Corporate social network open projects. Closed corporate social network of your company Connect with colleagues, work on documents, share your ideas, knowledge and success! DaOffic Company. Why you need a corporate social network

| 27.02.2014

According to various sources, on average each employee spends about 12 hours per month on personal communication in social networks. You can prohibit access to them from workplaces, limit the visiting time for some groups, or you can take the best that they have in their toolkit social media, and satisfy the need of workers for virtual communication.

Someone will say that we have a corporate portal and why do we need something else. Let's see what is a corporate portal? This is an internal site of the company, uniting a large number of information services and providing access to information related to production processes companies. In addition to the classic functions of providing reference data about employees and the structure of the company, the portal serves to integrate with special information systems and services, financial and accounting, project management, file resources, forums, etc. What will the integration of social network functions with a corporate portal give?

Terms and Definitions

For further understanding, let's add a few abbreviations and definitions:

KSS is a corporate social network, an analogue of the social network familiar to many with its functionality, but created to meet business needs. This is a professional social network that solves the problems of organizing and supporting the company's activities.

Working page in KSS- an analogue of a personal page on a social network in terms of functionality, its main purpose is to provide the employee with a convenient and unified tool for performing his job duties. This is a kind of single automated workplace on job function. In most cases, the work page is personal, but if necessary, it can be anonymized for some positions, for example, the work page “engineer on duty”. It has a substitution function, when, during the absence of an employee, the entire work page or some of its functions are transferred to other specialists or to other work pages.

Work page functionality- a set of rules for displaying subscriptions to news, participation in groups and other functions corresponding to the job description. So, the functionality of the working page of the technologist of the relay protection and automation service includes links to all software complexes used by the employee, notifications from these complexes, notifications from schedulers indicating the need to perform routine actions, subscription about incoming applications, oscillograms, requests from other structural divisions changes in regulations, etc.

Work Page Owner- an employee performing official duties corresponding to the functionality of this working page.

Profitable tandem

So, back to the benefits of integrating the CSS and the portal. Employees of the company will be able to have their own profile, which is functionally different from a profile on a social network and contains, in addition to personal information (photos, hobbies), additional professional information - position, location, phone number, competencies and main job responsibilities. This will help to establish informal communication between colleagues and will help strengthen the corporate spirit, will reduce the time spent on solving business issues, coordinating actions and searching for the necessary competencies.

Each employee, in accordance with their job responsibilities, has a set of customized views, notifications and filters and in a timely manner receives the necessary production information, orders and regulations, notifications about the occurrence of planned events, as well as additional information, for example about the birthdays of colleagues. Further, by integrating the functions of a social network with an electronic document management and management system, the process of issuing instructions and coordinating documents is simplified. By including the scheduling function in these systems, you can not be afraid that some order will be forgotten.

The corporate social network completely takes over the function of internal communication and replaces e-mail, expanding its functions. The creation of conferences, chat, commenting and notes in conjunction with the functions of office work, organizing assignments and scheduling activities make information about business processes more accessible, visual and transparent, and the processes themselves - controllable. What else can be done with the introduction of a social network? Accompanying almost all business processes of the company, developing the corporate spirit of the team, reducing weaknesses in the organization of activities in the absence or insufficient competence of employees, introducing new automated systems and business processes, the training of new employees, the formation of a motivation system, the elimination of emerging conflict situations within the organization, etc. Let's consider some issues in more detail.

Walking together

What are the benefits of implementing a corporate social network? In short, this is the creation of a company knowledge bank, a think tank with well-established semantic links between business processes. This is a convenient organization of the workplace, where everything is at hand, like a conductor, where a single information space has been created for each workplace and where various services are integrated into one information environment to perform job duties. This is also an opportunity to direct the needs of a person in virtual communication to solve the problems of the company. This is a convenient organization of the execution of instructions, control over assignments, tasks, the possibility of communication and feedback. This is also a user support service that is as close as possible to their problems or needs.

Subscription, bulletin board, notifications and a specialized news feed, like similar social networking services, will help in the daily activities of any employee. Thus, the materially responsible person and other employees associated with the supply of equipment will receive a notification on their "wall" that the contract has been concluded and the shipment of goods has begun. And the persons participating in the consideration of applications will receive notifications that another application has come for consideration.

Groups in a social network find their application and unite workers involved in a common cause. For example, in a situation with the automation of production tasks, it is clear that in an organization there are many business processes that are at different stages of automation. In these relationships, there is a project customer (technological divisions, financial and economic unit, etc.), which has its own needs, and there is a project executor (own developer or IT curator when performing automation by third parties). For each business process, a group is created in the appropriate category and with the appropriate tags, participants are included in this group, their roles and responsibilities are defined.

