The next frontier of employee communication

Blogs and wikis allow individual workers to collaborate worldwide

In 2002, IBM, the Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant, began an employee-to-employee communications experiment called “jamming.” This social computing phenomenon used web-based programs to lead IBM’s 340,000 global employees in a directed 72-hour online discussion.

In Values Jam, employees discussed what they thought were the company’s values and thousands of posts were distilled into three core company values.

“We found that very useful and important because the employee participation in the process, the employee involvement in actually shaping the values, which are quite detailed and specific, validates them and gives them an authority that may not otherwise be there,” said Ben Edwards, the director of IBM’s new media communications.

The next event, World Jam, took place in October 2004 to figure out how to put these values into action. Tens of thousands of ideas were distilled into 191 proposals, which employees rated. The executive committed to working on the top 35 recommendations.

Seeing how employees from across the company could come together to share ideas and create business initiatives inspired the new media technologies, such as blogs, wikis and podcasts, that IBM has since put in place.

“The jams predate new media, but they’re similar,” said Edwards. “They share many of the philosophies of new media which is to engage employees by involving them in content creation and involving them in the decision-making and policy-making process.”

All employees who have access to the IBM intranet also have access to three different tools that allow them to publish their ideas and projects for all employees to read.

The blog tool was launched in May 2005 and there are currently 3,500 active blogs, basically an online journal with reader comments.

The podcast tool was launched last October and there have been 750,000 downloads and more than 500 separate podcasts. Podcasts are mostly audio blogs, though more and more are using video as well.

Finally, IBM launched Wiki Central last December. There are 70,000 registered wiki users and 30,000 wikis, a collaborative website where all members of a group can edit the content.

Blogs and podcasts are a way for employees to share their interests, their work and connect with other employees in the company, but wikis offer the greatest opportunity for collaborative work, said Edwards.

“If you look at the traditional ways of working as a team, there’s a heavy reliance on conference calls and e-mails,” said Edwards. But for his new global media team with 22 members in 17 different countries, conference calls just won’t work. E-mail doesn’t work either because it’s harder to organize and there’s no way of knowing which e-mails were kept by which team members.

So Edwards is creating a password-protected wiki for his team so they can work together online. The wiki will have a shared calendar to co-ordinate major events, there will be a project management tool so every member can see the status of the project and members can load PowerPoint presentations and other documents to share with each other.

“We’re all working literally from the same page,” said Edwards.

IBM isn’t the only company using blogs or wikis for employee communications. According to New Frontiers in Employee Communications: 2006, a worldwide survey of 137 communications professionals by Edelman, a PR firm based in Chicago and New York, 33 per cent of companies use blogs for external or internal communications and one-third of those companies use blogs to communicate exclusively with employees.

“Because of its real-time interactive nature, blogs can be a really effective way to communicate, particularly if you’re in a business that has a lot of content to share,” said Nancy Flynn, author of Blog Rules, a guide to help businesses manage blog-related policies. “Unlike e-mail, it facilitates two-way communication. And, unlike instant messaging, it gives you more room to write.”

The popularity of blogs in the workplace is only going to grow, said Freda Colbourne, executive vice-president of financial and public affairs for Edelman in Toronto.

“It’s something that makes sense because more and more people are looking to their peers for information,” she said.

People are more likely to trust information that they get from someone they see as being similar to themselves, so a blog from a co-worker is going to carry more weight than a blog from someone higher up the corporate ladder, said Colbourne.

But with the increasing popularity of these technologies, there comes the need to develop policies that will protect companies from misuse. The very nature of blogs and wikis make their content nearly permanent because other users can link or subscribe to a blog, which propagates the content beyond the original site. Even if the company removes an offensive post or comment, it could still exist somewhere in what people call the blogosphere.

Employers need to make it clear what is and what isn’t allowed to be posted on an employee’s blog or wiki. Colbourne suggests companies take existing communication policies and apply them to blogs. If it’s something an employee isn’t allowed to e-mail or talk to friends about outside of work, then he shouldn’t blog about it.

Also, employers need to ensure employees are following all company policies, regardless of the technology or format, said Flynn.

“You want your employees to adhere to your organization’s blog policy, your ethics guidelines, your code of conduct, your sexual harassment and discrimination rules,” she said. “Any other rules your organization has in place, they apply when your employees are blogging.”

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