Today’s post comes courtesy of Gareth Murran, Innovation Product Manager at MindLeaders
2012 will see some companies pull ahead of others because they are able to collaborate, innovate and execute better and faster thanks to an ingrained culture of sharing. This is the year that companies get serious about investing in their internal social business capabilities, simply because it helps create and sustain a fast-moving, innovative and collaborative culture. It’s one thing to have a Facebook or Twitter presence run by your small marketing team. It’s a very different story when a truly social business has hundreds or possibly thousands of employees connected externally as well as internally.
The true character of any business is revealed in the collective experiences of its customers. Over the next year successful companies will be investing time, money, and resources into three key areas: customer service (which builds brand loyalty and drives word of mouth), culture (which leads to the formation of core values), and employee training and development (which leads to a pipeline of successful leaders). To provide great customer service, companies must educate, train and empower their employees to solve customer problems.
Culture is often dismissed as the “soft” underbelly of business. But as business leaders like Tony Hsieh (Zappos) have written, culture is what creates and sustains a great company. To earn the attention and business of the connected consumer, brands, products, and services must connect with its consumer personally, emotionally and intellectually. There are two ways I see culture changing because of increased sharing enabled by social technologies. The first revolves around connecting employees with customers. The second is connecting your employees with each other.
When connecting employees with customers no matter how many people you have on your social media team, it won’t be enough to meet the groundswell of customer demand. To do that, you have to create your own internal groundswell, embodied in all your employees, remembering that customer service is marketing.
The most important thing in creating a strong culture is that it creates tight alignment within the organisation. What the culture is actually doesn’t matter as much as the commitment to the culture and core values of the organisation. A lot of companies have “core values” or “guiding principles,” but most of the time they are very lofty sounding, they read like press releases and nobody really pays attention to them. It doesn’t really do much good to have core values if the organisation isn’t living by them. The right culture will see employees stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion.
When connecting employees with each others, tapping into the power of social technologies isn’t about mastering the latest shiny technology; it is actually about having a clear idea of the relationship you want to form. A growing trend right now is the adoption of “Enterprise 2.0” where a company uses software to connect employees socially within the enterprise. This can be either as a standalone service (like Yammer or Socialcast) or integrated into a collaboration platform or suite (like Salesforce.com’s Chatter, IBM Connections or Sharepoint). Think of it as Facebook behind the firewall. These tools are a complete inversion of the top-down way companies run. Increasingly forward thinking leaders are behind the adoption of these technologies. They realise it is a way to transform their organisations simply by creating the opportunity for people to share.
Coupled with the rise of the golden triangle of technology (mobile, social, and real-time), sharing results in the barriers between departments falling. Silos get broken down and the power distance between leaders/managers and front line employees becomes smaller. In this environment employees will engage more with the training/learning because they have access to just-in-time information when they need it that is personalised to their needs and will be more engaged with the workplace as a whole because they will be integrated into it quickly and supported on an ongoing basis.
In the end, culture is defined simply by the values, norms, and practices of how we get work done each and every day. Social media is about speaking with, not “at” people. The key challenge to making centralised decision making more open is not to involve more people in the actual decision but to open up information sharing in both directions, so that those in power have the right information on which to base their decisions and also have the commitment to share it back out to the organisation. The information economy is the economy, since information surrounds every product, real or virtual. Social business tools help liberate information. The intractable nature of some cultures means that in order for cultural transformations to happen and to happen quickly, the new norms and mindsets not only have to established and trained, but also reinforced over and over again.
