improving workforce productivity with online community and social software solutions

8/9/2019 Improving Workforce Productivity with Online Community and Social Software Solutions

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Improving Workforc e Produc tivity with Online

Community a nd Soc ia l Software Solutions

June 2009



Workplace Communities

Property of IGLOO Inc. All rights reserved. i

Contents

Contents ................................................................................................................ i

Introduction ..........................................................................................................

2

The Internet Affect — Web 2.0 ....................................................................... 2

Online Communities ........................................................................................ 3

Workplace Communities ....................................................................................... 4

Human Resources–Connecting the Workforce ....................................................... 5

Recruitment and Onboarding .......................................................................... 5

Managing and Retaining Top Talent ................................................................. 6

Sales–Streamlining the Sales Cycle ........................................................................ 8

Establishing Relationships to Close Deals ........................................................ 8

Streamlining the Request for Proposal (RFP) Process ...................................... 9

R&D–Improving Products

and

Time

to

Market

.....................................................11

Decreasing Project Lifecycles and Increasing Time‐to‐Market ...................... 11

Implement Quickly and Affordably .......................................................................13

Technology ..................................................................................................... 13

Deployment ................................................................................................... 13

Culture ........................................................................................................... 14

Conclusion–the C‐Level Perspective ......................................................................15




Introduction

Most companies today, regardless of location, size or industry focus struggle with the same things:

1. Vital corporate knowledge being trapped in information silos like email inboxes and structured

information systems like ERP and CRM (knowledge).

2. A limited understanding of organizational expertise (talent).

3. Creating their connected but globally dispersed workforce

(relationships).

These issues hamper productivity, decrease corporate capacity and

cripple the pace of innovation.

The Internet Affec t — Web 2.0

Over the last 10 years the Internet has changed our lives forever—

both from a social and a business perspective. Currently we are in a

technology phase that the experts call Web 2.0 — a set of new and innovative tools that take us beyond simple

browsing, searching and publishing of static web sites. These new Web 2.0 tools enable us to actively

participate, publish and interact with others on the web quickly, easily and at little or no cost.

Web 2.0 technologies are quickly changing how organizations, institutions and enterprises innovate, collaborate

and share knowledge. New user‐driven networked business models, practices and processes are emerging

where collaboration, contribution and sharing are promoted and rewarded within an organization. This cultural

shift is just starting to transform old hierarchical‐driven organizations into interactive, vibrant online

communities that are more agile, productive and competitive. Corporations, associations and academic

institutions are rethinking old business models and evolving their cultures to include Web 2.0 technology to

compete in an emerging global knowledge economy.

What is interesting is that many companies do not realize that networking is not a new concept in the business

world. Business users have been networking for decades, long before anyone had ever heard of Facebook or

Linked‐In. From the daily telephone conversations we have with our customers to conference room meetings

Property of IGLOO Inc. All rights reserved. 2





with potential partners or the water cooler conversations with other employees; these are all early forms of

social networking and are still being used today.

Online Comm unitiesOnline communities are a great solution for companies looking for new and innovative ways to find information,

share knowledge, experience and ideas, and to build business relationships across organizational and

geographical boundaries. When implemented correctly, online communities can create tremendous corporate

capacity by connecting, empowering and motivating their most valuable business asset: people.

Two major online community types exist in every organization – Workplace and Marketplace.

A Workplace

Community

empowers

your

organization

to

quickly

and

easily

connect

your

workforce

across

geographically dispersed project teams, departments and business units to realize significant productivity gains,

foster innovation and drive employee engagement.

Marketplace Communities extend your network beyond the corporate firewall, allowing you to connect with

members, partners, customers and suppliers to deepen relationships, build trust and reward loyalty.





Workp lac e Communities

A Workplace Community can effectively connect teams and departments within your organization helping to:

• Improve productivity; create social networks and engage your employees.

• Increase information sharing and reuse; instantly tap into the knowledge of distributed workgroups.

• Reduce duplicated efforts: share best practices and previous project information.