For external clients of the company, contractors, government and controlling entities, the situation is similar. For example, according to existing or planned contracts for the provision of services and the supply of goods, business correspondence and the coordination of documents are conducted. For the counterparty, access to specialized section KSS (or an email gateway is configured for a specific counterparty at his email address so that letters from him get to the working pages of interested parties in the KSS). State and other entities, regulatory authorities with which exchange of information, also get their access to corporate network resources.

Precise definition target audience to solve the whole variety of tasks, the company will allow to structure and streamline activities, to make sure that only the necessary information is at hand, and the necessary data can be found with simple and accessible actions.

A tool such as a forum or group chat will be useful during the active phase of the implementation of a project or, for example, when conducting a trial operation of a system, when resolving a situation under a contract technical support or in the provision of methodological and consulting assistance by a higher branch.

Notifications, news feed, message board on a work page on the web - a digest of business information about the subject area to which the page owner is subscribed. The KSS will tell you what needs to be done and how to solve the production problem, even if the employee is absent.

Frames on the network

What opportunities does the system provide in terms of personnel management? The work page of each employee contains information about their competencies and official duties, specified by keywords, tags or an arbitrary description. Organization of access of HR-staff to such information will allow suggesting possible changes in the staff in the event of a vacancy. Training of personnel, internships, training and exchange of experience in positions is carried out much faster. Personnel issues can be resolved remotely, using telecommunications.

Classical management talks a lot about horizontal and vertical links in the management structure, but the CAS will create a relationship structure based on processes, adding easy organization of work groups, diagonal links between departments and matrix structures management. The network will be able to take over any process, from working group implementation of complex complexes according to PJM standards and ending with the coordination of the work time of the commission for the inventory of tangible assets.

On the working page, you can bookmark thematic links for the same type of functional duties, in particular, links to the sites of regional and federal energy companies, sites of regulatory documentation for the design of buildings, sites of companies under contracts for technical support of computer equipment.

To the usual way of communication by e-mail will be added comments to messages, creation of instructions from messages, scheduling based on messages, linking and grouping messages by topic, setting tags and keywords. This will allow not only to easily organize the execution of the task, but also to bring together all the sources of information on any task or process, find it in the future and restore a complete picture of what is happening.

What does the president of the company, the chairman of the board, the general director, the deputy director of the company see? Production indicators, financial reports, reports on violations, execution of orders and group KPIs - in accordance with how the filters are configured and which aggregation is selected.

What's next? Perhaps an industry-specific corporate social network that unites energy entities, regulatory authorities and government agencies. Or a state social network, if the state reform in the field of information technology sees the expediency of creating its own corporate social network.

Implementation Issues

Despite the rapid growth in popularity of enterprise social networking solutions, large distributed companies are facing difficulties in implementing social networks. Why, although the number of installations abroad is growing exponentially, Russian companies are in no hurry to choose a solution for the corporate network? What difficulties do companies face? What are the ways to resolve such conflicts?

From the point of view of technology, the implementation of CAS affects almost all business processes of the company, and, as a result, this is a long-term project with a complex terms of reference and high cost. Many SaaS and KSS solution vendors understand this and offer free versions, some by limiting functionality, others by limiting the number of licenses. It remains for us to allocate a branch or business line to be used as a "pilot" project.

Raises doubts economic efficiency from the implementation of the network because it seems quite difficult to calculate the ROI. In this case, to analyze the effectiveness, it is necessary to include statistical tools and KPIs in the KSS, for example, to assess the cost of operations, the time to complete the process, the absence of rework, etc.

An obstacle to implementation may be the psychological rejection of CAS by top management, which is based on the unwillingness of the top management of companies to personally use this technology and be, as it were, on an equal footing with all employees. Some developers take this fact into account and specifically offer social tools for top management. For example, to collect round tables with the participation of managers, where each member of the social network can prepare his own question, and the leader can give an answer in conference mode to questions that require attention from his point of view. It is very similar to the Internet conferences that the President of Russia arranges in front of journalists.

Company executives tend to believe that only IT-oriented companies need advanced solutions, while ordinary employees believe that this is another information system that no one needs. But practice shows that many foreign companies, not related to information technology, I successfully use CCC in my daily work.

Also, a negative attitude towards social networks is formed from a certain stereotype about the uselessness of a social network for business. In practice, it turns out that employees always stay in touch and are involved in the process at any time, and insufficient awareness of employees increases the time for solving problems and leads to lost profits.

