It was a real privilege to join a panel of German community managers yesterday morning to discuss the differences between internal (employee) and external (customer, member) communities during the Community Manager Appreciation Day’s 24 hour Google Hangout. (Video embedded at the bottom this post. Click through if you’re reading this in your email inbox.) Rising early at 6am CST, I grabbed a big cup of joe and prepared to talk about my experience with internal employee communities.
Having managed multiple employee online communities, one of the biggest things I’ve learned about running them is that your co-workers will consider participating in your community to be just more work. And for many people, work isn’t fun, so it stands to reason that they’ll think your community isn’t fun either.
Many people I talk with seem to think if they can replicate the quote-unquote fun of Facebook by making their intranet more social, they’ll instantly get their colleagues more engaged at work. Here’s the thing though. Facebook itself isn’t fun. It’s the people we engage with that makes Facebook fun, so it’s not as easy as implementing a social intranet. As your company’s internal community manager, you’ll need to work hard to motivate your co-workers to participate. You can also find ways to compel your co-workers to engage, but you’ll be more effective motivating them.
Here are a few ways you can start motivating your co-workers:
- Show how your co-workers are getting their work done faster or better by using the community. Show screen shots, link to especially helpful people, get testimonials, etc.
- Find an executive sponsor who can work up the chain of command to get her fellow execs to support your community initiatives.
- Work with HR to get as many employee communications as possible sent through the internal community. In one community I managed, I sent the CEO’s monthly all-employee update through the community.
- If there are processes and procedures that employees must complete on a routine basis, see if you can find a way to have those processes moved into the community.
- Once you have enough data under your belt, run an analysis to determine if users who are engaged in the community are more likely to get promoted. If so, talk about it a lot — it’s a huge selling point for activating users.
Those are just a few ways you can ramp up engagement in your internal community. Any other ways you’ve seen to be effective?
Here’s a recording of the Google Hangout.
