Can we turn kids into grown-ups in just two months?

Yesterday my 14-year-old son missed a meeting with a teacher about some work he was having trouble with. I know this, because the teacher sent him an email expressing her disappointment that he was a no-show and she copied me. It’s not the first time this has happened. And my youngest son is no angel on this front either.

“Google Classroom is not the only thing to stay on top of,” I say to my boys. “You have to check your email regularly. Multiple times a day, otherwise you might miss something.”

As an advocate for a more social way of working, instructing my kids to pay more attention to their email is a bitter pill to swallow. And my kids look at me as if I’m crazy.

Two years of digital transformation in two months

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report that the company had experienced “two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Many of us working from home would agree. We’ve shifted our office desk to home and we’re trying to get on with work in a different way in the middle of a pandemic. It’s not easy.

Knowing the business rules

Even though our kids are digital natives, after watching mine ‘work from home’ for 30 days or so, I know they’re struggling too. We’re watching them try to adhere to all sorts of business rules and we’re disappointed when they can’t.

Truth be told, we’re asking our kids to operate like grown-ups who have been in the workforce for years, when the reality is, we can’t do a Microsoft and transform them in just two months.

We're asking our kids to operate like grown-ups who have been in the workforce for years.

Here are the capabilities and habits kids need to work on if they are to succeed in today’s distributed world of school. Parents, feel free to add to this list.

Kids, sort out these things:

1. Time management. There are no school bells to tell you when recess is over and Math class is about to begin. Learn to watch the clock and set alarms if necessary.

2. Outcomes. Learn to swallow the frog and focus on the ‘right’ work. Putting off challenging school work will inevitably lead to no meaningful outcomes. That’s bad news for your end of term report.

3. Deadlines. Make a note of what assignments and projects are due and when. Hand in work on time. Check in to see if any deadlines have shifted for whatever reason.

4. Dress. This is a tricky one right now, as I’m in gym gear almost 24/7. But kids, at least get out of your pyjamas, brush your hair and look presentable for that early morning Google Classroom session.

5. Dealing with others. When in meetings, look engaged. Your teachers and fellow students won’t love it if you look bored and they’ve love it even less if you fall asleep at your desk. Pay attention, look interested and get involved.

6. Playground politics. When I coach adults in building their digital capability, I say don’t ‘Twitter when you’re bitter’. Same rules apply here. If your little friends are driving you crazy in the virtual playground, don’t feed the trolls. Put your devices down and go do something else.

7. Work-life balance. If you can get your school work done during ‘office hours’ that’s less you have to do after hours to catch up. When it’s finished, switch off and go have fun. Engage in physical activity, since team sport is still out of bounds.

Educators are super heroes

In highlighting these areas for improvement, I’m not targeting schools. My husband and I have only got two kids to manage. Just as the world of work has changed, education has had to transform overnight. Class teachers are herding 25 kids or more every single day from their laptops. They are super heroes as far as I’m concerned, doing a fantastic job.

There is good news

It’s not all hopeless, though. As a fan of working in a more open and social way, here’s where I think many of our kids have the edge on us working adults.

Adults, learn this stuff from your kids:

1. Share your work. Whether it’s presenting to the class or posting a project in progress in the school enterprise social network, our kids are building a habit of working visibly and getting input from others along the way. It’s not weird to them. It’s a natural way of working.

2. Be curious. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. We do things the same way, even if it’s dysfunctional at times, because we’re too busy to re-engineer a process. Kids aren’t wired that way. I marvel (sometimes) at the ingenuity of my two boys who see the world as a place where you can be curious and experiment over and over again.

3. Be honest. How many times have you sat in a meeting, disagreeing with something being discussed, but not speaking up? Kids aren’t afraid of telling it like it is. Sure, we’d like our kids to apply some filters at times, but it’s refreshing to engage in conversations where we feel safe to be ourselves.

4. Be vulnerable. Too many adults think they need to have all the answers at work. We’re already bearing our souls by letting our colleagues peer into our messy living rooms and look at our isolation dress, hair and beards. It’s OK to be imperfect. Keeping things real at work engenders more trust than trying to maintain high production values.

It’s OK to be imperfect. Keeping things real at work engenders more trust than trying to maintain high production values.

Taking good habits into the future of work

As we continue to work shoulder to shoulder with our kids, let’s remember that changing behaviour and habits won’t come about in two months. Your kids are still learning how to navigate this and it will take a while.