In ordinary social networks, there is practically no moderation, network members allow themselves to make any statements, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment. In fact, if a company has its own corporate culture, then there will be no violations of this culture in the corporate network, and if the employee’s correspondence begins to lose business character, there are always colleagues or immediate supervisor who will intervene and restore the normal course of the dialogue.

Services information security it will be said that the social network contains a huge amount of information available to everyone. But if you define a security policy for the CSS, then such a question is no more difficult to implement than the restriction to any other information resources. And coordination and control over access to information will remain in the hands of information security services.

Most of the existing CASs offer a variety of ways to motivate employees, assess their contribution to the process and generate compensation for work. Considering that the network can implement the functions of electronic document management, the question arises of the legal validity of actions in the network, such as, for example, fixing the facts of familiarization with business documentation and the legitimacy of applying methods for assessing motivation in the corporate network. This problem is technically solved by using EDS tools, and organizationally - by developing local regulations that establish the equivalence of virtual actions in the CSS with real actions.

Summing up, we can say that if social networks have effectively solved the problem of communication between people in most countries, then corporate social networks will be able to make corporate communication effective. Often, in order to achieve something, it is enough just to use opportunities. We know the possibilities of social networks - we need to take them into service and use them to achieve the goals of an organization, company or government.

The corporate portal should be, firstly, useful for work, and secondly, interesting for employees. Meanwhile, having deployed the necessary functionality to provide the “first”, many companies underestimate the need for the second component. With the introduction of social networking technologies for corporate needs, organizations have fundamentally new opportunities for development.

The development of modern technologies has led to a real revolution in the field of work with corporate information. As you know, Professor Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School, the author of the concept and concept of Enterprise 2.0, initially defined the concept as “the use of new platforms of social software within companies or between companies and their partners and customers.” McAfee noted that such tools create numerous, often new connections between employees and different workgroups of the company. These connections help spread corporate knowledge and expertise in a "cross-pollination" fashion that creates real business advantages for the wave.

Today, the trend of transition from the “community of readers” to the “community of writers” is clearly and clearly manifested not only on the Internet (in blogs, forums and networks), but also in the corporate environment. Therefore, the role of the portal as a point of attraction for social and business active employees. Those companies that, on the one hand, create a convenient platform for communication on the portal, and on the other hand, encourage employees to communicate on the portal professional themes, can get very interesting and useful results for themselves.

However, the structuring of information on the portal is often organized in the form of a multi-tiered "closet" with "boxes" - sections where certain documents are folded and where it is not so easy to find them. In this form, information is very difficult to exchange: it can be found, but it will not be possible to transfer it to colleagues, discuss it, change it.

“As soon as we start thinking about how to increase the corporate information utilization rate, we come to social networking technologies: users not only consume information, but can also comment on it and get feedback,” says Viktor Komar, Director of IBS’s Integration Solutions Department. - That's how we can make information work. For those companies that have been running the standard corporate portal functionality for a long time and successfully, it makes sense to take a closer look at the new opportunities for organizing employee interaction.”

Instant messaging and constant presence in the virtual information corporate environment is the most important tool for operational communications, confirms Sergey Ryzhikov, CEO of 1C-Bitrix. - Intra-corporate social network (personal blogs, live feed, microblogging) is a mirror of the company, where people and their relationships are reflected to the smallest detail, the structure of the company with all its efficiency and non-optimality.

Solutions for organizing corporate social networks are becoming more and more in demand due to purely practical management considerations. Companies are increasingly realizing that the most significant competencies of employees lie in the area of “tacit knowledge”. Implicit knowledge is in the minds of employees, in contrast to explicit knowledge - documented on paper, in the form of files or data in various information systems. Analysts estimate that the ratio of implicit to explicit knowledge in an organization is typically about 80 to 20.

"An organization that strives to successful development, it is necessary to encourage employees to put on the corporate portal or any other resource of the company at least some part of the knowledge that is only in their heads, - says Irina Maksimets, Head of the Software Department of SITRONICS Information Technology" in Russia. - Corporate social networks with support for internal informal technologies for working with information, - one of effective tools achieve this goal."

“Thanks to the activity of employees,” Victor Komar continues, “the so-called UGC (user-generated content) is created on the portal, which is the main element for both the corporate social network and the knowledge management system. It is clear that the platforms inside the portal will be mainly grouped according to their profession - similar to how communities of interest are created on the Internet: lawyers will communicate with lawyers, and technologists with technologists. So, for example, in one of large holdings a global program of accounting transformation is being implemented. And the accountants of several dozen enterprises of the holding, scattered throughout the country, really need a platform to discuss their problems, share experience, and generate solutions. Where can they do it? Naturally, on the portal - and best of all, on a site specially designated for this purpose inside it.

