If you are involved in your company’s intranet and have not yet taken Net Strategy JMC’s Global Intranet Survey 2009, you should. Just head on over to http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/06/2009-global-lntranet-survey-goes-live-participate.html to sign up.
These days it seems like everyone is trying to save a dime and companies are obviously no different. The problem is in corporate America, employees tend to get a little sore if they loose all the little recognition perks they have been so used to getting.
At my company, we have been working hard this year on putting in a few little features into our intranet so employees and leaders can provide no-cost recognition to peers and subordinates.
P.R.O.P.S. or People Recognizing Other Peoples Success is a little tab on our employee yellow pages that allows employees to send a quick message of encouragement or congratulations. The message is posted to the employees profile page where the whole company can view the success (unless it is marked private).
Employees can send up to 10 of these little gems per month. We limited it so each time a kudos is sent, it really has some meaning behind it: “I can only send 10 of these out this month, I’d better make it count!”
The other little project completed this year was a branded eCards site. This simple site also allows employees to send a message to other employees (or out side of the company for that matter) a branded image and message.
Messages include Happy Birthday, Congratulations, Thank You, Job Well Done, and the like.
Unlike P.R.O.P.S., eCards are privately sent only to the intended recipient.
I hope you can see that it does not take too much effort to provide creative solutions to employee engagement and recognition. A few simple tools strategically added to your intranet can turn it from dull business site to socially engaging intranet!
I am currently working on an internal blogging package for my company. Besides the standard blog pieces, it contains some special communications features such as digest and on-demand emailing.
I have been fighting for allowing employee's to comment on items posted through the site. However, there is a great fear from our HR group. To help, I have made comments disabled by default and can be turned on by message, however right now, I am also working on a moderation option.
So why is HR, or executives for that matter, so afraid of employee's having the ability to comment on company news? What ideas do you have to help sell having open comments always turned enabled on our site?
I would love to hear from everyone!
Blogs are cool, social bookmarking sites are neat, but I really think wikis are the big news in the intranet 2.0 space.
At our company, we launched a wiki last fall (almost a year ago now...wow!) and it has mostly become the internal wikipedia. The wiki contains a lot of glossary terms pulled from all over the company from different business unit's websites. This has made it much simpler to find what the specialized terminology of our business means.
However I want more! I have been using the wiki for all my intranet documentation, support lists, application change logs, etc. But how do I get other people interested?
I see one problem with our setup, a slightly modified version of Screwturn Wiki, has no security. Sure it tracks who wrote what, but I would love to have a bit more partitioning, like the Workspaces concept in Socialtext's workspace concept, allowing separate work areas for projects teams, wikipedias, and onboarding, to name a few.
So what are your thoughts for wikis in the social intranet?
It is always the last thing you think of, or at least it is the last thing I think of: Creating a buzz around new intranet features.
Our current routine for a new "major" feature is to create a "spotlight" that includes an image and/or screenshot, header, text and link that lives on the intranet homepage for three or four days. We also create a blog post on our "intranet news" blog that gets a few reads ( < 1% of employees ). We try not to send out mass emails since people don't read those from our HR department now (that leads to another future post).
What are your ideas about building buzz around new intranet features?
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