This post describes one of three key exercises you need to perform to improve your chances of having a vibrant (enterprise) community.
The key value gain for enterprises that engage with social platforms is that employees are enabled to solve more problems, improve their practice and test or enrich new ideas. All without raising the costs of doing so.
The knowledge and experience of thousands of colleagues can be easily accessed through a social platform. If you have an idea or a problem you can search the community for shared knowledge or discussions on that topic or find experienced colleagues by searching profiles or discussions they participated in.
Many enlightened enterprises have recognized these benefits, however most struggle to create and maintain vibrant communities on social platforms.
I recently wrote a post on the importance of addressing the “what’s in it for me?” question for potential users of an online community. If potential participants do not clearly see what they can get out of participation, they will not engage. We regularly run workshops with participants to identify how collaboration would add value for them, with who they would collaborate, and on what subject collaboration and sharing would add value.
If you have answered the “What’s in it for me?” question. There is another factor that has great influence on the potential success of an internal enterprise community. It is related to the fact that enterprise 2.0 technology, or social media, help overcome a number of important barriers.
Firstly, space and time. If you have people in several different locations it is difficult and costly to bring everyone together to collaborate. It also makes it difficult for employees on different continents to know what their colleagues are up to. By having rich personal profiles, listing your projects, and having technology for online collaboration, you can lower the barrier of space and time significantly.
A second barrier has to do with the fact that, without tools, people are only capable of effectively networking with about 150 people. This phenomenon is often referred to as Dunbars’ threshold. Online networked communities can help overcome Dunbars’ threshold by what is called ‘loose ties’. An on-line community with loose ties and search capability can let you access a multitude of other peoples skills and experience, beyond the scope of your physical network of 150.
Imagine you have a problem or an idea; you can enter a community and do a very focussed search on profiles within the community, quickly identifying relevant people to talk to. You can also ask the community an open question and the people with the relevant knowledge will reply. Finally, and Linked-In is a good example of this, you can have loose connections with a large number of people. The platform then updates you periodically of all the activities of the people in your network.
For the third barrier we go back to Dunbars’ threshold. It is the reason why small companies are able to have successful collaboration and large enterprises struggle. W.L. Gore is an example of a company that is very collaborative and innovative. To maintain this level of collaboration they cut up any business unit that grows over 150 people.
The traditional answer of most governments and enterprises to this issue has been hierarchies. With hierarchies Dunbars’ problem can also be solved. When it comes to collaboration and innovation hierarchies also have a number of significant downsides. The main reason hierarchies hold back collaboration is that communication needs to travel great distances, up and down the ranks, to reach it’s destination. Add to that the fact that there is a lot of internal competition, power play, politics and there is a big barrier to surmount if collaboration (and innovation) is to occur. Communities can help get around this barrier because the participants interact directly without having to work through the hierarchies. We call this the democracy of participation.
When companies plan to start a community, the barriers are often overlooked. Having defined the “What’s in it for me?” question and created a list of things people will do together on the platform, you need to test all of them to see if they actually lower one or more barriers. The more barriers are lowered, the better your chance of creating a vibrant community.
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