• Save money; reduce project lifecycles and speed time to market.

• Protect your intellectual property; easily store, share and manage information in a central and secure

workspace.

This paper will focus on the business value of Workplace Communities. Throughout the paper, we’ll use real life

examples or applications of Workplace Community solutions to illustrate business benefits like:

• Making connections to improve productivity between teams and departments (Human Resources).

• Creating a sales knowledge base to align sales with marketing and services department, for example, to

close more deals in less time (Sales).

• Bringing products to market faster, reducing project cycles and duplicated efforts to save money

(Research & Development).





Human Resourc es–Connec ting the Workforce

Your Human Resources department manages your most valued assets—the people who work for you and

collectively contribute

to

achieving

your

business

objectives.

Rising

costs,

increased

competition

and

the

time

required to hire and train new talent have made retaining your top performers a growing challenge. Effective

human resource management increases employee morale and overall productivity. Engaged, productive

employees are essential to any company that wants to outperform its competition.

Workplace Community solutions deliver extremely cost effective ways for your HR department to acquire the

best talent, improve corporate communications and drive employee engagement and well being. Within an

online community, HR management can securely coordinate, manage and monitor employee processes,

interactions and activities, including:

• Creating the connections employees require to find and utilize information to drive business results.

• Increase recruitment and onboarding programs by reaching into your workforce on prospective

candidates.

• Deliver just‐in‐time learning based on readily available employee content, collaboration, and

interactions.

• More effectively manage the talent within your organization by creating a culture of collaboration and

career development.

Rec ruitment and Onboa rding

In today’s economic climate, every organization, both large and small, need to make their resources go as far as

possible. Recruiting and HR systems can present particular challenges to this objective—either companies buy

an expensive, inflexible true HR system and train employees to use it, or produce a solution in‐house. A

Workplace Community allows you to manage the hiring process—from creating and posting job descriptions, to

reviewing resumes and internal postings to the distribution of policies and procedures—(NDA’s, confidentiality

agreements,

time‐

off

request

forms,

etc)

and

benefits

plans

(enrollment

form,

insurance

health

and

dental

claims forms) as part of employee orientation once a candidate is selected.

As an HR manager, you can review resumes online (without even downloading them), comment on a resume

and rate the candidate based on a 5‐star rating system. This can all be completed inline. The highest ranked




candidates can then be interviewed and further comments added. Because the comments remain permanently

linked to the candidate, the benefit continues even after the candidate selection is done—management can

review the comments made at a later date to see how the candidate has improved on specific skills or

developed in

a particular

roles.

A

performance

review

can

also

be

uploaded,

accessed

and

modified

within

an

employee’s folder.

An online community can be used to augment traditional training approaches with videos, blogs, wiki articles, a

dedicated discussion forum and links to the profiles of other participants in learning sessions. Social software

tools allow participants to search for and find other members based on shared courses or skill sets. An online

community can extend your training solutions to improve employee performance and reduce staff turnover.

Ma naging and Reta ining Top Ta lent

Using a Workplace Community, your employees can be organized into specific groups, teams and roles which

mirror your current organizational chart. Based on their specific role, employees in your organization can create

and update their own professional profile, outlining specific knowledge, skills and expertise related to their

work. Profiling enables those that are best at their job and solve the most complex problems to increase their

reputations.

Employees can use the member directory to quickly and easily find the experts with the skill sets they need, discover new team members in other locations and bookmark team members as peers and knowledge resources.






A Workplace Community gives you the ability to transform your top experts into corporate heroes. Using a

Member Directory, employees can quickly and easily find the experts with the skill sets they need, discover new

team members in other locations and bookmark team members as peers and knowledge resources—all from a

private LinkedIn

‐like

social

directory.

By

clicking

on

a profile,

managers

can

view

the

most

recent

contributions

made by an employee.

