In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a large corporation consisting of about 300,000 employees, only 20,000 (6%) were registered users of blogs. Moreover, of these 20,000, only 17% (3400 or about 1% of the total workforce) had blogs and only 3% (600 or .2% of the total workforce) actively wrote blogs (defined as posting 10 or more times).
One company that seems to be doing better on the blogging front is Sun Microsystems. When you visit blogs.sun.com and review the statistics available in the right hand panel towards the middle, you find that there are 4298 bloggers at Sun. This number is about 12.5% of Sun’s total workforce of about 34,000 people. Each blogger has made about 30 posts on the average.
In my last post, I focused on one of the most basic things that needs to happen to motivate people to contribute — help people understand how blogs can be useful. I also believe that more needs to happen to increase corporate blogging. I cover those points below.
- Create a culture that supports blogging. Organizational culture can have a strong impact on the adoption of blogs. Workers in cultures that are collaborative and value openness and stimulation are more likely to take up blogging. Changing culture is easier said than done. However, I believe that leaders of departments or teams should have an easier time changing the culture of their departments or teams. Such leaders often have significant impact on setting the expectations of their direct reports as well as on how they are rewarded. They also have more frequent opportunities to share their vision and ideals with those in their department or team and influence them.
- Make sure that rewards cover the blogging effort. We are all creatures of habit and we typically do what will help our end-of-year performance evaluation. If there are no rewards for the effort that one puts into blogging, then only few who are intrinsically motivated will blog. Part of the reason why managers may be averse to rewarding the blogging effort is that they are not sure of the contribution that anybody’s blogging effort has made. I believe it is a matter of time before we implement technology tools that will help us figure out the value of contributions of different bloggers. For instance, the Conversation Tracker at Blogpulse can help you see the breadth and depth of the impact of a particular blog post. Cataphora makes software that helps a company figure out whose communications or contributions have the greatest impact (see related BusinessWeek article).
- Tie blogging to strategic initiatives. Changing culture and reward systems cannot happen on a whim. It has to make sense from a strategic perspective. Which means that blogging needs to be tied to the strategic initiatives of your company or business unit. Only then will the ‘powers that be’ take the lead in changing the culture and reward systems.
- Give evidence of success. People can be swayed if there is strong evidence of benefits of blogging. Ideally, the evidence should indicate that blogging benefits the company’s strategic initiatives. Strong evidence requires measurement. For instance, one could track indicators of engagement among individuals touched by the blogs. 360-degree feedback of those who have taken up blogging may also be tracked. For a marketing team, customer satisfaction could be tracked. If blogging improves the scores on these measures, then use this evidence to persuade others to blog. In many cases, measurement may be seen as onerous. Work with the HR department to help you with measurement. Or contact academics to help you out. Many academics, including yours truly, may be willing to help you out for free if you let them use your site for research or let their students carry out a project at your site.
- Blogging should not add to the total effort. Ideally, blogging should not add to the total effort that your workers exert during the day. We all have limited time to finish our work. If blogging is seen as an addition to the already high level of work to be done, it is not likely to take off. To overcome this situation, see if there is communication occurring via email or other means that could be shifted to blogging. At one of the companies I advised, I suggested that status reports or activity plans that were normally sent via email be moved to individual blogs.
- Create a simple blogging policy. A major company (with 10,000+ employees) that allows its employees to blog has a 19-page policy that bloggers need to agree to before they can blog. On a typical day, one sees only one or two blog posts from the entire company! On the other hand, when you visit Recent Posts at Sun blogs, you normally see about 5-6 new blog posts every hour. Sun has a blogging policy (or set of guidelines) that is only about 2 pages long. More importantly, it is in a language that is simple to understand.
Blogging, like any IT initiative, has to be a part of a larger business initiative. It has to make sense strategically (see evidence of better returns when an IT initiative is aligned with a firm’s strategy; additional evidence). Moreover, it will most probably require changes in the social system of your organization or business unit to really take off. Making these changes requires leadership, including being a role model. Unfortunately, most of the time, organizational leaders don’t understand that for IT initiatives to succeed, it takes much more than simply acquiring the technology and turning on a switch. Their leadership is the critical ingredient that is missing most often.
I offer my thanks to Andrew Meyer for making a stimulating comment on my blog post. I welcome additional comments, including those that would help companies increase adoption of blogs.
Thanks to both Surinder for the initial insight and Andrew for the experience based comments. My organization, a hospital with over 1,500 associates, is considering the implementation of a hospital wide blog. I had apprehensions about the level of use and this post is therefore applicable and interesting to me. The organization that is mentioned (Sun Microsystems) as having some success with a corporate blog is technical in nature. The assumptions therefore is that the majority of Sun’s employees embrace and are comfortable with technology. But what about all of the other institutions that are not technology based and where the majority of employees have trouble with or little understanding of technology? My instinct is that the corporate culture of Sun Microsystems has much to do with the success of their blogging program.
Gennady, culture plays a critical role in whether or not people will be willing to share what’s on their minds via blogs. When you talk to people from different companies, you are able to see how willing they are to open up in front of others. There are some companies where people just clam up so much so that even their nonverbal communication is minimal. Then there are those where you find people talking to each other, smiling, sharing ideas, and walking together in the corridors.
Culture is one of the social aspects of an organization that is critical for the success of blogging or other collaboration technologies. You also need strategic alignment (i.e., blogging should be seen as advancing the organization’s strategy) as well as proper leadership and reward systems. I believe that understanding of technology can be taken care of via proper training and education. That is not the biggest problem typically. The biggest problem is in bringing about social changes so that blogging can prosper. Even in technology firms where employees have a good understanding of technology, blogging is unlikely to be successful if it is not seen as helping strategy and the culture, leadership, and reward systems aren’t simply conducive to collaboration.