In particular, portal technologies make it possible to create a learning social network based on a corporate portal, where experts discuss important topics, give advice and train newcomers, create documents and offer ideas. In fact, employees create and form a community of like-minded people and professionals. Solving this problem allows them to create company value, “charge” newcomers and pull less active employees to participate in corporate team events. In addition, according to Irina Maksimets, the portal can become an indispensable tool for implementing the strategy of the entire corporation or its transition to a new branding program.

Proper use of the proposed technologies of the corporate portal helps companies maintain their uniqueness and not lose their value in the market.

The possibilities of corporate social networks are complemented by the fact that modern platforms now have tools for transparent integration of the desktop and user applications with the portal. For example, a person can publish a version of a document directly from Word, and it becomes available to other users. And progress in search technologies (tagging, keywords, typing, voice search), the ability to various sources, including taking into account the level of access that the portal provides to users, allow you to make any content easily accessible.

well forgotten old

Tools for creating internal social networks and joint work are included in almost all modern advanced technologies, software lines of large ECM vendors - such as, for example, IBM, Documentum or Microsoft. In addition, there are a large number of specialized solutions on the market, "sharpened" specifically for the corporate segment.

Konstantin Zhukov notes: “The concept of Enterprise 2.0 and its constituent Wikis, Blogs and mash-up applications continue to gain popularity. I would like to note that the new version of SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 widely supports all these modern trends.”

The organization and operation of internal corporate social networks is similar to open ones. In them, each user also fills out his profile, indicates competencies, interests, goals, blogs, establishes connections with colleagues. At the same time, groups of people who are interested in certain things can be formed freely, on the terms of self-organization. An important factor this is the visualization of all this economy and the rapid finding of the necessary information within the corporate network. Ideally than bigger company the more demand for these technologies.

However, it is necessary to understand that the perception by some people of the term "social network" as something super-new and the latest is incorrect, - reminds Dmitry Romanov, director of information management technologies development at IT Co. - In fact, a social network is a set of interactions/relationships between different people that has existed since the appearance of man as a biological species. And this topic has been actively studied by sociologists since the 20-30s of the last century. Therefore, we can say with absolute certainty that relationships within a social network exist always and everywhere, in any organization and are an integral part of any social structure. At present, it is only a question of using modern technologies to add another channel of people's communication to existing and new social networks, which allows all information of interactions to be made visible.

Sergey Ryzhikov advises deploying a corporate social network under the motto "His example is science for others": in order to popularize a new tool, it is very important that managers be among the first to post messages on their blogs.

It is advisable to define corporate regulations as soon as possible, which determines that the company's orders, current information that is of interest to employees (for example, about bonuses) are published only on the corporate portal. It is necessary to transfer documents there from the file server as soon as possible.

However, not all developers of portal solutions are supporters of the idea of creating their own corporate social networks in organizations. Global networks like Facebook already unite employees of one company, providing them with the necessary opportunities for communication and socialization.

“It would be more logical and efficient to carefully implement, encapsulate these networks in a corporate portal, naturally providing the necessary level of data confidentiality and security,” advises Artak Oganesyan, Deputy CEO EPAM Systems for business development and customer service. - Such "merging" will allow employees to communicate in the usual social network, will provide an opportunity to increase the creative and team spirit of their work - by organizing forums, stimulating discussions of ideas and tasks, supporting joint initiatives, and so on. In fact, it will be another tool for feedback (or, better to say, bidirectional) communication between the company represented by its managers at various levels and employees.”

Mobile, Cloud, Innovative

With the development of mobile devices (including tablets), remote access to corporate data will be more and more in demand. From this point of view, it is worth noting the active development of the mobile direction of portal technologies, their support for working with mobile devices of various formats and platforms, and the associated high expectations of customers regarding the availability of portal solutions through mobile devices. The portal is becoming a single window of access and a convenient tool for remote employees: many portal solutions already have an adapted interface for display on mobile devices.

“I think that portals should be developed towards increasing mobility,” says Artak Hovhannisyan. - Already, the availability of corporate mail, instant messaging and social networks on smartphones, netbooks and tablets allows employees to constantly be in the information space of the organization. By opening access through such mobile devices to the other functions of the portal (to corporate information systems, knowledge bases), the company will ensure continuous communication with its staff and their constant involvement in work processes. So theoretically (in terms of technology) the employee will have no obstacles in order to live all 24 hours a day at work, albeit “virtually”: the opportunity to “work hard” will be limited only by reasonable time frames that everyone can set for themselves myself".

