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011 Community Building, Innovation Employee Engagement

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Building networked communities has become much easier in the past few years, find out why and hear some best practices in this episode. Adam also discusses how to increase employee engagement and why it is so critical to technology innovation teams.

 

 Building2

Announcements:

    • I will be attending the SCORRE Conference in May in Orlando FL, Ken Davis and Michael Hyatt host this conference to help attendees with communication skills.  You should join us.
    • Ray Edwards Course on creating an information products check out Ray’s blog and podcast here.
    • My ESN market research e-book is ready, waiting on Ray’s course for a little guidance.
    • My500Words Challenge, writing 500 words with Jeff Goins, check out his blog at goinswriter.com

Feature Segment – Building Communities

There are many types of communities in our lives; there are personal communities, there are friendships, there are social media connections and now there are social enterprise communities forming at work.

 

These communities need to be managed, they need stewardship, it is recommended that there be an actual position called Community Steward for new social networks.

 

5 responsibilities of an ESN Community Steward

    1. Content Creation (yourself and/or others should create content for new members to consume day one)
    2. Market/ sell the community and its value to potential community members.
    3. Educate Users on Technology, how to actually use the software.
    4. Educate on expectations/ ground rules, how should the network be used, what is appropriate content for posting.
    5. Obsolete yourself, make the community grow and produce content spontaneously, just like FB and twitter does currently.

 

With some ambition we can also create our own communities such as:

  • Mastermind groups for business
  • Church or non-profits networks for members to connect and get things done together.
  • Topical study groups, bible studies, women’s/ men’s groups.

 

We can create these personal communities to help people, to run our business and to grow our influence. These communities can be created using (or enhanced by) software such as FB Groups, Kona, Wishlist, Basecamp, Tibbr, Socialcast, and many others.  Be ambitious create a new community.

 

Social Layer Segment – Engagement in Tech Innovation Employee Teams

 

Employee behavior engagement (not to be confused with ESN community engagement mentioned above) has a large impact on employee productivity and on long-term employee retention.  This cultureamp.com article cites the top five engagement drivers.

 

Below I list three ways to increase employee engagement:

 

  1. Gently force employees to move around the company, to cross train, to acquire new skills if they are stagnant/ complacent and not growing.  However, make sure to allow people time to mature, this can be a long-term process, disengagement does not equal poor performance.
  2. Create two visions, one vision for the company growth (most get this right) another for employee growth.  This vision should not be in the unwritten rules, the rumor mills, or meaningless rhetoric from HR, this vision should be leaders speaking from the platform at a variety of levels with the same vision.
  3. Tear down cliques, popularity clubs by rewarding good behavior and good productivity regardless of identity politics.

 

Innovation teams in particular benefit from full engagement, and not only engagement from an elite few.

  • In R&D innovation teams, layers should not exist; it is wise to avoid having a scientist layer, an engineer layer, a technician layer, a union worker layer that do not mix well together.
  • Making cultural changes such as this can best be done at the top levels of leadership.
  • There are many low-level employees that may have amazing ideas and insights but won’t share them because they believe that they will not be given credit, they believe this because they are discouraged and disengaged.

 

Are there any communities that you would like to build or join?
Would you be interested in joining an innovation mastermind group?
Are you engaged in your current position?

Please comment below or email me directly at adam@colliersengineering.com

 

Please rate this show in iTunes or share it with your tribe.
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010 Instilling Team Trust | Social Enterprise to Reduce Parallel Learning

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The social layer podcast: helping your business to accelerate, to grow healthy and to use social enterprise networking.

 

Trust1

Building trust in your organization is critical for a healthy culture, employee satisfaction, overall effectiveness and is necessary when setting up a social network. Adam discusses ways leaders can increase the level of trust in their organization.

 

Adam also discusses the concept of parallel learning, what is it, why it happens in a company, why it is bad and one way to reduce it.