At the same time, let’s look to our children for lessons in how we can be more effective in our work. Our kids are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and they will bring into the workplace more open and visible ways of collaborating and doing things. In the meantime, they can teach us a great deal about sharing what we know, asking for help, being curious and telling it like it is. 

Educator, entertainer, help desk & cheerleader. The many hats of a community manager

“Good community managers need to be able to go back and forth between strategy and execution – they need to live in both worlds. They need to listen deeply to understand, ask powerful questions and not assume all issues are solved by the ESN (Enterprise Social Network). They connect dots that others might not even see.” - Keeley Sorokti

The comments from Keeley were prompted by a question I posted on Twitter several weeks ago, asking people to share their views on the top three tasks performed by Community Managers.

Doing the ‘business of the business’ in enterprise social doesn’t happen by accident. Pinaki Kathiari summed it up well in his response, when he described community management as “part customer service, help desk, educator, entertainer and cheerleader”. Community Managers wear many different hats.

The reality is if you want to have a thriving enterprise social network, you need to have professional community managers leading the effort to ensure communities are strategic, relevant and valuable to the organisation and the people engaging in them.

What follows is a rough role mandate for a community manager, based on input from people in the job. We start with the most important task and move down the ranks. Here goes.

1.    Influencer, connector and knowledge broker

“Know everyone and build strong relationships.” – Tom Boden. Great community managers are skilful connectors, facilitating relationships all over their organisations to improve how work gets done. They identify influencers and enlist their support as ambassadors and champions to demonstrate how community can work. Influential community managers also know how to ‘encourage’ people or groups to ensure opportunities to make valuable and productive connections are not lost.

2.    Strategic business enabler

“It requires … the ability to translate community needs into tangible business value for the company.” – Mary Thengvall. Smart community managers align use cases for enterprise social with the organisation’s goals and strategy – the real work of the business.  Enterprise social networks exist to help organisations and their people to progress. Savvy community managers understand what’s going on in the business and can articulate a clear strategy demonstrating how working in communities adds real, measurable business value.

3.    Community strategist and tactician

“Sourcing content to support the community goals.” – Daniel Leonard. Community managers own and lead their community strategy. This means setting the direction, as well as curating, creating and seeding content aligned to community goals. Strategic community managers moderate their communities and are always experimenting, trying to work out what type of content will engage, entertain and help their audience learn.

4.    Advocate of the people

“Protecting the vulnerable by advocating for their value and insight.” – Jeff Merrell. People are the focus for decisions about communities. Insightful community managers look at who’s in and who’s out of a conversation to ensure the right people are engaged. This could mean finding a subject matter expert to chime in to help sort out a problem or getting the right leader to answer questions about a big issue. They’re skilled at creating an environment in which "people are seen, heard and feel safe to share" (Rachel Happe).

5.    Role model and champion

“Be engaged, observe, lead, guide and be the most enthusiastic participant.” – Catherine Shinners. Community managers set the tone for participation. They know they can’t expect others to adopt a social way of working if they don’t do it themselves. This means being active and open in their enterprise social network and doing it regularly. They also identify and reward people demonstrating the right behaviours, picking great examples to share in reporting and communications so others may learn.

6.    Trainer and coach

“Helping the organisation cross the chasm from early adopters to majority of employees participating – the most critical point in the life of a community.”  - Dennis Pearce. People are at different stages in their journey to become socially engaged, from those who are happy to give it a go, to those who are anxious about working in a fundamentally different way. Community managers address this by providing training, coaching and support catering for different stages of social adoption – and the different learning preferences of people – in their organisation. 

7.    Trouble shooter and technician

Being able to identify, mitigate and manage risks and put out the occasional fire featured on the list of top tasks. Unsurprisingly (for me anyway), working with IT and vendors to ensure your enterprise social platform is fed and watered regularly received but a brief mention. This demonstrates the further we go into the digital age, the more we realise we’re dealing with people’s mindsets first and technology second.

Who’s right for the job?

A great community manager is patient, persistent and resilient. A good networker, strategist and tactician. Curious, open-minded, empathetic and a good listener. They are slow to judge and quick to help.

Clearly, community management is not for the faint-hearted. But it's a rewarding job leading organisations and people to take up an open, networked way of working.   

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.

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.