Subscribe to newsletterUser-generated content for employee directories
I was invited to speak at the J.Boye inaugural meeting of the intranet manager community of practice in Geneva today. (photo view from the window of the meeting room)
I talked about social media inside the enterprise, sharing figures, trends and firsthand experiences from the Global Intranet Trends for 2009 report.
What I found the most interesting part of the day was how the participants described the social media-based features they would like to implement in their intranets in the future.
Many of their wish-list features centered around the concept of user-generated content for enterprise directories. This is a definitely a serious gap in most intranets today. Few organizations have optimized employee directories and made them a key piece in enterprise collaboration.
The majority of organizations offer very little in flexibility and user-generated content in the directory. The numbers below are percentages of the full survey population who responded “yes, in most or all parts of our enterprise” to the following statements:
- Employee directory has a free text field where the employee can add in personal notes such as their expertise or skills. (22 percent)
- Employees can set up individual profile pages or “My pages” where they can publish information about themselves, their projects and their interests. (13 percent)
- Expertise is managed by a set of controlled terms so that expertise is comparable. (9 percent)
- The employee directory also includes information generated through social media applications such as projects and/or communities (project spaces, wikis) and blog posts, produced by the person. (4 percent)
You see here a slide from a more detailed presentation on employee directories. The figures show that even Stage 3 intranets, theoretically the most mature, are not very advanced in this area.
Stage 2, leader
The chart compares the 3 Stages and you’ll see that Stage 2 is ahead of Stage 3 in this area. This is interesting, because Stage 3 is more adventurous than Stage 2 in many usages of social media. We’ll see in this year’s survey if this difference when it comes to employee directories is confirmed or not. (see definitions of 3 stages here).
Dream a little – then make it happen.
Some comments from the participants in the J.Boye CoP today regarding a social media angle to directories:
- “We want to add information to the directory, make it a way for staff to declare their interests, make it searchable by all staff, tagged, and possible the beginning of a community of interest around topics.”
- “We want to promote social networking so that it is easier for people to put together teams of experts. But we fear the reaction of ‘why look outside our own department where we have our own experts?’.”
- “If we implement Facebook-like pages, it will help the people in small units, scattered around the world to feel more a part of the group.”
- “We need a dynamic, collaborative directory to share contacts among people. However, I’m not sure people will share their contacts with other people.”
- “People are concerned about privacy. We want to build a well-designed, non-threatening application that makes it clear we are only sharing so-called public information, not private details.”
Critical mass will be slow to come.
One thing for sure, if you open up your directories or build applications like above, you’ll then be confronted with the challenge of getting employees to fill in information about themselves. Some employees will do it, of course. But the real business value will come when you get critical mass.
Lots of firsthand experiences and suggestions about overcoming this were offered by participants in the survey last year. I’ll share some of them later.
In the meantime, any experiences or thoughts to share?
4 Responses to “User-generated content for employee directories”
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February 25th, 2009 at 2:56 am
Gosh, how serendipitous, I’ve just written about the very same subject – Are You Being Google-Clever About Information Relevancy?
In summary:
Do you have the technical and business competence to do be Google-clever and forgo the obvious and flawed response of one-off “asking the people to supply”. Are you up for being Google-clever and giving your staff useful tools that also collect metrics? I know of no “enterprise” system that comes close to doing this – do you?
February 25th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Hi! I came across this newly launched application from Twiki, which overcomes many of the issues related to Enterprise collaboration raised in this article. To know more you can probably check out the following link http://twiki.net/twikiconnect.html.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Our first step was to allow employee’s to share some information about themselves, however we did it more structured by giving them 20 questions (10 about “my work” and 10 about “my life”). This was completely optional however we had a huge response from both people filling out the “bio” and employee’s who found it really useful in their daily interactions.
A few months later, we add two additional fields, one is a open “What’s your experience” more of like a mini resume and the other box is a skills tag or label list. The skill labels allow us to group employees together and make it easier for project managers to find the right members for their new teams.
The latest piece we implemented is around rewards & recognition. We added a tab to our people finder page that allows employees to write short (public or private) “kudos” to each other. They are allowed to send 10 per month to try to keep them real and not too frequent or frivolous.
Let me know if you have any questions on our implementation.
February 26th, 2009 at 9:28 am
If we can encourage users to populate themselves, it will encourage others and we can build critical mass. We are heading down this rout, but a few words of warning from our experiences;
- Beware staff councils and lawyers, be proactive in this area,
- Gradually rollout functionality rather than big bang,
- Social networking in the enterprise is about a 50/50 love hate split,
- Be prepared for comments like,
“Get facebook out of the enterprise, it’s for my kids”
“Why do I need to network, my colleagues sit in the same office”
Some people will never get it…