There are developments of special applications and interfaces of portal services to work on the most popular mobile devices, in particular on the iPad.

Through such solutions, it is possible to display data from decision support systems in real time on a mobile device, corporate systems management and analytics, monitoring systems, - Viktor Komar comments. - The head of the company, regardless of where he is, with one touch receives on the screen of his mobile device operational data on sales, business analytics, customized KPIs, and all this is fast, in a beautiful and visual form. Here he can take the necessary managerial decision. Such solutions at the intersection of mobile platforms, portal technologies and corporate applications are more and more in demand, they allow you to always keep a "hand on the pulse" and manage the company very quickly in any situation.

Since in many companies the corporate portal already implements the possibility of remote access, employees working with it from home or during a business trip, the next step in its development may be the organization of interaction with external partners, counterparties, contractors. There are no technical obstacles and problems in order to create a special partner zone on the basis of the portal and provide access to up-to-date directories, price lists and other necessary information, to implement the services needed by partners there.

Dmitry Romanov advises to pay attention to Social Network Analysis technologies, which allow visualizing and analyzing internal social interactions in a company. With their help, you can find informal communities of people, identify formal and informal leaders, and see how interactions within and between communities work. Technologies also make it possible to analyze the nature of the use of different channels of communication. Their application makes it possible to really derive a lot of benefit from the existing picture.

“The fact is that before all these processes were invisible for a long time,” Dmitry Romanov explains. - People communicated with each other and sent paper documents at best; this interaction was lost, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to trace the big picture. Now almost all types of human communication leave traces. AND software products Social Network Analysis classes just allow this information to be observed, made visible, analyzed and used to improve work efficiency.

In the near future, we can expect the use of the portal's capabilities for visualizing data in a spatial dimension, building specialized geoinformation services on its basis, which may be relevant for transport and logistics companies.

Konstantin Zhukov predicts the development of portal technologies in the "clouds". For small and medium-sized companies, this will allow you to use all the benefits of portal solutions without deploying them at your enterprise and without worrying about support and maintenance of the solution.

Curiously, according to Sergey Ryzhikov, the video conferencing and IP telephony segment is developing: “We expect big changes and an increase in demand in this segment: these technologies allow the organization to do more in less time and increase the efficiency of individual employees and the company as a whole.”

Portal technologies are a "klondike" of new opportunities for the company. Every organization has a lot of interesting data and information. Before the development of portal technologies, there were no interfaces or platforms to find and make this data available. Finding and showing them is the main purpose of the portal. For example, if a company has a document management system, you can do a simple thing - display on the portal information about how many inconsistent documents “hang” on which employee or, for example, publish the performance indicators of departments (such kind of online “Honor Boards” are obtained).

“Such information will be of interest to many; there will be an element of competitiveness, maybe labor productivity will grow, - Viktor Komar believes. - There is a lot of such data in any company, just not everyone knows how to use it yet. And to do this, you just need to give people access to them, give them the opportunity to compare this data with others. Then users will go to the corporate portal, write to the corporate forum, participate in discussions, and ask questions to management. And management can hold online and offline meetings. A portal that provides two-way communication is a good tool to reduce the distance between management and employees. The management sees what problems employees care about, and they, in turn, get the opportunity to communicate directly with top management, bypassing many hierarchical steps.

Another trend in the field of portal services is related to the fact that companies are increasingly bringing certain functions of their specialized systems to the portal so that they are available to users in a convenient and understandable form. It is clear that all specialized systems have their own characteristics, their own interface, but employees whose work is not directly related to them have neither the time nor the desire to understand these systems. For them, a simple portal service offering tailored functionality is much more convenient.

The portal allows you to build even a complex business process in an understandable way and helps even an inexperienced user to go through it step by step, - Viktor Komar explains. - This is a very convenient tool for all employees and beneficial for the company, as the use of a self-service scheme saves resources. Moreover, the range of integrated applications and, accordingly, the tasks solved through the portal is very wide: from ordering passes and a projector up to working with SAP and analytical systems. In the latter case, the organization of access through the portal to corporate applications allows you to save on paying for seat licenses. And the more employees you need to give access to the data of a particular application, the greater the savings.

