Motivation in Enterprise 2.0, or Old Songs about the Essentials

    What, besides the habit (and only among young employees), should make employees in companies begin to communicate with each other and effectively cooperate with each other, resorting to Enterprise 2.0 tools? How and on the basis of what will the size of the contribution of one or another employee be assessed in the common treasury of collective knowledge and in the results of joint work on a particular project?

    I am trying to find answers to these and other questions regarding motivational mechanisms, the weakest link in Enterprise 2.0, in this article. She is the third in my correspondence discussion with a very interesting author, constantly hiding under the eloquent pseudonym Drama 2.0.

    In my first article on this subject, I gave a translation of the main section of his materialpublished on the e-consultancy blog. in which the author answered his own question-statement “Why won't Enterprise 2.0 work?”

    In the second note, I tried to deal with those arguments of my "interlocutor" with which I do not quite agree. Now I’ll supplement the reasons he has named, why is it that Enterprise 2.0 still does not work as it would be desirable for all those who are actively promoting this area.



    Without incentives, Enterprise 2.0 will not work.

    Motivation and incentives are mentioned several times in an article in my correspondence vis-a-vis. That’s exactly what is mentioned, because I don’t know why, but beyond fixing the motivational problem as such, neither he, nor the work to which he refers, nor other sources known to me go. At the same time, effective mechanisms that encourage the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, from my point of view, are the weakest link in these technologies.

    True, in two places, my opponent goes a little further and gives arguments proving from his point of view that the lack of incentives for social network cooperation does not contribute to the effective implementation of Enterprise 2.0.

    The first argument is based on an example of how employees are reluctant to volunteer for working hours, and how difficult it is to get them to do it. The above analogy seemed unsuccessful to me. There is no objection to “forcing” someone to use something new - it is always bad. And at work, too. However, in the case considered, the employee does not see any obvious advantages for himself personally, why he should not forget to record the time spent by him on this or that operation each time.

    My experience in implementing various production management systems and design automation clearly indicates that when software tools facilitate work and, reducing the volume of routine operations, make it more creative, ultimately, employees quickly and willingly master such tools. After all, you do not have to force employees to use corporate email . And what, by and large, are blogs and forums worse for communicating and archiving ideas and considerations on current business processes. On the contrary, only better.

    But for self-timing of your own time, without additional special incentives, indeed, it is not possible to get by. As well as in order to interest the specialist to give his know-how to the common treasury of collective knowledge. Or in order to connect to the process of solving current production problems those who are not directly responsible for them. There are also necessary effective elements of encouragement.

    And here we come to the second argument of the author of the translated article, proving again from his point of view that most employees have no incentive to use social networking methods of collaboration. The point is that, they say, only 1% of members of any real or virtual community actively participate in its activities, which means (in the case of a social network resource) they provide its information content.

    I will not argue about the figure, although I am aware of several other similar estimates, ranging from 5 to 10%. In one of my notes (I don’t remember where already), I suggested estimating the share of more or less active content providers and / or processors based on the well-known “20:80” principle - 20% of resource users carry out 80% of all activities with its information.

    However, the issue is not in the figure itself, which in any case is quite small. And the thing, it seems to me, is that many of the tasks that Enterprise 2.0 sets itself do not depend on the proportion of active or semi-active users. For example , the accumulation of collective knowledge, the preservation of information in the event of the dismissal of a leading specialist, training and retraining of personnel, work with clients and external partners ...

    Old songs about the main

    Problem of lack of incentive incentives for employees to work with social network resources in companies and organizations I have already mentioned among the main obstacles to implementing Enterprise 2.0.

    Indeed, what, apart from habit (and, as we have already noted, only among young employees), should make employees in companies begin to communicate with each other and effectively cooperate with each other, resorting to Enterprise 2.0 tools?

    How and on the basis of what will the size of the contribution of one or another employee be assessed in the common treasury of collective knowledge and in the results of joint work on a particular project?

    Will this assessment have a material component or will everything be limited to a set of moral incentives?

    How to make sure that again, but now at the enterprises, the “crowd madness” inherent in many resources of mass Web 2.0 does not triumph, and the democratic ideals of social network structures do not turn into an unlimited anarchist revelry?

    Will it always be safe for ordinary employees to express their opinion on various working issues, while realizing that it may not coincide with the opinion of the direct manager or company administration?

    How, in general, to make Enterprise 2.0 eventually turn into a kind of union protecting the interests of employees, but without the bureaucratic excesses that are so characteristic of traditional unions?

