Social intranets are, in a word, cool. The ability to connect and collaborate with colleagues regardless of physical location through wikis, blogs, shared documents, discussion boards and the like is downright revolutionary.
Assuming people use them.
And that’s the part that all too often gets forgotten when drafting a strategy for socializing your internal online communcations. Getting the system built is only the first step – actually getting people to use it can be a bigger challenge.
We built it. Why didn’t they come?
Notwithstanding what is likely a staggeringly-gross oversimplificaiton – change is hard, especially when the alternative is a comfortable status quo. This is true even when the impetus for change is a black-and-white argument based on cold, hard, irrefutable fact. Smoking can take years off of your life, culminating in a fairly terrible death from any number of ailments - cigarette packages themselves make this perfectly clear – and yet people continue to smoke. Why? Because human behaviour isn’t 100 per cent rational. Emotional and environmental factors play a key role too.
Simply telling someone that using an online collaboration tool will save X hours a year isn’t enough. Breaking establish patterns of behaviour requires more than a rational argument. In their incredibly-useful and entirely readable book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the brothers Heath evoke the metaphor of a man riding an elephant. The man, your rational self, is perfectly clear on which direction to go and can, for short bursts at least, occassionaly steer the elephant in that direction.
Until the elephant decides to go another way. Then the illusion of control is lost.
The elephant is, perhaps obviously, your emotional self. The one that’s been doing a certain task one way for years now and isn’t overly inclined to change no matter how hard the rider pulls on the lead.
Appeasing the elephant
So how do you get the elephant on board? This entirely depends on the elephant. The trouble with emotion is that it isn’t rational. No two people will react to any given stimulus in exactly the same way. Some elephants take easily to their new directions (early adopters). Others? Not so much.
That being said, there are a few truths that have proven to be reliable, if not infallible, when it comes to managing the emotion of change.
- Small change is easier than big change: It would be silly to start down a journey without a clear end goal in mind but when it comes to bringing people along with you, it’s important to provide easily-digestable milestones along the way. Don’t start by asking everyone to start co-authoring documents in a shared workspace if this is a radical departure from past behaviour – start by getting people to save documents on a project site instead of on their computers. Inevitably some will be frustrated by the slow pace of change (we’ll get to them in a minute) but a series of small steps instead of one big leap is far more condusive to achieving critical mass.
- People love celebrations: Of course, setting out a series of manageable milestones is largely meaningless if they only recognition of reaching one is a quick “good, now keep going” from the boss. Instead, celebrate milestones as acheivements unto themselves. We’re not talking about a budget-busting office party every three weeks or anything but some sort of recognition is important if you want to maintain momentum. Carrots make for good motivators, especially when the people being led along are allowed to actually have a bite now and again.
- Squeaky wheels are still wheels: It’s so frustrating. You’re finally making progress; some of the reluctant converts are adopting the new tools and you’re slowly but steadily knocking down milestones – then the early adopters start complaining about the slow progress, thereby undermining your efforts. The downside to focusing on the back of the pack is that those at the front get restless. How do you keep them happy? Put them to work. Deputize them as change agents; ask them to take the lead by using the tools in their teams and offering ad-hoc, informal training to their colleagues. If you’ve got a large number of these early adopters, consider coming up with a second, milestone-laden roadmap just for them, leading them down the path to being defacto community managers.
- Empty pages are daunting: No matter which model you employ to visualize social participation (we’re fond of the Forrester social technographics ladder but the simpler 90-9-1 rule works too), the gap between creators and contributors is clear. The number of people willing to create brand new content in a social setting will always be substantially smaller than those who are willing to edit, comment or build upon existing content. Launching a suite of clean, empty wikis, forums and team sites to the company at large is a good way to intimidate the majority and drive people away. Instead, consider using pilot groups or barn-raising sessions for early adopters to develop seed content. Give the masses something to react to rather than asking them to start from scratch.
Change will always be hard but it can be almost impossible if you fail to consider the various factors – rational and not – that drive human behaviour. Technology can empower people to work in really amazing ways but only if you don’t scare them away first.
non-linear creations has helped organizations large and small build, deploy and drive adoption for social intranets and enterprise collaboration solutions. Contact us to find out how we can help yours next.
Photo by Libelul. Used under Creative Commons licence