Each chef has their own signature recipes. And only he knows what seasoning, mood or melody that sounds during cooking is the secret of a great dish. The same is true in business - each leader has his own management methods, each company has its own "kitchen". Can a corporate social network become the main ingredient of a dish, or does it remain a pleasant, but not at all necessary, decoration? Like a rose on a cake, let's say...

Many companies block access to social networks in work time. Others, on the contrary, launch their own networks, encouraging communication between employees on professional and personal issues. Opinions about the need for implementation may also differ: someone sees only advantages in the fact that employees always stay in touch and are involved in the process at any time, someone, on the contrary, believes that social networks distract employees from their main duties. and you can do just fine without them. However, both of them recognize that social networks are a powerful trend in communication, not only in private life, but also in corporate life.

According to Andrey Dankevich, Marketing Director of DaOffice, a Russian corporate social network, this is a full-fledged business tool, but even before implementing it in a company, it is very important to clearly understand what the result should be in the end. For example, the task is to quickly adapt new employees. The corporate social network in this case perfectly complements traditional systems training (distance or full-time trainings, courses, seminars, etc.) precisely by the emergence of social ties. For example, mentoring is developing - more experienced employees help newcomers by answering their questions on social networks, an adaptation program is starting to work, and this concerns not only skills, knowledge of the product or the ability to serve the customer, but also adaptation within the team. A person immediately becomes a participant and a member of the team, while it is quite easy to understand how much he has joined the team and whether he is ready to interact with colleagues.

Innovation management

Corporate network is a good tool for socialization, however, according to experts, it is important that this does not become an end in itself. Elements of social networks can be integrated into other IT systems so that users are involved in existing business processes.

Let's take an innovation management system as an example. In many modern companies, the collection of ideas from employees is somehow present. In this case, the corporate social network can be used as a tool for the initial collection of ideas from employees and further transfer of data to the "big" system for managing ideas and innovations. The benefit of such integration is that each of the systems does its own thing. The easy-to-use KSS generates a large flow of ideas through greater employee engagement, and sophisticated expertise is done through a complete innovation management system. In addition, the corporate social network makes the process of submitting and voting for ideas open and transparent. Thus, the company becomes more innovative, involves employees in the processes of business change. This, on the one hand, gives a great advantage for the business, as it becomes possible to implement those changes that are useful and important for employees, and on the other hand, it is an additional motivation for them. "My idea is realized, I have contributed to the development of the company" - this is a very strong motivator.

This point of view is supported by Alexandra Popova, Leading Specialist of the Internal Communications Department of CJSC JSCB "Russlavbank" . In her opinion, the value of a corporate social network is that involving employees in solving important issues motivates everyone to reveal their own potential. "It can also be noted that employees have a sense of responsibility for the business, which allows them to look at the company through the eyes of the owner and learn to make important decisions based on the benefit to the organization," she concludes.

Communication problem

In general, there are quite a lot of systems with which KSS can be integrated. However, here it is very important to choose exactly those with which integration will be really in demand, turning KSS from just an environment for communications into an environment for increasing the efficiency of employees.

Letobook social network implemented in Leto Bank became such an environment for increasing the efficiency of employees. The social network here is the main and main carrier of all information that is generated within the bank, and is used, first of all, to optimize and improve work processes - everything internal processes, from issuing new uniforms to employees to calculating interest on a loan, are publicly discussed online. All ideas are accepted for consideration, those that are really worth putting into practice are implemented, the authors of the ideas receive gratitude from the first persons, and this is a powerful stimulating and motivational program.

"For us, letobook has become an excellent platform for communication in all directions, both horizontally between colleagues from different departments and regions, and vertically between employees and bank management. Thanks to this, we not only know what is happening in all corners of our network, but we can promptly signal our problems, respond to these signals, discuss possible scenarios for the development of a particular situation and make optimal decisions.We were able to avoid isolation of the head office and top management of the bank from the real aspirations and common communication problem of all big companies federal scale. In the social network, the entire internal life of the bank is visible at a glance, any event, any difficulty immediately becomes public knowledge, and this is a huge power and great opportunities for development and improvement,” says Alina Morozova, leader in internal communications and Internet projects JSC "Summer Bank"

87% of bank employees are registered in the letobook network. From 27 to 50% of them use the network daily.

Overall Efficiency

Sofya Semenova, Head of Internal Communications and Brand at Volvo Group, believes that the corporate social network is an excellent tool for managing and motivating staff, as well as for organizing joint work on projects, storing and exchanging information, and managing knowledge within the organization. "The corporate social network brings to the business environment all the advantages of social networks: the speed of information exchange, intuitive simplicity and accessibility, user-friendly interface, support for mobile devices, a flexible subscription tool, the ability to ask for advice, ease of creating new contacts, use of a knowledge base in general access and collective intelligence for solving problems," notes Sofya Semenova.