    The list of these questions can be easily continued. And upon careful examination, it is not difficult to see that the answers to any of them rest on the solution of the following tasks:

    1. Providing users with convenient means of evaluating other users, the quality of their information, cooperative and other activities in a social network resource.

    2. Development of effective methods for the systematic processing of user ratings with the goal of ranking and filtering both the information circulating in the resource and those who are connected with this information in one way or another.

    3. Ensuring maximum transparency of the indicated ranking and filtering methods - “game rules” in the system should be obvious to all users.

    4. Creation of mechanisms for experimenting with the specified system methods in order to adapt them to the specific conditions of each enterprise, modify, expand and supplement by customers.

    5. Integration of the results of evaluations embedded in Enterprise 2.0 with incentive systems operating in companies and organizations (as part of a more general integration tasksocial network resources in traditional Enterprise Software systems operating there).

    Those who are familiar with my concept of an intelligent social Web will easily notice that this section is nothing more than “old songs about the main thing”. Indeed, in one form or another, all the issues raised here and the main directions of their solutions have already been considered in this concept. However, if for the mass public Internet, the criteria of intelligence were just good intentions, then for Enterprise 2.0, solving such issues can become the basis for creating mechanisms that strengthen, perhaps, the weakest link in the direction. Well, then, pulling this link, look, and you will pull out the whole direction!

    Habrahabr as a mirror of RuNet’s maturity

    Remembering my “songs about the main thing” that I “sing”, starting with “Open letter ”, I can’t“ sing ”another one of them. We are talking about respect for content carriers , those who, as already indicated, are very, very few.

    I’m perhaps one of the first, if not the first one, in Habré and in the Russian-language part of LJ, which almost two years ago started talking about SaaS (programs as a service) and Enterprise 2.0. Nothing but ridicule and cons, these conversations usually did not bring me. Like, we know all these "western" things - not for the unique Russian market all this.

    After the advent of cloud computing technology ( cloud computing), incorporating SaaS, a technology that is already being talked about at every corner, the situation here has begun to change dramatically. For my speeches on topics related to custom remote processing of information, I increasingly began to receive thanks. So Runet and the Russian-speaking market for this is already ripe!

    However, unfortunately, with Enterprise 2.0, the second seditious theme, the situation has not changed much. As soon as I mention the business application of social networking resources, the downsides continue to be an avalanche. The reaction to my previous note on this topic in Habré is unnecessary evidence of this.

    Well, it seemed that, besides “thank you,” can I say to the translator (the mentioned material is nothing more than a translation, moreover, by a rather interesting author)? And if you scold him, then only for the quality of the translation. So no, instead of discussing the publication in essence, among other similar questions, the question came up, why did I decide to highlight the annotation and a bunch of “black balls” (the note itself, the translator, and even the collective blog where the note was posted). I conclude: either the Runet has not yet matured, or in a state of minds on this problem in the Russian-speaking market, a turning point has not yet occurred. Well, let's help ... if possible, of course.

    By the way, about constant moralizing in the form and style of presentation of materials that many authors receive from habrachitateli. What comments you will not meet: why I highlighted this phrase, and why I put habracut in the wrong place, and why I refer to my works, and why such a long note or, conversely, a short one, etc. etc. Moreover, as a rule, such nit-picking comes from those who themselves rarely perform, and more often, never perform.

    I work quite intensively with English-language blogs. Not always and not in all the comments in them are also distinguished by intelligence. Even f-words , unfortunately, are sometimes found. However, what you almost never see there is moralizing - all the same, “writers” are respected!

    I do not want to repeat what I have already said in myReflections on a popular resource . ” I will only note, returning to the topic of this note, that one of the ways to stimulate the active part of Enterprise 2.0 users is to protect them from replicas such as “why say?” and “how did you say?”, and the direction of any conversation in the direction of “what did you say.” And here, perhaps, the opposed author is right, the problem is more “human” than “technical” .

    In my first note on our correspondence discussion with my counterpart, I promised to bring also the points of view of the pros and cons of other specialists dealing with problems of Enterprise 2.0. However, the lack of time and the abundance of such materials, on the one hand, together with the already mentioned weak interest of the public, on the other, forced me to postpone the fulfillment of this promise. At the same time, if the reader is really interested in this (which I still doubt very much), I will try to keep my word as soon as possible ...

    In the meantime, I remind you that the previous two notes on the question “Will Enterprise 2.0 work?” you can read on iTech Bridge:

    Broken Enterprise 2.0 - A Pessimist's Perspective (Translation of the Main Section of the Source Article)

    Everything is not so bad as it seems to some - the point of view of an optimist (afterword from a translator)

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