In an ideal scenario the corporate management team at your organization will make the necessary technology and strategy investments around collaboration and the future of work across the enterprise. Read More…

I’ve been a huge fan of what the folks at The Motley Fool are doing around employee engagement. In fact a few months ago I wrote an article about how they are the only company I have come across that has a chief collaboration officer. The Motley Fool employees around 200 people and is a multi-media financial services company (basically they help individual investors with finance advice). According to Glass Door they are the highest rated media company in the world to work for. A few days ago their CEO Tom Gardner made a 14 minute video around how The Motley Fool improves employee engagement and it’s worth every minute of your time to watch it. You will notice that Tom references the Gallup engagement survey in the video which revealed some staggering statistics about today’s workforce.
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One of the most common challenges I see with organizations that deploy collaborative platforms and technologies is the employee adoption rate. In other words, many employees don’t use the tools or there is a spike in adoption which quickly falls a month or so after deployment. Occasionally I see some managers try to mandate the use of new tools but most of the time adoption grows organically. I don’t know of any companies that have 100% of their employees joyfully using their collaboration platform. Evolving the way we work takes time. There are many reasons for why employee adoption rates might not be where you want them to be. Here are a few of the most important things I’ve seen organizations do quite successfully to help improve employee adoption in the short and long-term.
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In January, Social Fresh surveyed more than 1,000 partners for its annual Community Manager Report. It’s the third year Social Fresh has compiled the report. Some of the findings proved to be interesting (community managers trend female–in a male-dominated industry), while others really weren’t all that surprising (only 1 in 5 community managers is on the agency side). Shelly Kramer shared her two cents on the report here (and also congratulated friend Jeff Esposito of Vistaprint who recently won Community Manager of the Year–congrats Jeff!)
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The role of the manager is evolving quite a bit thanks to the connected, social, and collaborative world we now live in. Corporations and schools around the world originally modeled their approaches based on the way the military did things. We needed everyone wearing the same uniform, showing up, taking orders, and doing the same thing, with a few people at the top giving the orders and making the decisions (the topic of education is one for another post). This is the elite small group of people that were “in the know.” This is how many companies today have been built (and many are still run this way) so it’s no wonder that overcoming corporate culture is such a challenge. The word “manager” is in itself outdated as it typically refers to someone with power who exerts control. If you look up some of the synonyms for “manager” you get words such as “slavedriver,” “boss,” “zookeeper,” “handler,” and others.
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I came upon a blog post this weekend that addressed its subject matter in a way that I found breath-taking both in its simplicity and in its clarity.
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Based on a research report Chess Media Group released last year on the State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration, the most common types of employee/user resistance to collaboration are: Read More…

Based on a research report Chess Media Group released last year on the State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration, the most common types of managers resistance to collaboration are: Read More…