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This is wrong, because after all, these are quite different tools with different properties and different tasks.

Comments on news on the portal are NOT a social network!
Pages with user profiles on the portal are NOT a social network!
Even blogs and wikis are NOT a social network yet!

It doesn't get people involved! Attendance fluctuates between low and very low, and the number of posts and comments can be counted on the fingers. Familiar?

Blogs

Blogs are a good tool for expressing your thoughts in detail. But their biggest drawback is that not all users are ready to write long detailed notes.

It is believed that out of 100 readers, only 1 will write blog posts. And only 10 will comment. Thus, new posts will appear a couple of times a week. It's too rare for your employees to develop the habit of regularly checking in to read new blogs.

And if people do not have the habit of reading, then even the 1% of users who would like to write in such a blog will not write. After all, what's the point of writing something that almost no one will read? That is why corporate blogs rarely get real popularity.

Wiki

A wiki is a good useful tool for collaborating or for accumulating and organizing knowledge.

But in itself it is not engaging. Few people will go to the wiki every day and re-read articles to see if something new has appeared. Subscribing to changes also does not give the desired result, since most of the changes are minor and do not concern you personally (based on personal experience).

As a result, the wiki often becomes the lot of only a few enthusiasts who just really believe in its usefulness.

Forums

Forums can provide a fairly good degree of user engagement. But still less than social networks can give. We can say that forums are the progenitor of today's social networks.

In my opinion, the main problem of forums is their complex structure with sections, subsections and topics. To get to the content you need, every time you have to sweat a little :)

Social networks in this sense bring a good tool of subscriptions (or “adding friends”). This allows you to subscribe to the right people and the right topics once, and then read only ONE page of news, which contains only what you are really interested in.

Therefore, forums are, although a good tool, but more and more receding into the past.

Email

Although e-mail has positive aspects of application, you should not turn a blind eye to the many problems that arise when working with it, in particular problems with communications:

Information is hidden in mailboxes and access to it is impossible for people not participating in the conversation;
For each recipient of the letter, the information is duplicated. Like a virus;
Excessive email attachments eat up disk space;
It becomes difficult to communicate with each new person involved in the discussion.

But there is one more thing that has made email the biggest productivity drain for employees – forcing email communication on the recipient of the email. Yes, this applies to the recipient, not the sender. Developing a structure for storing letters and sorting out the chaos in folders with incoming messages - this is caused by the absence of its own communication structure in the mail. As a result, filtering letters becomes a difficult task - it is necessary to determine up-to-date information, find related letters and scatter them all into folders. These actions are done by each person participating in the discussion for each separate thread of letters. And if you add to this highly intellectual work "professional spam" - when the recipient does not have the opportunity to refuse some of the discussions to which he was added by the sender - the situation becomes unmanageable for many people and a lot of time is wasted.

An illustration of the difference between a "professional spam culture" and a "choice culture".

In a “culture of choice,” everyone has the ability to determine which conversations they want to actively participate in. Most likely, these will be discussions of value to the employee and topics of interest to him. This means that conversation topics are open by default and hosted on open platforms. In this case, the sender accepts the fact that the recipient is not obliged to spend his time familiarizing himself with all publications, but reads only those that are most interesting and valuable to him.

Even people who use e-mail out of habit can be lured into the new kind communications. They can still write e-mail messages, automatically leaving messages on the corporate social network instead of the mailing list in the e-mail. Thus, they will accurately deliver information to those who will be interested in it. Even if other team members choose to subscribe to the group/topic via email, the information will remain available online to anyone who will ever need it. Once the recipients read the information, they can safely delete the email and still be sure that they will find the contents of the email in the group/subject. In other words, there is no need to spend time organizing emails in folders in your email client to make it easier to search later. They simply go to a group on corporate social network to find the desired discussion, find it using a general search or in the list of topics. If they want to leave a comment on a discussion, why not do it in a group where everyone can see who commented on what, instead of creating multiple links emails by clicking on the "reply all" button.

How to benefit from a corporate social network

Unlike blogs and wikis, it is very easy to write to the social network, since it does not require the creation of large, detailed articles. And writing a post for a couple of sentences is easy, almost anyone can do it. Our statistics show that there are 30% of active writers in the corporate social network. That is, the involvement is an order of magnitude greater than that of blogs (1% of authors and 10% of commenters).

