Internal Communications

Asda’s Green Room

I’d heard great things about Asda’s Green Room, an online portal where Asda staff can get together to find out what’s happening around the company as well as share their own stories, pictures and videos. What excited me most about it was that anyone can join in. The whole shebang is exposed to Asda customers, shareholders, media – anyone with a passing interest in Asda can and is encouraged to take a look around.

Given that I’m hugely interested in what I see as the inevitable convergence of internal and external communications, driven primarily by growth of social media, I had huge expectations when I paid my first visit. First impressions were mint. It looks great and sounds great. So I scratched beneath the surface a little. I have to say, by the time I left I was feeling pretty disappointed.

OK, so it has only been going for about 5 months. Actually 5 months in social media is probably the equivalent in several years in real-time. There are some signs of genuine interaction with ‘colleagues’ (that’s what Asda call their staff) and customers who have commented on the stories posted by the Green Room team. However, many stories have attracted no comments at all.

When you consider that Asda employs over 150,000 people in the UK, 90,000 of whom who are part time (and therefore presumably have a bit more time for social networking) this does not feel like success.

Lifting the bonnet slightly, I then saw that the Green Room’s own Facebook site has only 200 fans and despite almost daily updates, 2 ‘like its’ were the only sign of interaction going back to November 2009. I didn’t see a single comment on any of the wall posts during this time. The Green Room’s Twitter channel only has 51 followers (52 now – hi Steve!).

Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love what Asda have done here, it is ground breaking stuff – truly. I’m just a tad disappointed that Asda colleagues do not appear to have embraced the portal with as much enthusiasm as the very capable Green Room Team clearly have.

Watch this space – I intend to find out why.

Participation inequality

So we are using Yammer where I work. I like Yammer a lot. Mainly because the basic functionality is free and therefore gives me the chance to experiment without spending a bean. The technology is fine and it sure beats email as a way of threading conversations across the company and in work groups.

We never officially launched Yammer, and yet around 15% of the company (244 people) have found their way to the site and registered in a matter of months. I was initially disappointed that despite going to the effort of joining the network, most people do not appear to use it. Analysis of the contributions to date reveal that 5% of the users (12 people) are responsible for just under 60% of the content and 50% of the content is generated by just 6 people.

Then I discovered Jakob Nielson’s theory of Participation Inequality.  In short, Nielsen’s theory, otherwise known as the 90-9-1 theory, is that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all of the action.  On this basis, our Yammer figures look quite respectable.

So I took a quick look at Wikipedia, and discovered from their latest figures that that a mere 0.13% of users (85,000 people) are active contributors against 64m unique users. And I took a quick look at Twitter, where recent figures suggest that 5% of users account for 75% of all activity.

I feel much better now! The next step is to try and work out whether the lurkers are deriving any benefit….

The Marzipan Layer

I love a good analogy. Somehow they help you see things very differently.

I recently stumbled across an interesting description of middle management – the “marzipan Layer”. My very limited research suggests that it describes those in an organisation who are a cut above the cake itself but who are not quite wealthy enough to be the icing. Dame Laura Tyson, one of Barack Obama’s economic advisors, has used the term to mean the layer of managers ‘stuck’ below the top-level ‘icing’.

In my line of work I see the marzipan layer as something slightly different. It can often be the layer within an organisation where communications get stuck. It can often prove to be a bit of an impenetrable layer, where important messages from the executive team get stuck and never make it down to the bulk of the workforce underneath.

Likewise, important feedback and ideas from the ‘cake’ too often never make it up through the marzipan layer to the ‘icing’. There are any number of reasons for this, many of which are legitimate and understandable. They can be addressed through training, awareness, support, and incentivisation. The one standout exception is those managers who deliberately hold back on passing feedback up the line because they fear it will make them look bad.

In a culinary sense, Marzipan it is a dense pungent paste made from ground almonds and sugar. It serves to provide an impenetrable layer protecting the spotless and clinically clean icing from being stained by the moist rich fruit cake underneath it.

Hey maybe there is more to this analogy than I first thought!

Flipping videos

I’ve been thinking about using the excellent flip for internal communications. There’s no doubt that internal use of video can be a very engaging way of bringing corporate news to life, however the overheads in terms of cost and time get in the way of doing it on a daily basis.

I believe there will always be a place for the video profesionals to work their magic on the bigger events but that this can sit comfortably alongside impromptu low budget clips of staff commenting on issues, products, etc.

I just stumbled across a useful video and discussion on this subject here. The one thing missing that would make the flip an absolute winner for me is a wireless microphone. Picture quality is not a problem to the YouTube generation, but without great sound quality the best you’ll get is close-ups of people shouting at the camera, which just doesn’t do it for me.

Work hard, play hard

You see this rather hackneyed phrase far too much these days for my liking. People seem to like wearing it as a badge of honour. My problem with it is that it serves to reinforce the traditional boundaries between ones work life and social life, which in my book is a problem.

OK, some use it to justify work related jollies, which is fine. In fact it’s more than fine. If it’s true it’s a beautiful thing. However, others use it as an excuse to sneak out early on a Friday afternoon because their super human efforts have enabled them to pack into 4 hours what their less able colleagues take a whole day to achieve.

I’ve just finished reading a very interesting piece by Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School called Is social networking at work good for employee engagement?

The fact that more companies in the UK ban the use of social networking sites in the workplace than don’t means that this is already a much debated issue. There was an excellent piece a while back on Mashable which pretty much articulated my own very strong views on the matter. What interested me most was the bit on the blurring of the boundaries between home and work, especially given that in my inaugural introductory post yesterday I boldly stated I like this trend.

It’s true, I feel this blurring is a very positive thing – what Professor Birkinshaw has done is help me think harder about why. The truth is I had never really thought about it, other than to rationalise that it is a very powerful force in creating stronger bonds between a company and its customers. I hadn’t really considered that people who like to keep their work life and social life completely separate may be leaving their more creative and playful side of themselves at home.

Professor Birkinshaw suggests that when people bring more of themselves to work the benefits are increased creativity, engagement and discretionary effort. Rock on!