Internal Communication: Interactivity Is Non-Negotiable!
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[This article is taken from our White Paper “The Enterprise Social Network at the Heart of Collaboration” >>> access the full White Paper (FREE)]
Since the arrival of the enterprise social network (ESN), the landscape of internal communication has changed radically, and the traditional intranet will soon be nothing more than a memory. Hundreds of organisations have already crossed the Rubicon and opted for a social network. Others have kept their existing intranet, but transformed it into a social and collaborative platform. On both sides, the stakes are in fact the same: to streamline internal communication, to create social ties within the organisation, and to make social technologies a driver of cross-functional working, interaction and cohesion, in order to work better.
The Transformation of Communication Practices in Organisations
1.Breaking with internal communication by email
Of course, the choice of an enterprise social network (ESN) is not always a reaction to the traditional intranet. In smaller organisations, where it is not necessarily deployed, it is above all email that is being targeted.
At SeeQualis, a consulting firm with around sixty consultants, internal communication went through email. The problem: half of the employees work at client sites and have an email address there, so they rarely checked their SeeQualis one. Today, the ESN has become the single channel for communicating within the company. Employees out on assignment can easily access information from their smartphone.
2.Opening top-down information up to interaction
Of course, the value of the social network is not only to ensure that top-down information is properly distributed to everyone, but also to open it up to interaction: bottom-up and cross-functional. A beneficial dimension.
The law firm LLC & Associés, which has around a hundred employees, sees this when the announcement of a signed contract triggers congratulations, or when the arrival of a new colleague is greeted with welcome messages. Small marks of attention that are a source of team cohesion, and that had no place on the static intranet they had before.
3. Decentralising Internal Communication
Some large companies also choose the social network for their internal communication. Engaged in a major strategic project, Club Med wanted communication to be faster and more spontaneous within the company, and to create cross-functional links. Until then, news about life at the Club was managed by internal communication, which commissioned reports from the various regions and distributed them through a dedicated platform. Now, any employee can publish directly and freely in the social network’s internal communication group, and see their content recommended or commented on by colleagues.
Employees do, of course, still need to engage. At Mutualité de la Réunion, the intranet built with Google Sites was dropped in favour of the social network Talkspirit, in particular to capture life in the field. Alongside the information broadcast by head office, there is room for what is fed back by employees working in the group’s thirty or so branches. A genuine added value for identifying and addressing customer issues and detecting weak signals…
To encourage participation, managing director Didier Rivière has set up a Bureau des remerciements: when an employee posts an interesting message, he thanks them with a comment. But instead of these thanks getting lost in the social network’s discussion feed, they are centralised in a dedicated group, the Bureau des remerciements. “It works rather well,” he notes. “At first, I posted a few thank-you messages and, seeing them, employees started doing it too.” To encourage information to flow upwards, the managing director has also opted for a solution that is still rare in companies: a team of three people is given a specific budget to reward, each month, the messages that struck them, and at the end of the year the most original message receives a special prize.
Internal Communication Now Centred on Employees
1. Making Employees' Daily Lives Easier
On certain subjects related to company life, employees ask for nothing better than to be able to speak up and exchange with each other. At Lagardère Publicité, communication around an office move, for example, took place through a community on the enterprise social network. Day after day, employees were able to share their questions and the company to provide answers, easing a change that is always difficult.
Increasingly, the social network is also used for the onboarding of new employees. When they arrive, the platform puts them in touch with the people who will support them, so they can interact with them easily as needs arise. In other cases, as at LLC, newcomers can call on all of their colleagues through the social network in order to get an answer or access to a resource. They find their feet more quickly as a result. At SeeQualis, a group dedicated to onboarding welcomes them even before they arrive, so that they can already take part in company life.
2.Bringing employees together around their interests
Finally, through the community spaces of the social network, employees can come together spontaneously around thematic or professional interests, sharing with their colleagues what they read, their ideas and their challenges, beyond the structures of the organisation. But here too, employees still have to engage. While coming together around shared interests seems natural, keeping that community alive is another matter.
For a long time, this question revolved around governance, with the advocates of laissez-faire on one side, giving employees complete freedom to create communities, and the advocates of a formal framework on the other, keen to make sure a community would be viable and, to that end, requiring it to set out its objectives, appoint its facilitators, and so on. So which is the right approach? Both and neither, one is tempted to say, since either one, depending on the context and the people involved, sometimes produces positive results and sometimes leads to failure. In reality, the focus on this clash of methods mainly reflected how aware the company was of what collaboration demands in terms of resources. As that understanding grew, a second period opened up, centred instead on support.
Covéa is a good illustration of this turning point. The mutual insurance group has set up a dedicated structure to develop collaborative practices. Community Manager positions have been created. Each one manages a portfolio of communities and supports their facilitators day to day. They also work with managers to raise their awareness and train them on the tool. This structure also relies on a network of ambassadors, volunteer employees from all backgrounds who champion the social network in the field and help their colleagues get to grips with it and put it to use. An arrangement that creates positive momentum, but one that also requires the company to recognise the time spent by these ambassadors and by community facilitators. And to go further still in acknowledging the effort needed to encourage cross-functional communication through the social network and to reap all its benefits.
Also read: The 12 Best Enterprise Social Networks
Also discover: Best Internal Communication Software
★ CASE STUDIES ★
1.Caisse d’Epargne d’Auvergne et du Limousin
To support exchanges between its employees, Caisse d’Epargne d’Auvergne et du Limousin (Cépal) has deployed an enterprise social network, which has become the preferred place for local communication and is gradually eating into the intranet (which hosts business content). It also plays an important role in sharing training resources, particularly for new employees. Each intake has its own space where, for eight weeks, its members can get together to talk and access training materials. In this way, the social network provides all these interaction capabilities. Information published in the corporate communication space can be commented on and, depending on the integration choices made, employees can find the discussion feeds of their communities on their intranet home page. In every case, the connection between the intranet and the social network must make it easy to switch from one to the other. But this type of project is also an opportunity to thoroughly rethink the corporate communication side so that it reflects the diversity of the organisation and encourages cross-functional working.
2.Communauté d’agglomération de Grenoble-Alpes
Within the Grenoble-Alpes conurbation authority, an intranet was in place, but it was little used. The only means of communication with the 1,800 staff spread across 56 sites was still a quarterly newspaper sent to their homes… Today, on the collaborative intranet, each department or service has its own page to present its services, its projects and its team. Everyone can see what the others are working on, which reduces the risk of duplication and encourages interaction between departments. As for the beating heart of the intranet, it lies in the collaborative spaces of the social network, in particular within thematic communities that can bring together everyone from front-line staff to service directors, by way of elected representatives.
★★ BEST PRACTICES ★★
1.Making the social network the single internal communication channel decisively encourages adoption of its use.
2.Non-work communities can make employees’ daily lives easier (e.g. a group for those who like to go running at lunchtime, another group for interns to organise their Friday evening outings together, etc.).
Access the full White Paper
This article is taken from our White Paper “The Enterprise Social Network at the Heart of Collaboration”. It covers all the issues related to Internal Communication, Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Practices, and offers concrete ways to collaborate better through Enterprise Social Networks. Read it in full (FREE):
