There is a famous saying that goes: 'culture eats strategy for breakfast.' As an organization, you can want employees to work and communicate more transparently, but if the culture is not there, it is a waste of time. The social intranet is a mirror of the organizational culture. Is that culture closed, are you not allowed to make mistakes and do you have to coordinate everything before you take an initiative? Then there will not be much spontaneous activity on the platform.
How then?
Make sure that, in addition to the implementation of a social intranet, there is time and space for a major change process. In that change process, a new way of working becomes leading (and not just the social intranet tool). Such a change process must be initiated both top-down and bottom-up. The top of the organization has the role of indicating the frameworks where they want to go with the organization. Within those frameworks, employees themselves have all the space to fill that in concretely. This process can also be organized with a social intranet. In one of our blogs we described how you can make everyone the owner of an organizational change.
The organization's board can accelerate change by making what comes from the rank and file a spearhead in the strategy. One of the things that gets in the way of good cooperation is the existing reward structure. Everyone is assessed once a year by their direct manager in a performance review. As long as you keep your manager brazil whatsapp number list happy, you are sure of your job. That does not always lead to good cooperation. Sometimes it even leads to outright competition between employees.
Microsoft does this differently. There, the evaluation of an employee also depends on what other employees think of you. They have to answer questions about how you collaborate throughout the organization. This is a direct incentive to actively seek collaborations. This is a very tangible form of reward. But rewards are often subtly woven into an organizational culture. Think of the pats on the back, the public recognition and the appreciation of colleagues. Mark Britz already showed in his blog with a single example how stubborn a culture can be in maintaining certain behavior. You can't solve that in a single adoption campaign.
Cause 3. There is no clear goal
Many social intranets are introduced in the organization to replace an old-fashioned intranet. Unfortunately, in many cases a clear organizational goal is missing. I have already mentioned a number of possible goals above. Such a goal is decisive. It ensures that the project team has focus. A risk is wanting to do everything at once: wanting all employees to participate and wanting to roll out all functionality. Ultimately, this ensures that nothing is done well. A clear goal also ensures that you look critically at existing tools. To what extent is it clear to employees which tool they should use and when? Are there duplicates in the digital platforms that are already offered? How does the social intranet integrate with existing business tools.