Enterprise Social Network Deployment: Driving Adoption from Day One

Deploying an enterprise social network (ESN) is always a major challenge: convincing the target audience, in a short amount of time, of its value. Before launch, securing support from top leadership is essential to legitimize the project. And in the ideal scenario, leaders should not simply promote its arrival — they must use it themselves to meet their own collaboration needs.

[This article is excerpted from our White Paper "The Internal Social Network at the Heart of Collaboration" >>> access the full White Paper (FREE)]

Lead by example

Leading by example, when top management begins to change its own habits, creates a change dynamic. It encourages people to leave behind old ways of working — in particular the overuse of email. This is exactly where the Neovia Group digital team invested to support the Talkspirit rollout. The virtues of leading by example cascade down through every level of the hierarchy, all the way to front-line managers and project leads. This approach must be paired with tenacity, because changing work habits does not happen overnight. At the team level, it commonly takes weeks — or even months — before each member leaves old reflexes behind. Only then does the online community truly become the hub for all exchanges.

Read also: Defining the main use cases for your collaborative platform

Involve users in the pilot phase

Alongside top management involvement — and therefore from the very pilot phase — it is essential to include users who represent the different profiles across the organization. They are often called ambassadors. It is increasingly common to involve them in large numbers: 10 to 20% of the workforce over a relatively long period (three to six months). This gives them time to make the tool their own within their working context, and to feed the project team with valuable feedback.

Sometimes users are brought in even earlier in the ESN deployment project. At Fiafec, a joint training funding organization (OPCA), 17 of its 210 employees took part in selecting the software. The real-estate company Nexity followed the same logic, inviting 70 of its 7,000 employees to test four tools in parallel on a specific business scenario. This approach simplified and objectified the debate over which enterprise social network to choose — saving valuable time for the rollout.

Read also: 3 best practices for using groups to roll out your enterprise social network

Read also: Collaborative work: we don't all share the same values

📣 Client story: Neovia

Julien CIBAT (Digital Project Manager at Neovia Group): "Making top management the project's ambassadors"

"Rolling out an enterprise social network at scale is a project in its own right — it requires budget, resources, and time," says Julien Cibat, Digital Project Manager at Neovia Group. Neovia Group is a company of 8,300 employees, present in 28 countries and specializing in animal nutrition and health, which adopted Talkspirit in July 2017.

The goal of the internal social network: bring international teams together around a company project and give them simple ways to collaborate. The Digital and Communications departments, backed by IT, orchestrated a phased rollout by geographic zone, starting with headquarters-based teams. "It is essential to bring top management on board early and convince its members to adopt the platform for their own collaboration needs. Then you identify the first project ambassadors and plan a broader rollout," adds the Digital Project Manager. Even while the project was still in the pilot phase, more than 1,000 users were already on the platform.

"Extending the pilot phase and involving a large number of users gives you time to identify relay champions. It is also an opportunity to refine the messaging for different audiences and usage scenarios, and to adjust the support setup," argues Julien Cibat. Deploying on a site or in a subsidiary is, every time, a mini-project — one that involves meetings with local directors, business unit leads, and HR to structure the approach, explain it, and identify the right stakeholders. Among the key success factors, the Digital Project Manager highlights the quality of the relationship with Talkspirit: "The support and feedback management make it possible to best integrate user needs while accounting for differences in maturity and existing technology ecosystems."

🎤 Experience feedback: KLM

At KLM, some employees noticed that the process for reporting service failures on board aircraft was not performing well enough. When a video screen or a seat is defective, meal trays are non-compliant, or newspapers are in short supply, a fast response is critical.

These employees therefore created a group dedicated to reporting these issues, on the internal social network. Result: the resolution time for certain problems was cut in half. The productivity gains along the handling chain and the improvement in customer service quality convinced the airline to extend this approach across its various routes.

The old process had been abandoned. It routed information back to the back-office through an online form, before trickling back down to managers and the staff responsible for catering and maintenance. Now these teams are immediately notified of messages posted by cabin crew. Furthermore, the addition of photos, videos — some including passenger testimonials — and community reactions among members reinforce the impact of messages.

The merits and limits of ChatOps

The category of ChatOps tools (including Slack and Microsoft Teams) comprises group messaging platforms that interact with third-party applications. Exchanges can even be automated through conversational agents (chatbots), which are set to become increasingly sophisticated thanks to artificial intelligence.

Strengths: The user experience — fluid, real-time communication — makes ChatOps tools well suited to business collaboration within small teams.

Limits: The strengths of ChatOps become weaknesses as soon as the audience expands to an entire department (everyone is then flooded with notifications). The same applies when exchanges need to be preserved (finding a specific exchange — or document — with its context and retracing the thread of discussion becomes very difficult).

🔔 Ultimately, as soon as collaboration involves larger numbers of participants (20 or more), opting for an internal social network rather than a ChatOps tool is the smarter choice. More effective.

Read also: Internal communications: interactivity or nothing

Key figures

80% of employees champion group work (FaberNovel Institute and BAP study, May 2018)

36: the average number of cloud services used by one employee. 20 of which relate to collaboration and file sharing (McAfee 2016 study).

64% of employees use the email to share information and interact with their team (YouGov and Lecko study, February 2018).

Two essential best practices for deploying an enterprise social network

• Personally convince every member of top management to take ownership of the ESN, make them comfortable with the tool (show them the key actions), and get them to commit personally. At Sodexo, the executive committee assistant worked in tandem with the Head of Digital Transformation to bring all top managers on board.
• Position the ESN as the central pillar of collaboration, as Air France–KLM did — where 40% of its 80,000 employees are now active users.

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This article is excerpted from our White Paper "The ESN at the Heart of Collaboration." It covers all the challenges related to Internal Communication, knowledge sharing, collaborative practices, and provides concrete ways to collaborate more effectively through enterprise social networks. Read it in full (FREE):

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