Make good technology choices. But put people first in the digital workplace

I was catching up with some Twitter buddies at Digital Workplace Experience 2018 in Chicago early last week when I was grabbed to go and record a video on my thoughts about the conference.

Besides the conference hosting a great group of digital workplace experts in one place, the thing I loved most was the overwhelming focus on people and change. Not technology.

Yet shiny new tools are difficult to resist and there are more of them every day. For example, the social business application market alone is expected to grow to be a $37 billion industry by next year, according to tech analyst firm 451 Research. Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats. Without thinking, we rush in for the sugar fix. Feels good in the short term, but how do we feel about our choice later?

Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats.

The irony of the march into the digital age is the further we go, the more we realise being ‘digital’ isn’t about teaching people how to use tools. Instead, the main game is helping people get into the right headspace to want to try new ways of working.

Why does this make sense? Because traditional adoption methods focused on technology won’t work to rally people around digital tools in a modern workplace. As digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out at #DWX18: “Adoption of new technology is not automatic, because participation in the digital workplace is optional.”

People choose whether they want to come along for the ride in the digital workplace. So, we need to focus on people and provide them with clear value in order to have them try something new. 

Catastrophe hit earlier this week when Slack, the messaging platform went down. The tweets about the outage were hilarious, but the undercurrent serious. Slack users had embedded the chat tool so deeply into the flow of their day that suddenly life was a disaster without it. Apparently.

There were loads of vendors at #DWX18 and I talked to many of them about their tools and how they were convincing customers of their business value.

Between the content of the conference and the insights from vendors, it’s clear we need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

We need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

The problem with starting the conversation from a ‘tool first’ perspective is we end up focusing on checklists of functional features, rather than working to a clear and compelling business purpose.

As Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras point out in The Right Way to Select Technology, “If you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value”.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value. Worse still, an ill-prepared workforce will try new tools and then blame them when value isn’t delivered. Vendors may run a real risk of becoming the nearest throat to choke.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value.

Here’s a way for us to think about this:

• Start with people. Get in their heads to understand their personal fears or the excitement of trying a new way of working. Could they be champions for you, or are they resistors? How will you address their concerns or harness their enthusiasm?

• Identify a compelling purpose. Help different audience groups appreciate how a new tool will enable their specific type of work. Address the What’s In It For Me to make it meaningful. Create a link to real goals and work to be done.

• Explain how people can get into different ways of working. Focus on behaviour. With enterprise social, for example, explain what it means to listen and contribute value. Simply asking people to do those things doesn’t mean they’ll know how.

• Tools next. A balance of functional training and building digital capability is essential. Build confidence by helping users make the most of new tools. Jump straight to this step and skip over people’s concerns and a clear purpose at your peril.

• Better business outcomes. When people are clear about the purpose of a new tool and feel confident in using it to get real work done, you’ll achieve meaningful adoption.

Of course, rallying people around new technology may happen in an organisation where leadership may not be engaged or where a culture is not ready to take the plunge. We should take more interest in organisational preparedness to welcome change, so we don’t waste time spinning our wheels and ensure the success of new digital technology deployments.

Making good technology choices is important, but is only part of the success equation. For new digital technology to stick, put people at the centre of the action. Solve a problem for them and then you really are giving them something they’ll value.

Weight training and finding your enterprise social muscles

I’d participated in Bodypump classes for years and years before finally getting up the guts to go and train to become an instructor. It was a big deal for me. Ask me to get up in front of a crowd and make a presentation about communications or social and I’m at ease. But when it came time to certify as an instructor, the thought of submitting a video of me coaching a class in how to execute deadlifts, squats and lunges was terrifying. The road of certification was very different to anything I’d ever navigated before.

I wish I’d taken the leap sooner because it’s so much fun! I look forward to every class I teach. My participants and I sweat bucket loads and our muscles burn. Over time, our weights have become heavier, our limbs leaner and more toned. We return for more again and again. We’ve found ourselves part of a wonderful virtuous cycle, spurred on by the great things resistance training was doing for our bodies.

"Building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym."

McKinsey talks about the evolution of social technologies occurring in three stages, taking companies from trial and error use, to collaboration and managing knowledge and on to the Nirvana of harnessing social to democratise strategy. 

In my experience, building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym. As McKinsey points out, once you make the leap and use social at work in more purposeful ways, you’ll get a bigger benefit from it. You have the opportunity to get into what I’m calling a virtuous social business cycle.

Here’s how:

• Connect – We make a conscious decision to move out of our silos. We listen. We post, without having an expectation of where a response may come from. We may be excited or anxious about what people will think about our post.

• Collaborate – The social habit forms as we feel the love from colleagues who engage with us. We make our work visible. We share what we know to help others kick business goals. We're adding value.

