional services firm
CGI, which
needed a centralised platform to support its growth strategy, and technology firm Ricoh, which turned to social
collaboration to support the process of integrating its business following
an acquisition.
- Supporting a
business transformation strategy. Transforming the operations of any organisation places
considerable stresses on the workforce, and so anything which can maximise
the transparency of change through clear channels of communication will help
to ease the process. Yellow Pages Group in Canada is a great example of this;
the firm has been going through a broad digital transformation exercise
over the last few years, expanding from a purely paper-based publishing
model to a digital media and marketing solutions service provider for
Canadian businesses. The company’s CEO recognised that it was important to
improve the level of communication and collaboration between the different
business divisions and regions, to speed up the rate of information
exchange between them and to make decisions more quickly and confidently.
- Supporting
innovation to drive business differentiation. Lower barriers to
entry across many markets mean that there is a constant need to ensure
processes are as efficient as possible and to find new opportunities to
meet the customer's needs. As a large, distributed player in an
increasingly competitive market, Portuguese
engineering and construction firm Mota-Engil wanted to develop a more innovative
culture across its organisation, encouraging employees of all levels to
contribute ideas about new business opportunities and improving existing
business processes, and then to enable these to be taken from idea to reality
in a managed, collaborative and visible way.
- Improving
staff morale and engagement. In traditional, hierarchical organisational cultures,
the flow of information can be painfully slow and constricted, and
corporate communications (and increasingly HR) leaders often turn to
social collaboration to break down the boundaries across the organisation,
connecting leaders more directly with employees, and increasing the speed
of communication between employees. This was the case at Southeastern Railway, where staff needed a better
way to share information about train services in real time, to respond to
increasing demands from customers and provide a better level of service.
At Danish rail operator DSB, against a background of
poor staff morale, the communications team sought to motivate employees to develop a more proactive and
customer-focused culture where performance is celebrated rather than
questioned.
- To
better engage with customers and partners. While social collaboration is often
internally focused, in some organisations the driver focuses on extending
a collaborative culture outwards to engage more openly and interactively
with customers or partners. Healthcare
specialists Sg2 wanted to enable the company’s advisory capability to become
more viral, to encourage discussion and interaction around its findings
and ideas, and position Sg2 as a hub for people in the industry to
collaborate and communicate – not just with Sg2’s experts, but with each
other – on healthcare issues, thereby increasing the number of potential
customers it could reach and its penetration into the marketplace.
Do you
have an interesting social collaboration story to share? Please get in touch!
#Collaboration #strategy #socialcollaboration #bestpractice