Setting Measurable Goals for Collaboration with SWOOP
When you set a goal to achieve something specific, you are much more likely to achieve it. Ambitious goals also turn out to be more motivating than goals that are easy to achieve. At SWOOP, our mission is to make organisations and individuals better at collaborating, and that is why we are now introducing goal setting in SWOOP.
It will go live later in January 2021, and you can read all about goal setting for Yammer and Workplace from Facebook in this blog post.
Since 2015 we have done extensive research into how organisations, groups, communities and people collaborate on Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace and we have published this in our annual benchmarking reports which are freely available at www.swoopanalytics.com/benchmarking.
Our Enterprise Social Network performance measures are aligned the SWOOP maturity model which is based on prior work by Simon Terry and Siemens. In the graphic below you will see how the goals are aligned to the different maturity levels:
Our ongoing investment in benchmarking since 2015 has enabled us to form a comprehensive picture of what ‘good’ looks like, and we now feel confident we have been able to find the important signals that can provide insights into collaborative performance. Using an Olympic team analogy, we can measure resting heart rate, body mass and other important performance metrics for each athlete, for each team, and for all the teams in different sports. We also know what athletes from other countries are achieving. This will help you focus your attention on where it will provide the greatest return.
The goal setting feature in SWOOP is available for all dashboards and nearly all quantitative metrics.
The goals are set up as minimum, maximum or a range. For instance, the Response Rate has a minimum goal of 50% replies to posts.
Once you reach the 50% you are achieving what the top 20% of organisations achieve.
You will need to set a date range of at least three months to be able to see and adjust the goals. This is because the default goals are sensitive to shorter date ranges.
SWOOP provides a suggested default goal where we have the data to back it up, i.e. based on our benchmarking data set. For quantitative measures where you do not see a goal flag in SWOOP, you can set a goal yourself. For example, in the Response Rate measurement shown above, we include a default goal of minimum 50% of posts having received a reply, but there is no default goal for Likes or for how fast those replies should come, but you can set that if you want to.
The default goals provided by SWOOP are set to what the top 20% in our benchmarking data have achieved. Undoubtedly, that will be ambitious for some and worth striving for. However, for others it may not be right given an organisation’s particular stage of adoption or unique context. Therefore, we allow you to adjust the target.
Enterprise goals, Community/Group/Team and Personal goals
Our global benchmarking reports showed us that goals do not scale, so they need to be adjusted for the size of the group of people they relate to. Therefore, SWOOP provides different goals for the same measures at the Enterprise, Community/Group/Team, and Personal level. First, we will explain what the metrics are, and then we will show what the goals are for each level.
Overview of metrics and why they are important
| SWOOP Metric | Description | Why it is important |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive users | Percentage of users who have taken a tangible action such as a post, reply or like. Reading, browsing, joining or leaving groups is not included. | Collaboration is a ‘contact sport,’ and you need a broad base of active participation to get the large-scale benefits. |
| Response Rate | Percentage of posts that get a reply. | Without conversation we are not collaborating, but just communicating (broadcasting). Once the volume of Replies exceeds the number of Posts, we can be confident that conversations facilitating tacit knowledge sharing are starting to happen. |
| Public Messages | Percentage of messages posted in public groups. | This is an indicator of overall transparency. In general, we would like this score to be high, indicating a maximum opportunity for broader knowledge sharing. |
| Curiosity Index | Percentage of messages (posts and replies) that includes a question. | The degree to which an organisation looks to improve through exploring better ways, challenging, and questioning the status quo is a strong indicator for innovation. |
| Mention Index | Percentages of posts that include one or more @ mentions. | Mentioning someone relevant in a post leads to more replies, thus is a powerful way to engage others in a conversation. |
| Multi-Group Participation | Activity participation in multiple groups. The Diversity Index at the enterprise level is the average of the scores for each person. | Successful innovation is regularly linked to diversity in an organisation. An individual with high diversity would be equally active across a broad range of Communities/groups. |
| Two-Way Relation-ships | Calculates the proportion of connections that are reciprocated, e.g. you replied to my post and I replied to yours. | Two-way relationships indicate a stronger and more cohesive network. Trust is higher, and organisational speed is faster. |