Many organizations are still wary of networking solutions primarily because they are insecure and have little or

controls. This is where Workplace Community solutions are different— they come complete with multiple layers

of security, auditing, measurement and permission controls —built right in. This enables managers to facilitate a

bottom up approach to problem solving; putting the power into the employee’s hands on which applications

they use and how they use them. This new culture empowers your workforce to take up the charge responsibly

and over‐deliver or outperform beyond your expectations.





Sa les–Streamlining the Sa les Cyc le

In many companies today, the sales force is mobile and distributed. Most road warriors need instant access from

their mobile

devices

like

the

BlackBerry®

to

the

most

up

‐to

‐date

corporate,

customer

and

sales

information

that

is most likely locked behind the corporate firewall—and they need it fast. They need to know when critical sales

information, such as Pricing Guidelines, Competitive Intelligence or Product Specifications have changed. And

because one sales transaction typically involves multiple interactions with people, they need to be plugged into

various teams across your organization—and even the world—for support: marketing for collateral; services for

customer support; Professional Services for custom deployments; and domain experts to help them close deals.

Creating a Workplace Community for your sales team is a cost effective and efficient way for your sales force to

access and continually contribute to rapidly changing information, and connect with vital resources at any time,

from any place.

Establishing Relationships to Close Deals

A Sales Community can connect all of your sales‐facing teams to streamline the sales cycle and help your sales

team close more deals, faster. You can use a secure online community to create a perpetual, growing sales

knowledge base—for existing teams to tap into as well as future teams. As the knowledge base is populated

with sales‐related information, it will grow incrementally in value. Because the Sales Community is centralized,

online

and

secure,

it

can

be

accessed

by

sales

and

other

departments

crucial

to

the

sales

cycle.

Mobile sales staff can quickly and easily build an online sales support network to help them handle customer

engagements—from objection handling, preparing presentations to building compelling customer scenarios and

demonstrations. It’s amazing that that the average knowledge worker spends three hours a day looking for

information. This adds up to over 720 hours per year, or 90 working days of potential productivity loss. Apply

this loss to your sales cycle and you can imagine the number of opportunities missed and its affect on your

company’s bottom line.

Sales related

information

is

housed

in

a secure

Sales

Community

where

participants

can

have

permissions

to

access, view or edit assigned by role. All information can be searched, bookmarked, commented on and

subscribed to (by email or RSS) by authorized team members. This allows departments and teams to be “in the

know” when relevant information is updated or changes. Your sales team is guaranteed immediate access to the




most up‐to‐date information and the people they need to help them do their jobs. Less time is spent looking for

relevant information and more time can be spent on building important relationships and closing deals.

Sales reps can quickly and easily contact each other for timely answers to critical question—while they’re on the road.

Streamlining the Request fo r Prop osa l (RFP) Proc ess

A Workplace Community provides the ideal permissioned environment for multiple departments to collaborate

securely to complete an RFP or any multi‐disciplinary related team initiative. For most submissions, the larger

the opportunity, the more input required from many and the response time allotted is generally short. A

proposal team is typically made up employees from your sales, professional services, marketing and

development departments. The process involves dividing up the RFP into relevant portions and assigning them

to designated members from this team. Without an online community, the team might rely on email for

collaboration, and have little visibility into what the entire proposal reads like until all content is merged. Often

when the

proposal

is

merged—at

the

eleventh

hour—it

doesn’t

flow,

isn’t

complete,

or

isn’t

what

management

is comfortable with. Inevitably, this leads to a last minute scramble to revise the document into an acceptable

proposal that is not as high quality as it could have been. An online community eliminates the need for your

teams to rely on email, and provides version control and auditing—reducing the likelihood of participants

working on the wrong versions or duplicating efforts made.






