There’s a blogger who has reported that a blog launched in his company for internal communication purposes is failing. “Too few posts, too few comments, people aren’t reading, there’s not enough content, too few employees use aggregators,” writes Fredrik Wacka on his CorporateBlogging site.
Wacka notes that comments aren’t necessarily a measure of success—“A blog can be an extremely powerful resource without ever being commented on. It all depends on what the purpose of the blog is”—and that the intranet makes it easy for employees to read an internal blog without using an aggregator.
I suspect, however, that there’s a deeper problem at work here. I’ve seen it in dozens of companies, not with blogs but other communication technologies running the gamut from e-mail to instant messaging. The launch of these technologies is left in the hands of IT. This isn’t a slam on IT, mind you. Most IT departments do a great job at what they’re supposed to do: get the technology working. It’s not—and shouldn’t be—IT’s job to establish policies for the use of technologies, to market the tool, or to drive a cultural change around how the tool should be used in a business context.
Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. “Here you go everybody. We’ve installed e-mail for you. Godspeed.” As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative. You wind up with some employees using e-mail for the same communications that lead others to reach for the phone. Some employees misuse the technology; how many companies have no guidelines for whether employees should “reply all,” cc everybody in the known universe, or quote all preceding messages in a reply e-mail?
Messaging is a problem of uncalculated proportion in most companies. I rarely talk to a knowledge worker who receives fewer than 100 e-mails each day, and that’s after the spam filter has done its job. Companies complain that employees engage in non-work-related conversations using company instant messaging tools. Employees send faxes to colleagues who are on the road and can’t receive them. Nobody has made an effort in these organizations to change the culture to support the appropriate, effective use of these new tools as they are introduced.
Every new communication technology is additive, not a replacement: IT didn’t remove your fax machine when they installed e-mail, did they? There are as many as 15 messaging tools at play in most organizations these days, ranging from interoffice mail to SMS text messaging. For some time now, I’ve been calling such an effort “Message Mission Control.” It belongs in the hands of Human Resources (for development of policy and alignment with reward and recognition processes) and Employee Communications (to reinforce desired behaviors).
When Bob Buckman launched message boards at his Memphis-based chemical company, Buckman Laboratories, he did it with a speech (printed and distributed to employees around the world) in which he articulated goals and expectations for the boards. Not to put too fine a point on it, he basically said that employees who didn’t share their knowledge with one another on the board in support of companies wouldn’t last long at the company. He followed up his words with action. The culture changed.
I suspect none of this happened at Tower, the company described in the blog. I don’t know it for a fact, but I’d be willing to bet the blog was opened with some remarks about a new tool for communication, and that was that. In the workplace, new communication technologies are an enabler only if employees know how they’re expected to use them. Imagine the productivity improvements that could be recorded if every organization established Message Mission Control.