| Influencer Risk | This measures how reliant the organisation is on a selected few power networkers. | A high Influencer Risk means low resilience to the loss of core members. |
| Persona Distribution | The distribution of people by ‘active’ SWOOP Personas, i.e. Broadcaster, Responder, Catalyst and Engager. Observers are excluded. | Getting the right mix of personas represents strong collaborative patterns across the enterprise. |
Enterprise default goals
The following default goals represent what the top 20% of benchmarked organisations have achieved:
| SWOOP Metric | Default Goal | |
|---|---|---|
| SWOOP Persona Distribution | Broadcasters | <5% |
| Engagers | >30% | |
| Catalysts | 30-40% | |
| Responders | 30-40% | |
| Interactive Users | >60% | |
| Influential People | <20% | |
| Public/Private Messages | >80% | |
| Response Rate | >50% | |
| Two-Way Connections | >35% | |
| Multi-Group Participation | >60% | |
| Curiosity Index | >17% | |
| Mention Index | >10% | |
Community/Group default goals
The following default goals represent what the top 20% of benchmarked communities/groups have achieved. Community/group goals are different for small, medium and large communities/groups. Size is based on the number of members:
Small Group/Community: 1-50 members
Medium Group/Community: 51-499 members
Large Group/Community: 500 or more members
| SWOOP Metric | Small Group | Medium Group | Large Group | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SWOOP Personas | Broadcasters | <5% | <3% | <3% |
| Engagers | >30% | >25% | >25% | |
| Catalysts | 30-40% | 30-40% | 35-40% | |
| Responders | 30-40% | 30-40% | 30-40% | |
| Interactive Users | 100% | >90% | >80% | |
| Influential People | <5% | <20% | <20% | |
| Response Rate | >70% | >60% | >60% | |
| Two-Way Connections | >80% | >60% | >40% | |
| Multi-Group Participation | >80% | >60% | >50% | |
| Curiosity Index | >17% | >15% | >13% | |
| Mention Index | >10% | >9% | >8% | |
Personal default goals
These personal goals are derived from the Enterprise and Community/Group goals:
| SWOOP Metric | Default Goal |
|---|---|
| Two-Way Connections | >60% |
| Multi-Group Participation | >80% |
| Curiosity Index | >17% |
| Mention Index | >10% |
| Response Rate | >50% |
Collaboration strategy and goal setting
Goal setting is a strategic planning activity, and it can be a very powerful way of engaging your organisation and/or your team in thinking through what you want to achieve from your collaboration platform. Do remember the goals are nothing more than signals that will tell you if you are heading in the right direction, but achieving them is not necessarily success in itself. Collaboration is a means to an end, but not the end itself.
We suggest you approach goal setting the following way:
Decide what the most important business outcomes are for your organisation.
Decide what role the collaboration platform will have delivering these outcomes.
Decide what the collaboration goals should be. SWOOP provides default goals based on what the top 20% of organisations achieve, but you need to confirm these are right for your context.
Here are two examples of how a desired business outcome drives the goal setting for collaboration:
Example 1
An organisation had been implementing Lean Six Sigma to drive further efficiencies in the sales process. It discovered the remaining sticking issues were not about process, but about how people executed the process. Head office could not understand why it was so hard for the field-based salespeople to follow the prescribed process. They then introduced an enterprise social network to improve collaboration between field-based salespeople and head office to uncover what was getting in the way.
Several regional groups were created for salespeople to ask questions and share photos etc., as they ran into problems following the process in the field. Since the core aim of the group was for head office people to answer questions from the field, a goal of 90% replies to posts was set, and a minimum 50% of the field-based salespeople had been actively engaged by posting or replying.
After just four weeks, nearly a hundred questions had been asked, every single question had been answered and 67% of the salespeople had actively taken part. The sales process was tweaked as additional training was provided where needed.
Example 2
A recurring issue identified from the annual employee satisfaction survey was employees asking for more direct interaction with the senior leadership team. To augment existing communication channels, the leadership team decided they would use the company’s enterprise social network more deliberately to engage their people in two-way dialogue. A goal was set for the senior leadership to become Catalysts or Engagers, to post updates and reply to questions (proportionally aiming for two replies for every post) as well as posting questions to encourage feedback (Curiosity Index of 10% or above). The senior leadership team members received individual coaching from the corporate communications team, and the leadership team was able to sustain an improved online engagement profile which led to significant uplift on this specific area in the following year’s employee engagement survey.
More information
If you would like more information about goalsetting in SWOOP, we would love to talk with you. Contact us today.