The Importance of Organizational Culture to Intranet Success

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I talked with a friend of mine -- I'll call her V -- last week regarding her intranet woes.

Her company, a national retailer headquartered in Seattle with storefronts in 13 states, recently launched an intranet to replace their previous information sharing systems which relied heavily on shared file folders and public folders in their Outlook email system. The previous system was of little value to the company: employees found it difficult to find the information they needed -- neither the share, nor the email folders were effectively searchable. Often, employees would simply default to calling one another on the phone or sending group emails asking for the whereabouts of the content they needed.

The intranet was intended to create a central location for the storage and access of business-critical information and also features social computing tools to make it easier for employees to connect with each other, build networks of relevant resources and foster community in the company.

But adoption numbers are low.

In talking with V it became clear that the issues blocking adoption are hardly technical and are almost entirely cultural. Among the cultural challenges to overcome and some best practices that might help, I see these:

1. Resistance to learning new technologies -- the organization has developed operational habits around the shares and Outlook folders. As inefficient as those tools are, they nonetheless now exist as the devil these employees know. They'd rather limp along then take the leap into uncertainty associated with learning something new.

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: Training, training, more training. I've said before that the launch of your intranet is not the end of the project. It's the beginning of the training phase of the project. Ideally, training would be identified as a need from the outset of project planning, but even if it wasn't, if you launch and then see little or no uptake, you can salvage the situation by planning training sessions. Those sessions should grow out of listening first -- talk to the employees about what they're uncertain about and build the training to address those concerns. In addition to formal training, encourage employees to help each other through the new tool since the ones teaching will learn more if they're having to teach others and the "students" will be more likely to engage if they see their peers validating the new tools by using and evangelizing them.

2. Fear -- During our conversation, V told me how she had tried at one time to create a Facebook group for members of her organization. She wanted to foster community among the widely dispersed employees and also try to bridge the gap between the corporate management personnel and the retail personnel. The Facebook page was a failure. People didn't want to join because they believed that, if they joined and became connected with management, then management would just use the Facebook page to "check up on them." According to V, management was present on the Facebook group but never participated and some of the senior managers admitted that, "Well, yeah, we are there to check up on people."

Now enter the new intranet and its social networking tools. As I said, few employees are using it. Having heard the Facebook story and the employees' reason for avoiding it, I'm not surprised to hear they aren't actively participating in the internal social tools either. Clearly, there's a lack of trust in this organization.

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: Find a champion in senior management. When it comes to enterprise social computing tools, a present, but non-participatory upper management is probably worse than a completely absent senior management. A senior management that lurks, never participates, never shares, that isn't an active part of the community but stands ready to swing the hammer of reprimand over things they see and hear in the online social community has a chilling effect. They're Dick Cheney lurking behind the hedges. To turn this situation around, you need an active, enthusiastic member of the senior management team to jump in and participate, share, encourage others and just generally make the environment a positive one. They can make it safe. If employees see that senior management is participating, the implication will be that a) senior management won't think my participation is a frivolous use of my time, therefore b) nothing bad will befall me if I choose to enter and participate in this environment. Fear kills adoption. Making it safe encourages adoption. Someone in senior management has to prove it's safe by being there to welcome people as they come to peek inside.

3. A Culture of Hoarding -- Many employees at V's company are more inclined to hold information back rather than share it, thinking that by doing so they somehow protect their position in the company. This is not an unusual problem to encounter. Pete Fields touched on this phenomenon during a presentation at the 2008 Office 2.0 Conference in which he mentioned that we're entering an era in which the ethos of "whoever shares the most has the power" is replacing the old model of "whoever holds on to information retains power". We may be entering that era, that shift may be occuring, but it happens at different rates in different companies. And at V's company, the fact that cultural shift hasn't gained momentum is a serious block to successful adoption of the community-building and collaborative features of their new intranet. 

• Adoption Best Practice that Could Help: An incentive/attention program. The Prosci Change Management Method tells us that all change happens at the individual level and that it only happens when your strategy builds awareness, desire, knowledge, action and reinforcement (ADKAR). V's company, therefore, needs to create an environment in which those employees who are not changing their behavior develop a desire to make a change. They have to want to change or they won't change. To make people want to change, then, you have to show them what's in it for them if they do change. There are differing opinions about whether the best approach is to use a carrot or a stick to create the desire to change. I'm of the opinion that flogging employees for not participating may move the adoption needle slightly, but it will move the resentment needle significantly. Therefore, I advocate finding carrots -- positive incentive, not negative incentive -- to entice people to change.
• For example, you could develop a system that awards employees with a point each time they share on a wiki or comment on a blog. Expose the points to everyone so employees can compare their point totals against their peers and let employees cash their points in for rewards once they reach a certain threshold.
• The second element of this kind of program, though, needs to be attention. When employees participate by posting content on a blog, make sure someone comments on it (preferably someone senior); make sure new blog posts are highlighted for the rest of the community to see (visible content begets content); when someone reaches the point threshold and cashes in, praise them and highlight them, advertise the fact that someone just won something. And it doesn't hurt to make it clear to people that, even if participation in sharing behavior doesn't impact their employment security and advancement directly, human nature being what it is, it's just a fact that the people who do share will get noticed more and it's the people who make themselves noticeable that tend to get opportunities in most companies. So sharing information is a way to pull the spotlight in their direction a little bit.

It comes down to this really: the best way for V's company to improve their intranet adoption numbers is to travel back in time to before the new intranet was created, talk to their employees about what features would help them and what they'd be likely to use, design around the employee input and then plan a strategy for incentivizing and rewarding participation.

Since they can't do that, they at least need to understand that enterprise social computing projects like their intranet are really culture-change-management projects. If they proceed with that understanding (V, to her credit, gets it), and recognize the strong role of human psychology in the problems they're encountering, then they can still improve their adoption numbers significantly.

Enterprise social computing adoption is a major concern pre- and post-launch. I've listed only a few best practices that I've seen work. What would you add to this list? What advice would you give V's company to help them achieve the results they were hoping for?

(For an overview of a successful implementation of an enterprise-social-computing-enabled intranet, see Bill Ives's 6 part series "Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen". It'll do ya good.)