Many
employees won’t mingle with enterprise social software, it takes planning,
vision, training and effort
The promise of a successful ESN deployment is appealing to
businesses: implement a Facebook- and Twitter-like system for your workplace,
with employee profiles, activity streams, document sharing, groups, discussion
forums and microblogging, and watch employee collaboration bloom.
IT and business managers envision staffers using the ESN
suite for brainstorming ideas, answering each other’s questions, discovering
colleagues with valuable expertise, co-editing marketing materials, sharing
sales leads and collaborating on a new product design.
The siren song of ESN is hard to resist. Spending on this
type of software is expected to grow from $4.77 billion this year to $8.14
billion in 2019, according to MarketsandMarkets.Yet, many companies struggle to achieve the level of user
adoption and engagement for ESN suites that’s necessary for them to be
effective.”It’s still a challenge, and will be for a while,”
Koplowitz said. “It’s going to be a long journey.”
Carol Rozwell, a Gartner analyst, estimates that between 70
percent and 80 percent of companies she talks to about their ESN deployments
are struggling with it.The experts say that there has to be a business goal
behind the implementation of an ESN suite, and that this has to be made
explicitly clear to the end users, who must see how the software can help them
do their job better. It’s also important to provide proper training to show
employees how they can switch some — or many — email and IM interactions over
to the ESN software, and be more productive and efficient. It’s also key for
managers and top company executives to endorse the use of the ESN software and
lead by example through their own participation.
Experts also say it helps when the ESN software is
integrated at a technology level with the other tools employees use on a daily
basis to do their jobs, whether it’s their email and calendaring client, their
CRM and ERP suites or their office productivity applications.The participation
of managers, informal team leaders and top level executives is also crucial,
because average workers will take their cue from them.
“That demonstrates the fact that this is a real set of
tools for everyone,” she said. “The leaders have to model the behaviour
they want others to mirror.”And once people start dipping their toes in
the water, managers have to be there validating their efforts, by acknowledging
their participation with gratitude.