 

Feature Segment: Growing Trust in your organization, growing trust in people for you

 

Miriam Webster defines trust as assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something

 

Two ways to build trust within your organization and team members trust in you, if it is not there currently

    1. Consistently display vulnerability, show your vulnerability, for example, dogs lay down under an alpha male exposing their neck in a display of vulnerability.  We can share ideas when we know they are likely to be stolen. A leader can be transparent and share her weaknesses, her confusions as a leader, this s being vulnerable and increases trust when done in moderation.
    2. Consistently do things for other people, help your people to do their jobs well, this sends a strong message that leadership wants teams to be successful.

 

Trust, like culture, begins and ends at the very top.
Andrea Bonime-Blanc

Social Layer Segment: Put a Stop to Parallel Learning

Parallel learning is a term that I coined while writing my non-fiction book, one chapter in this book is devoted to this concept, parallel learning it refers to the phenomenon when two individuals or teams working in the same company are learning and researching the same material yet do not collaborate and share notes.

 

Why is it bad?, it is unhealthy because the company is paying twice (or more) for the same knowledge, that is more salary expense than would be necessary if employees would simply collaborate.

 

Reasons Parallel Learning happens:

Innocent reason, the employees simply did not know the others were working on the same thing or had the knowledge and they innocently did not communicate

 

Intentional, the parallel learning occurs when leaders or employees are competing for credit or for accomplishments and want all the credit for themselves. This is one indication that your culture needs work.

 

  • A great idea…use social networking software (ESN) to help break down parallel learning, this will work especially well for the innocent parallel learning.
  • For the intentional parallel learning you may have bigger culture problems then ESN can fix in the short-term. To stop intentional parallel learning you must generate more trust in your organization; you are unhealthy and need an overhaul in your culture.  I would suggest hiring a organizational health coach or consultant.  Email adam@colliersengineering.com for more information.

 

Announcements:

FOCUS: I have decided to place my side business as short term my top priority (other than my day job) so these podcast episodes may not be consistent for the next few months. You can find the services that I offer here: collieradam.com/hire

 

Available Soon: I have finished my 1st e-book, which is intended to help IT leaders or managers to get started with social enterprise networking.  This ebook is essentially social enterprise software market research 101.  It introduces the reader to some great options for ESN software and it hopefully will save the reader some market research time and potentially even consulting fees. Still researching the price-point, it will either be free or $9.99 at the most.

 

Ice Skating: this NY winter has been brutal, Adam has been Ice Skating for exercise, at the end of this episode Adam shares the sounds of him ice skating.

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008 Why R&D Teams Should use Social Enterprise Networking

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Announcements:

As a reminder the content of this podcast and blog is intended to help companies and organizations implement internal social tools in order to operate more effectively.

 

My URL has changed for this site from sociallayerpodcast.com to www.socialayers.com (only one L).  This url seems more appropriate for this site which hosts both blog and podcast posts.

 

Check out my guest post on at the Innocentive blog here!

 

Feature Segment:

One reason that R&D teams should use social enterprise networking.  I have several reasons for this but went with only one for this episode in order to focus more sharing useful action items rather than just sharing lists.

 

Enterprise Social Networks can help to eliminate knowledge silos.  These networks do this by:

  • Creating a searchable database of employee expertise, allowing teams to identify experts and saving valuable company time on learning.
  • Providing news feeds of knowledge workers work to spread valuable knowledge, making the company more intelligent and an overall faster innovator.

 

Call to Action: Poll your R&D team see how they react to the prospect of having a social network at work.  Teach your teams that if knowledge sharing is important why not use the tool of software to help with this?

 

Social Layer Segment:

 

Whether we realize it or not we are learning things during our personal social media activities.  The art of maximizing the connectivity and the response of your tribe to your social media posts can be different for every network.   Apply these learning’s to your company network to maximize the response of your fellow employees to your posts and provide the maximize benefit the company.

 

Calls to action:

  • Get active on at least one social media network, LinkedIn might be most applicable to a current or future enterprise social network.
  • Compile a list of learning’s for each of your social media networks, focus on what types of posts at time for post get the most response from your connections?

 

If you like this podcast or if it has been useful to you please share the love at www.socialayers.com/love

 

What are some other ways that an R&D organization can use a social enterprise network?

 

Next episode we will discuss the mindset necessary to minimize the competitiveness between employees while maximizing the competitiveness of the company overall.

 

 

Happy New Year! I hope that your 2014 becomes your best year so far!

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