Finally, when the deal is won, the lessons learned, customer stories and win/loss insights from each sale cycle

can be posted and pushed out to the team using community tools such as blogs and forums. This information

can be reused by any employee that has contact with customers. Supporting a “watercooler” type approach to

sharing information,

sales

reps

are

more

likely

to

connect

with

subject

matter

experts

through

unstructured

peer‐to‐peer exchanges, such as blogs and forums ( Aberdeen Group: Sales 2.0: Improved Productivity Through Internal Collaboration). These Web 2.0 tools capture information that might have previously been lost, bridging

the communications gap that exists between ad hoc conversations around the watercooler and structured

content generated after a meeting, for example. Blogs, forums and wikis have permanence, meaning that all

information is captured within the online community and can be searched, accessed and re‐used. As well, these

tools reduce and can eventually replace the immobilizing amount of email the average employee receives each

day (200 according to one report).




R&D–Improving Produc ts and Time to Market

Your Research and Development (R&D) department lies at the heart of your business, anticipating market

opportunities and

developing

new

products

and

services

“ahead

of

the

curve”

to

give

you

competitive

advantage. An R&D Community combines an organization’s talent, knowledge and relationships to build highly

productive R&D teams.

Dec rea sing Projec t Lifecyc les and Inc rea sing Time-to-Ma rket

According to a recent article by USA Today, 85 % of all employees work on projects with employees in other

offices. An R&D team for a global company might be spread across six offices throughout the world. Dispersed

development teams

can

use

diverse

locations

to

their

advantage,

coordinating

development

projects

across

different time zones to work continuously, around the clock, to release a product to market faster. This can only

happen if your R&D staff can effectively collaborate to share ideas, capture information, follow internal processes

for regulatory compliance, share best practices and connect with experts—colleagues, customers, partners and

suppliers—at different stages of the development cycle to work together to complete R&D projects and get new

products to market.

Use an R&D Community to promote collaboration and communication between your development team and the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.






Using an online R&D Community, you can immediately build your development project team from the ground

up, and ramp up members to start contributing immediately. Profiles give you access to your employees’

background, skill level and experience, allowing you to use the best resources from anywhere in your

organization to

create

a highly

effective

R&D

team.

You

can

define

roles

and

set

up

permissions

and

responsibilities based on profiles to ensure that the project stays secure and on track. Using an online

community, you can get your R&D projects up and running in days not months.

A sense of focus is a vital component when building an effective team. An online R&D Community can provide a

secure work space where team members can access everything they need to participate in and complete

projects successfully. All project‐related information is stored in one place, so new group members can quickly

get the information they need, such as Product Specifications, Project Scope and Requirements documents, to

begin contributing to the project much faster. Powerful content management functionality supports multiple file

formats—such as MS Projects, ghant charts, functional and technical designs, CAD drawings, engineering

documents and more. Along with this information, project members can access who wrote it and what other

contributors or the company experts say. The goal is the same—to have access to changing information faster—

but the take away is the additional information that provides context, data and expertise.

A Development Wiki—a collection of web pages that team members can access and modify —can be set up with

each new

development

project.

Departments

and

team

members

can

collaborate

using

a wiki

to

chart

the

Product Roadmap or write software, for example. This is especially valuable in global organizations, where

employees work remotely to contribute or brainstorm, regardless of location and time zone. All of the

information captured in a wiki is securely stored in the network, preventing the loss of valuable knowledge

during the project or once it has been completed.

All information from a development project can be stored in the network and used to establish Communities of

Practice, in which you can save ‘best practice’ methodology and build on these tactics to reduce duplicated

efforts and establish industry standards.





Imp lement Quic kly and Affordab ly

The introduction of any online community requires the effective management of people, process, and

technology during

implementation

and

deployment

to

ensure

success.

It goes without saying these tools must adhere to corporate governance policies and practices set up by the

organization and made available in a formalized, controlled and secure environment. Managers need to become

enablers in this new world and not gatekeepers. It requires changes in existing business models and corporate

culture.

To get you started, we have included some recommendations which can significantly help your organization to

successfully deploy an online community.

Tec hnology:

• Applications — identify the right applications for workforce. Depending on the project and the

demographic of your workforce (location, age, technical abilities, etc.) different applications and

integrations may be needed. For example, Gen Y will most likely want use text messaging and a wiki;

while Gen X will want to use documents and email.

