A few weeks ago, a colleague posted a TED Radio Hour from NPR on our Perficient Yammer network titled – “Why We Collaborate”. After listening to the broadcast, I thought this would be a perfect segway into a post I have been working on for a while now. I want to discuss some of the high points of the broadcast, while weaving in some personal observations about our own network at Perficient. My hope is that by providing some context around our experiences at Perficient implementing Enterprise Social networks, it might help grow your own Yammer network’s maturity and engagement.
The first part of the broadcast was an interview with Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. If you didn’t know, Wikipedia has over 80,000 people who update it, and they do it for free. They have 19 billion page views per month, in the top 5 of all internet websites. That’s a ton of traffic, viewing a ton of content, all administered for free by people all over the world.
Why would they do it? Why do they do it for free? Jimmy says –
Its fun!…and I made the world a little bit of a better place
This is a very powerful concept. To me, the idea of having 80,000 unpaid employees is a quite advanced. You start to think about their motivations and what about this endeavor is appealing to them. We’ll explore some of these thoughts later in the post.
One of Wikipedia’s earliest challenges was how to handle controversial subjects. They ended up with a policy of “Neutral point of view. Don’t take a stance, only report on what reputable parties say about it.”
In Yammer, we have similar challenges. What’s appropriate to post and what’s not? Conflict is a natural part of collaboration. How do we handle conflict on our Yammer network? Its important to handle these challenges up front and proactively.
When evaluating community engagement in Yammer, a network will go through 5 stages – passive, reactive, participative, collaborative, and proactive. We want our engagement to be proactive, like Wikipedia. We want people who want to collaborate.
At the highest levels of Yammer community engagement, you will notice the following traits in the network:
- Users develop relationships that enable them to effectively and innovatively complete projects.
- Users reinforce appropriate behavior in others through constructive criticism and mentoring.
- Innovative uses of the network to reach business objectives is encouraged.
- Users expand their own relationships and regularly engage with others to complete projects and tasks.
- Employees deliver business outcomes based on relationships.
These traits will help deliver the highest value for your network. Its important for a Yammer network to grow and mature with Community Managers who can help as Wales says, “channel mass chaos into order”.
We’ll talk about a number of the other bullets points later in the post.
The second part of the broadcast was a bit off topic. I encourage you to listen though, I learned a lot about Captcha and how the creator is using it to change the world by digitizing books.
What Motivates Us to Collaborate
In the third part of the broadcast, Clay Shirky talks about cognitive surplus and ideas similar to Jimmy Wales describing how populations can come together to solve large problems. As he explores those ideas, he gets deeper into the reasoning of why projects like Wikipedia have been successful without paying the people who manage them.
What the internet has essentially helped us rediscover is that there are all of these non-financial motivations that we all have, the desire to have a sense of autonomy or competence, I’m doing this by myself or I’m on my own, I’m good at making Lol Cats or I’m good at updating Wikipedia. I’m part of a group that knows I’m here, I’m feeling a sense of membership or I’m being generous to other people in my group, I got appreciation, I got thanks. You can build enormous, enormous things on that collection of intrinsic motivations once you get away from the idea of everybody is essentially optimizing for time and money and nothing else.
This is a very powerful thought. If we can get past the thought that everything we do in business should be driven by optimizing for time and money, then we can truly achieve enormous things. I think this relates directly to what we try to do with Yammer.
Often, business leaders will say – “What’s the value to social networking in the enterprise? I don’t want my employees on Facebook all day instead of working.”. I believe, and Shirky eloquently stated, if we can move past the idea that every action has to be driven by time and money, then we can be extremely successful. Is it beneficial to you employer to discuss fantasy football, golf, cooking, or any other personal related subject at work? Of course not. But, if we are able to organize socially as a team and discuss common interests; would we then be more productive? I argue yes. If I feel more connected to my colleagues, my collaboration with them will greatly improve and together we can achieve great things.
Shirky also addresses the idea that we collaborate because “my boss says I have to”. We should want to collaborate together, but acknowledge that those motivations are also selfish. We are “motivated by competence”. People who want to collaborate do it without payment because they get a non-financial benefit. They get noticed by their peers. There is self value in helping someone by answering a question or directing a colleague to a document they need. Shirky asks –
Why are these people doing things together?…Why do people go to bars when its cheaper to drink beers at home?
We all know the answer. We go to be around others and socialize and form groups. Extending that in the workplace is very valuable.
In Yammer, we can have a coexistence of social groups and work groups. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite examples, which comes from a large enterprise customer with 50,000+ employees. They created a group for mothers returning from maternity leave, to help ease them back into the workplace. Think about it, you’ve left your job for 3 months, 6 months, or 3 years. You return to the office, but things have changed. You need to get re-acclimated to your workplace. I can only imagine the conversations that went on in that group, but I can bet you none of them were work related. However, did that group add value to the organization? Absolutely!
Happy Yamming!
