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Listening to employees through Workplace and SWOOP
What do stingless bees have to do with a Workplace network? For Australian Catholic University (ACU), the stingless bees are an example of how its Workplace network has connected thousands of staff across the country and led to immediate business value.
What impact do leaders have on collaboration? Show me the numbers!
One of our most enduring observations from organisations successfully using Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) platforms is the important role the CEO and executive leaders have played in the network’s success.
Engagement At Scale: What Senior Leaders Need To Do
It is more important than ever for senior leaders to build trust by establishing two-way conversations with their people – at scale. In this article, we’ll give simple, practical and evidence-based tips for achieving this spending just five minutes per day. We’ll also show you how to measure this at the individual level.
Are Private Groups More Openly Sharing than Public Groups?
Amy Dolzine from accounting firm EY recently reflected on five years of observing Yammer groups, both public and private, and like many of us has been promoting transparency and open group collaboration. However, she made the following observation: “In my observations, completely without data, it feels like having private spaces where the audience is limited to a select group, ironically enables people to be more open. When you ask people in an org to be vulnerable to all, people are not as yet willing to ask the difficult questions, and people are less willing to answer. But in a smaller subset they are.”
Amy’s post intrigued us, perhaps because in some way it resonates with what we have observed ourselves. We often hear that private groups provide a safe place to speak openly. At SWOOP we are the ‘data people’ and because of that we felt compelled to see what evidence, using our Yammer benchmarking facilities, we could find.
Getting the Best out of Online Groups at Work
The digital workplace has spawned a limitless opportunity to form online groups. Today, organisations can have staff participating in groups emerging through enterprise social, team messaging, online conferencing and a plethora of external groups like LinkedIn and Facebook. No matter the source of their formation, there are some common needs that must be articulated if an online group is to be a success or not. The first step is to be mindful of the type, and therefore, purpose of the online group you are forming. There are vast differences between a group established to share news, to one to support a project team, to one to develop new work practices.
Tyranny of the ‘Long Tail’
The advent of Internet-enabled e-commerce brought an increased focus on ‘Long Tail’ distributions. Internet organisations like Amazon are able to exploit their low marginal costs by selling low volumes to the Long Tail of buyers with unique non-mainstream needs.
Rely on Activity Measures from your Enterprise Social Network at your Peril
For most people “Social Analytics” means understanding consumer online behaviours. For businesses it is about understanding how best to take advantage of the social networking channels of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the like, to enhance your brand perception. Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have essentially evolved from public social networks, with the activity based metrics migrating as well, with little thought to their effectiveness. Activity measures are typically available “out of the box” with ESNs. This is a BIG problem though! It doesn’t take too much research to find out that the Enterprise objectives for ESNs and those for external brand building are substantially different.