Creating Change – Digital is Different in the Detail

Change management is about helping people to adopt new behaviors and ways of acting, and the basic tenets seem to hold up under a storm of different circumstances.  John Kotter defined the 8 steps to change management back in the 1990s in his now classic book, Leading Change.  Those strategic steps apply broadly to most change situations.

But how do you implement that change management strategy when you are trying to move your organization to become a social business?  What do you have to keep in mind?  What is critical that was only of interest before?  Do you need to execute differently?

As social media moves from a collection of diverse and separate initiatives to more formalized, broader engagement, and ultimately to being fully integrated and aligned with the strategy (see The 3 Stages to Becoming a Social Media Organization, http://goo/gl/fb/6flCv), distinct social media enablers become increasingly important.  Four factors in particular demand new execution practices:

v Social media is real-time and all-the-time

The immediacy of social media is exciting and vibrant and down-right scary.  The change management plan needs to take those considerations into account.  How?

§  Rapid risk mitigation and damage control plans

You cannot predict every possible negative situation that might arise.  But you can define and teach guidelines for managing those situations.  Ensure that a clear social media policy is in place and well understood.  Create scenarios and practice!  Practice should focus on guidelines, not scripts, so that employees can adhere to the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Greg Reeder of the U.S. Marines, “In the absence of guidance: do the right thing.”  (Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Reeder was talking about social media! See http://goo.gl/fb/isThH)

§  Engage legal and IT on the core change management team

Social media is fluid and does not allow time for legal review of all communications.  Have legal on the core team so that employees internalize their perspectives and so that the attorneys understand the range of possible issues.  Involve IT so that the technology can be tweaked for simplicity.  Technology supports; it does not lead.

§  Plan for 24/7

Not every social media implementation needs to be a 24/7 operation, but plan how you will handle comments or problems that might arise out-of-work hours.  Will you use volunteers to cover some additional hours?  Will you follow-the-sun for staffing?  Will your site(s) specify the hours you monitor and respond?  Do you need extra staff at either end of your day?  Who is “on call” for emergencies?

v It’s personal

Social media draws in the employee on a personal basis with a name and face, a personality and a professional reputation at stake.  It also humanizes the organization.  So “personal” has two aspects that must be balanced.

§  Build the team slowly and practice together to create a common culture.  As an organization, you want only one personality.

§  Let the employees with the strongest social media skills mentor others, and base mentoring relationships not on hierarchy but on social media savvy.  Mentoring helps both to grow culture and to reward skill and performance.

§  Allow employees to use their own voices.  They have a common corporate identity, but individuality should still shine through.  Let them share a bit of themselves on-line.

§  Encourage and enable employees to become internal ambassadors for the social media activities.  

v Social media smashes silos

Once your social media strategy expands beyond discrete, limited trials, the activities will have impact across functional and business units; they will seep into new projects unasked; they will rattle independent fiefdoms.  Actively embrace integration.

§  Involve brand managers in the change management core team, even if the only implementation is for customer service.  How the customer service is handled, the words used, the policies enacted, and the customer engagement created will all affect the brand. 

§  Seed other projects with employees engaged in social media.  Bring a social media perspective to non-social media specific projects.  This type of engagement will help to create broader organizational change more quickly.

v Social media is both the change and the process for the change

§  Use social media to communicate

Use forums, videocasts, podcasts, microblogs, blogs to share widely the successes and learnings of the social media initiatives.  And don’t limit the communication to statistics and status updates; demonstrate the value of social media by sharing stories and personal accounts.

§  Make social media indispensible

Embed the use of social media into the day-to-day processes and communication.  Solicit ideas and launch initiatives on internal discussion forums; make significant announcements on a blog; provide real-time announcements (closing early due to weather!) on an internal Twitter or Yammer site.  Make sure that all levels of management engage over the new tools. 

The foundation of change management is constant.  It’s about helping people to adopt new behaviors.  The strategies that underlie change management are well established, tested and proven.  But when an organization is evolving to a social culture, the tactical steps you use to make sure the changes stick need to change.  I would love to hear what has worked for you!

Clover Architecture – the 4 Leaves of Extraordinary Social Media

Making social media an important and seamless element of an organization is like growing clover.  You get a lot of good efforts and almost-there’s, a lot of 3-leaf clovers. But 1 out of 10,000 times, you get a 4-leaf clover.  That’s when social media transforms an ordinary organization into one that truly stands out.

