Month: December 2015

Chris Thorn, Head of Digital at the BHF, talks about being “Digital By Default”, where what we do as an organisation is digital first, rather than adding on digital later as an after-thought. A step along the journey to making Digital By Default a reality is using a framework to understand how “digital” our people are.

Digital Visitor and Resident (V & R) model

“The Digital Visitor and Resident (V & R) model provides a framework to depict how user preference and habit motivates engagement with technology and the web. V&R commonly is described as a continuum, with two modes of online engagement at either end, making a separation between different approaches to engagement. People operating in Visitor mode have a defined goal or task, and select an appropriate online tool to meet their needs as they arise. For example, using a smartphone to search the internet for directions to a local bookstore, thus finding a particular piece of information online and then going offline to complete the task. There will be little in terms of social visibility or trace when online in Visitor mode. People operating in Resident mode are online to connect to, or to be with, other people. For example, posting to the wall in Facebook, tweeting, blogging, or posting comments on blogs. The web supports the projection of their identity and facilities relationships. In other words, Residents live a percentage of their lives online. Unlike the visitor mode, there will be online visibility and presence when in resident mode. It is very common for individuals to engage online in a mixture of Visitor and Resident modes depending on what they are trying to achieve.” Thanks Wikipedia. 

V & R Process Mapping

V & R Process Mapping is a way of getting people to document which digital services and platforms they use, and where they place those on the spectrum. This would include Facebook, Twitter, Sharepoint, Evernote, Email, On Demand TV, video streaming (Youtube), etc. We could use this process across the organisation to understand how digital people are. The more people who complete the process the greater our understanding becomes, and so we develop a better picture of how digital our people are, and where the gaps are in having people who are digital enough to achieve Digital By Default across the organisation.     

— From the V & R framework we get the four stages (Emerging, Establishing, Embedding, and Experiencing).

I’ve been reading and thinking a bit about Stoicism and it’s central theme of control. Recognising that there are things we can control (our judgements, decisions, actions, etc.) and things we can’t control (the weather, other people, train timetables, etc.), Stoicism seems to suggest that our emotional turmoil and discontent come from confusing which things go in which category. So, we get stressed about trains running late when really we should accept that as something outside our control, and we feel like we feel a lack of control about our workload because we haven’t fully accepted responsibility for our decisions and actions. A clear, calm, rational state of mind comes from being able to better understand which things in our lives we should expect to have control over and which we shouldn’t.

I realise now what we did wrong. It has been a few months since we started using Yammer as an internal social network, and over that time the number of users has grown steadily while the use has declined, and I have an idea about why that might be. 

When we started with Yammer we created groups for each of the teams and departments across the organisation. But those teams didn’t have anything to post because they already work together and talk to each other. We set up Yammer to mirror how the organisation is set up. Yammer is supposed to be a collaboration tool, a means for individuals from different teams to work together on the same project but creating groups the way we did just reinforced the barriers between teams, it didn’t break them down. With the same virtual barriers in place as organisational ones, and no reason to post anything, Yammer wasn’t adopted and made as effective use of as it could have been. 

We should have set up groups for each project or campaign that was being worked on, and invited everyone that was involved to join the group. Then there would have been a reason to post about what you are working on, ask questions and start discussions because the group would contain people who were working on the same project but not in the same team. And this would improve cross-functional working and provide a broader understanding of the whole project as people with different roles in the project share their experience, provide information, and get answers. 

Yammer could have worked so much better for us, if only we had understood ourselves better before we started. But that’s not Yammer’s fault.

The Knowledge Manager sends an email about hitting a milestone in the number of users on Yammer. One of the Digital team replied, ‘Can’t we use Facebook for Business?’.  

Needless to say, the Digital team don’t like Yammer, but I wonder if Facebook would be any better, what we would use it for, and whether it’s a solution without a problem. We share links to interesting articles on Google Plus, but like most organisations our main form of communication is email. And email has it’s advantages; it works on lots of different devices, can attach files, can be sent to only those people you want to receive the message, you can respond immediately or at some future time, and emails are searchable. I’m not suggesting email is the perfect communication or collaboration tool, but then neither are social networks that are built around a central feed with the latest content at the top. This approach makes it difficult keep track of a relevant post without manual effort of using tags. 

Maybe it’s a technology issue, that we just don’t have the right platform to achieve a social way of working, but I think the deeper issue is that we just aren’t digital residents at work enough to move away from email as our main form of communication. Until the overwhelming majority of us engage in our work as digital residents there is no requirement for Yammer, Facebook, or any other internal social network.

I’ve been thinking about ways of bringing innovation to our everyday work, but not wanting to be innovative for the sake of being innovative I wanted to come up with some problems to solve. 

I think meetings could be improved by introducing some awareness of the different learning styles people have, and then structuring the meeting and delivery content in ways that give everyone the best chance to get the most out of the meeting. 

There are a number of models that could be used: kinesthetic, auditory & visual, Honey & Mumfords four learning styles, or Insights four personality colours. Each would require some assessment of all our people to understand how they fit in to the chosen model, and there would need to be a lot of education work to help people understand how to deliver meetings that meet the needs of different learners, but the benefits could be worth it.