• Act – We embed social in the flow of our work, making the most of it to solve business problems and tap into new ideas. We’re action-oriented, not passive by-standers.

• Achieve – With the right people doing the right things in enterprise social, organisations committed to getting real work done in open and transparent ways will achieve better business results. The virtuous social business cycle is at work and we return to it again and again. 

Just like my Bodypump experience, getting into a virtuous social business cycle will help organisations find enterprise social muscles they never knew existed. And who doesn’t want great muscles, really?

Losing control and other myths about enterprise social networking

if you’re not already using social media or your organisation doesn’t value it, taking a leap into enterprise social could feel like jumping out of a plane for the first time. Exciting and terrifying.

People’s concerns about enterprise social are rarely about learning how to use the technology and are more to do with their comfort levels in working openly and feeling in control of their work. It’s one thing to engage routinely with people you know in emails or meetings, but to pose a question or share your views openly for anyone from anywhere in your organisation to see and to comment on can make people feel vulnerable, even in positive environments where there’s really no good reason to fear speaking up.

The positive network effects of enterprise social

Enterprise social networks (ESN) provide a platform for people’s voices to be heard and for serendipitous knowledge sharing to happen. Rather than spin your wheels finding the right person in your organisation to help you solve a problem, working more visibly with social can bring the help directly to you. And quickly.

Then there’s the ‘network effect’ of visible answers to questions saving time for hundreds, even thousands, of your colleagues who have the same problem. This is just one use case. The opportunities are endless when organisations go beyond simple connection and apply enterprise social to dealing with live business challenges.

But…old habits die hard

Despite the obvious benefits of embracing enterprise social technology, there’s still a fair bit of resistance to its uptake. If you’ve been good at your job and have climbed the corporate ladder without having to be social, then why change an approach that’s worked for you? This mindset is then reinforced in organisations through systems and processes that celebrate the contribution of individuals above all else. If you are rewarded only for what you deliver and there’s no value attached to collaboration in your organisation, then sadly people will tend to align with that way of working.

If you’ve been good at your job and have climbed the corporate ladder without having to be social, then why change an approach that’s worked for you? 

Most of this resistance comes from a place of not understanding the true potential of working visibly through enterprise social technology, coupled with the fear of exposure. But many of these ideas are myths. Let’s correct some misconceptions.

Myth 1. People will say or do the wrong thing

If you’re clear with people at the outset about how enterprise social works, they will understand what they post is visible to everyone in the network. This means mischief-making and errors are rare. A common saying in today’s digital newsrooms ‘we may be wrong but not for long’ also applies to enterprise social networks – post something inaccurate or do the wrong thing and the network will do the work to fix it. Catastrophic ESN train crashes are rare.

Myth 2. It’s not real work

If you use your ESN to pursue real work, then it will be treated as a serious business tool. Organisations that succeed with enterprise social don’t limit their activity to chat – they focus on creating business value. This means encouraging people to build a habit of using their ESN in the daily flow of work and putting in place community managers to build communities of practice mobilising people around hard business goals and objectives. Sounds like real work to me.

Organisations that succeed with enterprise social don’t limit their activity to chat – they focus on creating business value.

Myth 3. You can ‘launch and leave’ your Enterprise Social Network

You can’t put enterprise social technology in place and then expect people to figure out why and how they should use it all by themselves. That’s akin to inviting people to a meeting and then not having a clear purpose behind it – a waste of everyone’s time. Helping people understand the benefits of enterprise social and how to make the most of it requires a solid plan, including ongoing communications and training.

Myth 4. Enterprise social will transform a dysfunctional culture into an open one

An ESN is not a silver bullet to address underlying cultural issues. If your organisation doesn’t value diversity of opinion, or it punishes people for speaking out, there’s no tool that will magically change that. Along with introducing social technology, there must be action to address behaviours, systems and processes that run counter to creating an open and collaborative environment.

If your organisation doesn’t value diversity of opinion, or it punishes people for speaking out, there’s no tool that will magically change that.

Myth 5. Lots of Likes, Comments and Activity Means Your ESN Is a Success

It’s easy to get caught up in ESN metrics such as the volume of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ as measures of success. What’s more important, however, is taking action on what you see and hear in your ESN. For example, if you’re a leader with a mandate to change a process that’s a problem for customers or your people, then you should do so. When positive business change comes about as a result of people speaking up and doing their work more visibly in your ESN, then you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction.

Don’t Give Up on Enterprise Social

If you’re working to make an ESN stick in your organisation, don’t give up. People who are initially hesitant to try enterprise social find the fears and anxieties associated with using it slip away once they give it a go and discover its benefits. As enthusiasm across your organisation grows, the ESN wins across your organisation will snowball.

It’s then organisations previously wary of social realise it can make a big difference to business outcomes.