The four leaves of a clover traditionally symbolize hope, faith, love and luck.  The four leaves of the internal social media clover?  They represent:

§       Leadership (hope)

§       Governance (faith)

§       Culture (love)

§       Technology (luck J)

Each of these leaves is necessary for an organization to benefit as much as possible from social media.  Drop any one leaf, and the impact becomes ordinary.

Three veins keep each leaf healthy:

Leadership – Executives must be

v   involved

v   passionate, and

v   bought-in with strong ROI.

Governance – Strong social media implementation requires that silos tumble.  

v   Governance must be cross-functional

v   Expertise must be integrated across and within units, and

v   HR policies must take social media into account.

Culture – Key cultural characteristics of break-out social media organizations include

v   openness

v   trust, and

v   collaboration.

Technology – The final leaf of every 4-leaf clover is smaller than the other three, and for social media the fourth leaf is technology.  Technology is an important enabler, but without the leadership, governance, and culture, great technology is wasted.  Many platforms can be implemented that enable engagement and dialogue.  Keep them

v   simple

v   inexpensive, and

v   designed for social interaction, not for file sharing!

I have discussed each of the 4 leaves of social media in previous posts and will continue to delve into these internal issues.  (See, for example, http://goo.gl/fb/wthL8, http://goo.gl/fb/PBENn, http://goo.gl/fb/zUijJ)

What has been most instrumental in turning your organization into a social media model inside and out?

Fear the Ostrich

“Social” and “public” are not synonymous, but a lot of companies shy away from social media because of a fear of losing control of private information.  Among my clients, I find the greatest fear among organizations whose work touches financial or health care considerations or who deal with security issues.  They worry about personal data being released inadvertently; they worry about social harm resulting from social media.

To a point, I agree.  In fact, I am glad that they have these concerns! 

But avoiding social media altogether, and ignoring internal management and usage, is a red flag.  Remember the ostrich?

Social media is a fact in financial services.  Socialware’s June 2010 Advisor Survey found that 60% of financial advisors use social networks for business purposes and an additional 11% plan to do so.  Unfortunately, 43% of advisors who use social media either do not have or do not know if their firm has a policy.  Add those ostriches to the firms that prohibit advisors from using social media (85% of advisors not using social media pointed to their firm’s prohibiting it as the reason), and the ostrich herd starts to grow.

In working with financial services firms, I have found that the fear is internal as well.  Executives fear that opening channels of communication among departments will prompt employees to share information inappropriately.  But implementing social platforms internally has proven to provide tremendous value, helping companies learn how to manage social networking interactions.  The learnings are broad:

Ø  How do you answer questions that seek information you don’t want to share without torpedoing the connection?

Ø  How do you recover from a mistake?

Ø  How much oversight is appropriate for a community?

Ø  How open should a community be?

Ø  Which organizational silos are unnecessarily duplicating work and data?

Ø  How do you train employees to use the social networks effectively and appropriately?  Written policies are necessary, but the poorest of teachers.

Internal networks start a cultural shift; they drive employee engagement and create new governance structures.  They develop confidence and skills.  They even drive greater efficiency and productivity.

In the Socialware study, almost 50% of respondents who used social networks said they had gained new referrals from them, and about 1/3 of these could identify new customers.

But company fear isn’t helping: 40% of the advisors believe that the firm’s social media policy is detrimental to their performing their jobs!

“The Fear is Very High”

Social media is a fear monger for most company directors, according to Nicky Wakefield, who runs the Human Capital Practice of Deloitte Australia.  (Nicky was speaking at The Future of Workplace Communications webcast, August 5, 2010).

In light of the rampant fear, it is surprising that a Manpower study in 2010 found that only 29% of American companies have a written social media policy. 

Fear levels rose last month when the NLRB made its first ruling on a claim involving critical posts by an employee on Facebook.  The NLRB ruled that the company “maintained and enforced an overly broad blogging and internet posting policy.”  The NLRB has also filed another claim against an employer whose policy prohibits “the use of electronic communication and/or social media in a manner that might target, offend, disparage, or harm customers, passengers or employees; or in a manner that might violate any other company policy.”

Many fearful directors are undoubtedly awaiting the outcome of this second claim, and those who work for the 29% of companies that maintain a social media policy will certainly be re-evaluating those policies.

But I don’t think that the message should be to have more tightly written policies.  Isn’t the message that social media is now an established means of communication?  It is no longer a distinct channel; it is just one of the many ways people interact – right there with the telephone, e-mail, texting – and, yes, talking directly to one another.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Do organizations really need social media policies?  I think that they need human resource policies that include social media.