Business leaders and decision-makers are beginning to understand the inescapable truth that community is key to business improvement and driving customer loyalty.
It can be quite intimidating for not so web savvy business leaders (particularly for ‘old-school’ operators) to consider adopting social media within the business when the only exposure they have to these tools is through the knowledge that employees are loitering on Facebook and Twitter during work time.
How can we best manage that cultural barrier to convince the business to adopt social web technologies to create a culture of community in order to harvest and harness the creative potential of the crowd?
Like any new relationship, positive, sustainable change is achievable if time is taken to ease the shift in attitudes.
Grafting some complimentary social software componentry onto existing, everyday systems and/or processes is an approach I am adopting within Government. I am working on a project to enable a simple, browser based requisitionong system to track building maintenance requests and forecasting.
Pretty simple system really…click through request, a description and approval with some workflow tooling in the back end. What we intend to include is a voting and comments system and some predictive technology as we’ve used on our innovation management platforms whereby users can see the status of their requests, and everyone else’s and vote and or comment.
One good example of how this can work for the business is where there exists a persistent issue in say a fifteen-story building. We will receive ad-hoc requests, from different people through various channels that end up with different people. The impact of that issue on tenants is diluted as there is no consolidated picture.
By providing one entry and broadcast point where people can view and support the requests of others, systemic or chronic issues can be more quickly and easily identified and actioned.
For those who are still reluctant to move into this space, this approach represents a nice, bite-sizing of social software integration that can pave the way for future proposals while developing a greater sense of community within the business.
