Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and corporate culture awareness.

Can your company be unsuitable for Enterprise 2.0?  Check out this recent article and blog about corporate culture and the adoption of social business tools.  I say, the path to Enterprise 2.0 is paved on a supportive culture.  If you don’t have a supportive culture, it’s nearly impossible to find real success with any social tools (beyond small scale deployments — which may be very successful for your team, but not at the enterprise level.) What is a supportive culture?

Like other subjective items (humor, art, cuisine), it is very hard to define this in words — but to borrow Justice Stewart’s line “I know it when I see it“.  So let me share examples and counter examples.

A negative: A caustic corporate culture can severely debilitate collaboration initiatives.  I was working with a company when I learned that one of the senior sponsors has a tendency to yell.  People use all types of behaviors to express hostility. Some  yell and others are passive-aggressive.  Neither are particularly appropriate or helpful in the workplace, but they are a reality that you sometimes face.

One of the most interesting classes I took when I was getting analyst training at Forrester was in how to deal with hostile customer behaviors.  Analysts and consultants sometimes face the heat in ways that may surprise you.  We are paid to “call it as we see it”.  This can evoke a reaction.  As analysts, we were trained how to convey information in non-confrontational ways to diffuse the possibility of a heated reaction. We were also trained how to recognize certain known patterns of hostile behaviors (e.g. the quiet architect who waits till the end and smugly declares that you don’t know what your talking about, the young VP who wants to show you how smart he is and brings you in only to one-up everything you came to present, the client who cannot believe they “sent a woman and not a real analyst” to the client site — seriously, we heard it all.)  The training was good, but it reflected the reality that we needed to be prepared for this kind of stuff. Hostility exists in the workplace, not just against vendors or consultants, but against anyone who might threaten those who stand on weak ground.

From the perspective of the client, they can play that sport where they bring in a few vendors and beat them up at demos.  But it sends a message to their workplace.  If your workplace has senior executives who yell or act out hostilities – you are going to have a very difficult time with Enterprise 2.0.  Sorry.

A mixed case:  Sometimes you have a corporate culture that is supportive to Enterprise 2.0, but only in some forms.  Remember, Enterprise 2.0 is a category of many things.  It’s like furniture.  You can buy a chair, a couch, or a table, and you can buy a matching set — but you cannot buy a furniture.  Similarly with E2.0, you promote specific behaviors and practices, supported by specific tools.  And these tools differ.

For example, here are two cases where internal blogs did not work well, but internal discussion forums did.  In this McDonald’s video (forward to minute 14 to catch the Enterprise 2.0 part), I learned that the “strong team-orientation” at McDonald’s is such that individual blogs just did not take off.  I heard a similar finding presented right after this Enterprise 2.0 Summit presentation by Mark Masterson when he explained that the German employees at CSC liked to use forums and the US and British based folks liked blogs more (they rolled out an Enterprise 2.0 platform that provides both).  His take on this was that Germans were more egalitarian and team-focused whereas Anglos were more vocal and self-promotional (yes, forgive his blatant cultural stereotyping, he’s in a good position to assess these matters, as he has a foot in both cultures.)

I’m familiar with two other cases in my personal experience where wikis were highly successful in places that discussion forums were not.  Perhaps corporate culture had a factor in this too.

Positive examples: There’s an old case study (before we even called this stuff “2.0″) about the Eureka project at Xerox.  I’ll blog about this case in more details in the near future since I had a small part of the larger story when I worked there almost 20 years ago.  The quick take was that Xerox rolled out an employee community for its repair technicians. They had actually tried a few communities initiatives before, but those failed.  Eureka succeeded.  Why?

Previous communities were set up in a way that did not make the repair technicians feel like they belonged as equal citizens.  Management was trying to get something out of them, and made that message too blatant.  (The repair technicians were the source of tons of field information that was used to fix defective designs.  They also frequently ignored the service manuals because they knew how to fix the machines using better tricks.  Engineers wanted to know the dirt on their machines, but there was a bit of a cultural rift between the engineers and the repair folks.)  In earlier attempts, management ask technicians to submit a quota of repair tips, or they had joint quality circle teams between technicians and engineers.  Technicians just didn’t feel at ease in these settings.

The Eureka community, in contrast, was set up for the technicians to foster their communal kinship.  It  encourage technicians to brag to each other about their clever work-around solutions. This community was for them. Technicians bonded with and helped each other.  And incidentally, product engineering and management were able to data-mine the conversation for helpful insight.

Lesson:  If you roll it out, don’t expect “they will come”.  It’s not that simple.  You have to tune into the underlying culture to see if it can support Enterprise 2.0.  I believe some companies have a culture unwelcoming to Enterprise 2.0 — at least now.  I also believe that in time this will change as a new generation of leadership emerges in the post-recession economy.

Tagged as: adoption, behaviors, community, culture, Enterprise 2.0, success story, tip