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Chapter 6 Corporate Social Network to Drive Collaborative Culture as Key Enabler for Modern Work

This real-life example is based on an engagement at a pharmaceutical company.

The pharma company's communication and collaboration were limited to emails. Teams were working in silos, using various consumer tools such as WhatsApp to connect and to share information. Without a central platform for collaborating and sharing knowledge, employees had a difficult time finding the information they needed. They had to send documents and spreadsheets as attachments to work on them together.

Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), was used as knowledge storage, but it was poorly maintained and the information was usually out of date. A platform for video calls was used only for external purposes, as its limited usability and the lack of integration were not attractive to the employees.

Best-of-Breed vs. Best-of-Suite

In choosing solutions for improved communication and collaboration, the pharma company followed the best-of-breed approach. A best-of-breed approach means that the organization must invest time in each individual product's upgrade cycle for integration and testing. Some components even lack a proper integration, which makes workarounds (with scripts or additional integration tools) necessary. In a best-of-suite solution, this is typically not required, as the suite's components usually follow the same release cycle and are already well integrated.

If companies can cover this investment, best-of-breed is a very flexible approach that might cover niche use cases better. This was, however, not the case for this pharma company. Therefore, the pharma company's (chief information officer) CIO decided to migrate to the best-of-suite approach as part of their digital strategy.

Instead of implementing products from seven different vendors, they choose Microsoft, which has a broad and integrated portfolio. The Microsoft 365¹ (M365) suite fully meets their needs for communication and collaboration tools.

Corporate Social Network

In a brainstorming session with the C-level staff, the idea of a corporate social network came up. While the chief marketing officer (CMO) immediately liked the idea of “a LinkedIn only for our company,” other executives were more reserved. The main concern was that employees could get too confused about which channel to use for which information.

A workshop highlighted the main use cases of a corporate social network:

 Building community at scale across organizations

 Using communication and collaboration to share and leverage the knowledge that people within an organization possess

 Ensuring that leaders and employees get engaged at scale

The platform is a distinct way to connect larger communities of workers with long-tail information to share, rather than smaller focused groups, which are more likely to use chat for immediate communication. This allows conversations with longer half-lives that are not serviced through a chat mechanism alone. Whereas a chat within a team is almost not that useful 48 hours later, conversations on a corporate social network may be useful months or even years later.

Employees are gravitating toward a corporate social network for top-down scenarios, from leaders to employees to broad communities, whereas chat drives bottom-up adoption, connecting individuals and teams. Both approaches contribute to the company's collaborative culture.

Following the Collaboration Framework

The Collaboration Framework provides guidance based on urgency and target audience (see Figure 6.1). The products in this Collaboration Framework follow the pharma company's decision to adopt the best-of-suite approach with M365. The framework would also be applicable for the best-of-breed approach with products of various vendors.

The pharma company decided to follow and adopt the Collaboration Framework. This framework implies the following:

 Urgent communication is handled via chat (Teams).

 Non-urgent communication is done via email (Outlook), informing about events, news, etc.

 Individuals store information on a file-hosting service (OneDrive) or in notetaking software (OneNote); both allow sharing with others.

 Teams and departments are organized within a collaborative software platform (Teams); some also use a task management tool (Planner).Figure 6.1 Example of a collaboration framework based on Microsoft 365 products

 Persistent information is stored in a knowledge management platform (SharePoint) instead of the former intranet solution.

 Company-wide information and employee-driven initiatives are shared on a corporate social network (Yammer).

Driving Adoption

Hands-on workshops were executed to drive adoption. After the workshops, most employees understood the basics of what they could do with the platform. Once they start using it, their knowledge began to expand quickly. A regular newsletter sent via email encouraged the use of the other channels. This newsletter also featured best practices to further enhance the chat and meeting culture of the company.²

Later the company deployed a bot called Icebreaker³ to further boost social interaction. Icebreaker helped the teams to build cohesion by pairing two random team members each week to meet. The bot makes scheduling easy by automatically suggesting free times that work for both members.

One year later nearly every employee was using the chat and notetaking software, while 85 percent of the employees were regularly engaged on the corporate social network. The bot helped to strengthen personal connections and build a tightly knit community. This strategic shift increased the company's productivity by 18 percent.

Key Takeaways

 A best-of-suite approach requires less investment in integration and maintenance compared to the more flexible best-of-breed approach.

 A corporate social network connects larger communities of workers with long-tail information to share, while smaller, more focused groups are more likely to use chat for immediate communication.

 Hands-on workshops and regular newsletters can help to drive adoption of the Collaboration Framework.

Endnotes

1 1 Microsoft 365 (M365) is a superset of Office 365 with Windows 10 Enterprise licenses and security and device management products.

2 2 “5 Productivity Hacks to improve your Meeting Culture,” a generic example of how a newsletter can help to shape the meeting culture: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-productivity-hacks-improve-your-meeting-culture-alexander-loth/.

3 3 Icebreaker bot on GitHub: https://github.com/OfficeDev/microsoft-teams-apps-icebreaker/wiki.