An enterprise social network solves the problem of engaging people better than any other of the Enterprise 2.0 tools. It really allows you to achieve that your employees will go there every day. Simply because there will always be something new and interesting.

And if your employees start going to your social network every day, then it will immediately become a way to increase traffic to all your other internal resources - corporate portal, blogs, wikis, project management systems, systems distance learning and others. To do this, it will be enough just to publish links to new events in these resources on the social network, and this can be done automatically.

In short, a corporate social network is designed to increase attendance and demand for all the communication and collaboration tools that you have in your company. And therefore it should not be confused with anything else!

A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute entitled "The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies" states that with the help of social technologies, companies can increase productivity by as much as 25%.

Based on research findings, scientists at the McKinsey Global Institute have identified four key areas where collaboration platforms are most effective in improving office productivity:

Email. About 28% of the time (11.2 hours per week) is spent on average answering and reading email. When using corporate social networks, time costs are reduced by as much as 30% (by about 4 hours per week), due to the ability to search through all messages created.
Search and collection of information. 19% (7.6 hours per week), on average, are spent searching for inside information held by certain employees in the company. Again, due to the ability to search absolutely all created content, this figure can be reduced by almost 35% (to ~4.9 hours per week), saving an average of 2.7 hours per employee.
Communication and collaboration. Use of phone, e-mail, personal meetings between employees takes about 5.6 hours working week(fourteen%). Using the internal social network, the employee can directly contact the right person, bypassing the mailbox and not cluttering it up, which will help your company save up to 35% of working time (2 hours) per employee.
Execution of specific tasks. Employees of the company spend the most time on tasks, approximately 39% or 15.6 hours per week. Internal social networks help increase productivity by about 15% (2.3 hours per week). On the one hand, corporate tools allow you to centralize all work processes in one place, and on the other hand, all your employees can use these functions to directly perform tasks.

Myths about social corporate tools

Many are hesitant to use social collaboration tools due to misconceptions or lack of a clear route to success. In addition, vague descriptions of the benefits of connecting and engaging employees do not convey the true value of knowledge sharing and social collaboration in solving critical business problems. Well, do not forget about security issues.

Below are five common myths that prevent you from getting advanced social collaboration tools within your company, and comments on them.

Myth 1- Social collaboration platforms are not reliable and secure.

Since most social collaboration tools reside within an organization's IT infrastructure, you can be sure that all your data is secure. environment– an ideal platform for professionals and teams working on sensitive projects or assignments.

Myth 2– Corporate social tools are more about bringing employees together, socializing and having fun, they can't be used to get things done.

Companies are turning to enterprise social platforms to achieve critical business goals, including rapid interaction, knowledge sharing, and smarter communications to avoid the headaches and limitations of email discussed above. Instead of sifting through multiple emails to find the most important and relevant information and then waiting for a response, employees have instant access to experts, departments and information to complete critical tasks!

Myth 3– Corporate social tools help employees use social media to communicate with their key audiences.

Traditional social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter primarily connect people on a personal, equal level beyond corporate firewalls. In contrast, corporate social tools are used to engage users within an organization to solve business problems, unleash expert knowledge to create innovation, make decisions, and improve outcomes. These collaboration tools are secure, streamlined, real-time, and synchronize team collaboration and communication, resulting in increased team productivity and profitability.

Myth 4– Corporate social tools do not solve real business problems / do not show the true ROI.

There is a great need for an informal work tool that bypasses the typical software barriers found in most organizations. Modern technologies(CRM, ERM, business process automation, and others) do their job by storing information and assisting standard business processes, but do not support the dynamic informal communications necessary for innovative thinking and collaborative decision making. Enterprise social collaboration tools have shown positive gains in business efficiency, productivity, and visibility by helping teams solve real problems and get things done. The main thing to do is to link these indicators to the business goals of the organization. Once aligned with business goals, the true benefits of enterprise social collaboration tools can be measured to get real ROI.

Myth 5– A social enterprise collaboration tool cannot be adapted to meet my needs. I have no choice but to invest in a completely trustworthy platform.

The company can always choose which social interaction tools will provide the opportunities and benefits that are most important to the organization. The Formicary Collaboration Group believes that these tools can be divided into three categories: employee engagement, employee awareness, and collective intelligence. Companies can start with the categories that meet the most pressing business needs and build from there. For example, it makes sense to choose tools that maximize your organization's talent base to shape personnel reserve or improve face-to-face interactions between teams to make decisions on critical issues. Regardless of the category or the needs of the company, the implementation should not happen overnight, but become a process.

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