• Security — ensure that your corporate data is secure including storage, transmission, accessibility and

auditing.

• Extensibility — look for solutions that will integrate seamlessly with your desktop applications,

enterprise solutions and mobile devices.

• Administration — identify your business requirements around controls for configuration, measurement

and monitoring of information and collaboration.

Deployment:

• Pilot — identify a known business problem with a high probability for success to show quick time‐to‐

value and

learn

from

your

experiences.

• Bottom Up — empower your employees and make them part of the decision making process – as your

employees will ultimately be the key contributors to the online community or network.

• Measurements — identify key measures of success including risks right from the start.





• Outreach — create and implement outreach and awareness campaigns to stimulate usage and

excitement.

Culture:

• Generational Gap — identify, recognize and plan for the differences between how different generations

utilize and consume information within your organization.

• Change Management — changing behaviour is difficult; plan on finding champions to promote the

network; implement incentive programs; code of conduct and best practices.

• Feedback Loops — create easy to use feedback tools in your community such as polls, blogs and rating

that can provide critical insight into future investments and deployments.





Conc lusion–the C-Level Perspec tive

With the ever changing workforce (more distributed; more mobile and more technology savvy) and the Web

expanding to

include

new

communications

and

collaboration

tools,

online

communities

are

becoming

increasingly recognized as a powerful business application that connects the knowledge, talent, and

relationships within your workforce to improve productivity. There is a growing interest today in how

organizations can participate in the evolution of online communities and leverage supported Web 2.0

technologies to capitalize on new opportunities.

From a C‐Level perspective, Workplace Communities provide more visibility into the entire organization, by

giving managers the ability to empower their workforce and monitor individual performance and discover where

the talent really resides. They can quickly and easily see who is blogging, commenting on, rating, subscribing to,

contributing and accessing key resources in the network. Executives can take their organizations’ pulse with

newfound insights into how it is organized, how the workforce connects and collaborates and how the culture is

developing to see what makes the company “tick”.

Information is made transparent by the network—corporate knowledge is bubbled up where it can be used and

developed to reduce rework and improve productivity. Information is no longer buried in company inboxes and

hard drives or isolated in silos. A Workplace Community fundamentally reduces unnecessary emails between

co‐workers, letting employees choose or subscribe to receive, read, discuss and contribute to based on their

participation, without

being

intrusive

or

a waste

of

time.

Workplace Communities are fundamentally changing the way organizations conduct business—today and into

the future. For more information, visit www.igloosoftware.com.

http://www.igloosoftware.com/





IGLOO develops online community and social software solutions for groups, teams and organizations of any size.

Our solution suite combines Web 2.0 technology with on‐demand hosting, consulting, e‐engagement and all of

the community support services necessary for a sustainable and successful deployment. Organizations use

IGLOO communities internally to improve employee productivity (Workplace Communities) or externally to

foster relationships

with

members,

customers,

partners

and

suppliers

(Marketplace

Communities).

Fully

integrated collaboration, knowledge sharing and Web 2.0 social networking tools enable organizations to quickly

and cost‐effectively create online communities to leverage talent, knowledge and relationships across

organizational and geographical boundaries. IGLOO is funded by RBC Venture Partners. Jim Balsillie is Chair of the

IGLOO board.

If you would like more information on IGLOO’s Workplace Community platform, please contact us at:

Toll free: 1‐877‐ON‐IGLOO (1‐877‐664‐4566)

By email: [email protected]

22 FREDERICK STREET, 6TH

FLOOR

KITCHENER, ONTARIO, CANADA N2H 6M6

TEL +1.519.489.4120

FAX +1.519.489.4121

www.igloosoftware.com

[email protected]

© Copyright 2009 IGLOO Inc. The copyright to these materials is owned, without reservation, by IGLOO. These

materials may not be copied in whole or part without the express, written permission of IGLOO. The information in

this document is subject to change without notice. All rights reserved. Printed in Canada.

mailto:[email protected]

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