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  • Ana Asuero 8:00 am on May 17, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: enterprise social network,   

    [INFOGRAPHIC] 7 types of internet users you encounter when using an Enterprise Social Network 

    Today it’s World Telecommunication and Informacion Society Day 2013, declared by the United Nations in 2006. Its aim is to raise awareness about the possibilities of new technologies for society.

    To celebrate it, we wanted to give you something special on the blog today. When you move about the internet and social networks, you’ll encounter many types of different users: from those that walk without glancing up from their cellphone screen to those who still send you text messages to meet.

    Tell us, which one do you identify with? Which do you think is the most common user in your personal and work environment? If you want, you can share it on Twitter with the tag #diadeinternet.

     

  • Carlos Gonzalez Jardon 9:00 am on May 8, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , enterprise social network, , , ,   

    Enterprise Social Networks and Project Management 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we would like to welcome a new author to our blog. The clarity of his first post has surprised us, and that has made us even more delighted about him joining our group of contributors. Carlos González Jardón (@cgjardon) is consultant and trainer in project management. With more than 18 years’ experience in the IT sector, his activities revolve around IT project management and quality standards such as CMMi. He holds a computer engineering degree from the Universidad de Vigo, an Executive Master’s from ICAI/ICADE and PMP certification from the Project Management Institute. He is currently consultant in Project Management at Tecnocom. Welcome and thanks!

    We live in a society where access to information is no longer the privilege of a few and has been democratized. Nowdays, in a single click, we can access a wide range of data from multiple sources: search engines, online newspapers, blogs, social networks… The technology revolution is causing a social and professional evolution, in how we relate to our environment. Information continues to be important, but how we access/acquire that information is gaining relevance.

    In this environment, an enterprise social network can become a vital tool that enables us to strengthen some key aspects in our work:

    • Speed. Quick decision-making.
    • Reliability. Quality of the data.
    • Collaboration: Share information.
    • Acccessibility: A single data source, multiple devices to access it.

    The subject is rather extensive, but we will look briefly at how an enterprise social network can help us in executing projects.

    Projects and Enterprise Social Networks

    In project management, communication is a critical factor. But what do we understand communication to be in a project?

    According to the PMBok® Guide (project management knowledge base), one of the leading references for any project leader, managing communication involves all processes required to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval and ultimate disposition of project information.

    In other words, the project manager needs to ensure that all project stakeholders have or have access to, at the right moment, the information required using suitable and efficient means. This is extremely relevant as poor management of communication and information in a project could cause the time that the project manager devotes to communicate, distribute, share and access the information to sky-rocket, and even bring the project to the brink of disaster.

    In order for the project manager to have the right information at each stage, they need to interact with their team, the customers, suppliers, and the ‘closer’ they are to the task being done, the better the information. Basically, the project manager needs to beSOCIAL with all those stakeholders in the project. It is not enough to have social skills based on ‘face-to-face’ interaction. We need to seek support from the tools that enable us to manage online or virtually multi-disciplinary and multi-site teams.

    In this scenario, an enterprise social network can play a differential role. If we share aspects of our daily lives, why shouldn’t members of a project team share, through an enterprise social network, their problems, doubts, concerns regarding the activities being performed in the project? This activity is already being done in the corridors, on the phone, but it is difficult to have a document support with the conclusions reached. Using collaborative tools can help to flourish and document information that would be lost otherwise. In those project-focused organizations, an enterprise social network can provide major value by sharing and accessing data easily and quickly.

    Benefits of Enterprise Social Networks in Project Management

    Although I’m sure there are many more, these are some of the benefits they can provide:

    Quick access to one of the best sources of knowledge: the team’s experience.

    The senior profiles are an excellent source of knowledge and that knowledge can be used to resolve different situations that we face daily in a project. Coaching, mentoring, tutoring, training or resolving of doubts can be done dynamically through an enterprise social network.

    Repository of project information and documents.

    Although this point has already been solved by many other tools, an enterprise social network can be the main point of access to shared resources. It means converting the current static or one-directional intranet (always focused from the company to the employee) into a social and collaborative environment ‘company-employee’ and ‘employee-employee’ (beyond a simple question-response network).

    Reduce “meetingitis”.

    In many organizations, there are too many inefficient meetings. Often we finish the day with the feeling that we haven’t done anything “productive”. Simple meetings to exchange information and update everyone can be replaced by short virtual meetings (e-meetings): for example, the status of our project, clarification of doubts, etc. These e-meetings will not replace face-to-face meetings, rather they will complement them and reduce them to the essential ones, as the cost, both economically speaking and cost-opportunity (what I don’t get done) is very high.

    Simplify management in multi-site environments.

    In environments where the team is located at different sites in the company or in the client (or even in teleworking situations), the social network will help us enormously with that task of “sharing”, reducing, or even eliminating problems resulting from not all being in the one place.

    Neglected management.

    On many occasions, we experience many short interruptions that break our usual work rate. Enterprise Social Networks mean that those short interruptions can be channelled through it to be answered at a later stage; or even they could be resolved by other members of the team collaboratively, leaving evidence of their resolution in the “social environment” itself.

    Our value lies not in what we know, rather how quickly we can “update” (learn what we don’t know, acquire knowledge) and how we share it with our co-workers.

    In this scenario, an enterprise social network can become a perfect work environment where different stakeholders in our project can interact according to their role, regardless of their physical location and time zone.

    The work environment is a clearly social activity in most cases, so why not use enterprise social networks? This way sharing knowledge among the project team can be more agile, although to achieve it, a cultural change is required in organizations.

     

     

  • Bill Cushard 9:00 am on May 2, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , enterprise social network, , , ,   

    On-boarding New Employees on Enterprise Social Networks 

    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

    On-boarding new employees is a major undertaking for many organizations. In fact, for most training departments, on-boarding is most of what it does. A lot of money is invested in on-boarding new employees, but there are staggering statistics that show that all of this time, energy, and effort is largely wasted.

    For example, according to the Wynhurst Group, 22% of staff turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment and the cost of losing an employee is at least three times the salary. This means that organizations are spending thousands of dollars per new employee to on-board them only to see many leave, costing the organization even more money to replace.

    These statistics alone should cause business leaders to question whether their current on-boarding efforts are effective enough to reduce these numbers. The good news is that new employees who went through a structured on-boarding program were 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years.

    So there is hope.

    Learning Job Skills is a Limited Goal of On-boarding

    The purpose of most on-boarding programs is to help new employees learn the skills they need to perform their jobs. Of course, this is important, but not enough attention is placed on other important goals of on-boarding, including socializing new employees into the culture of the organization. This limited goal of on-boarding is short-sighted because research has shown that effective on-boarding and new employee socialization can lead to positive outcomes in terms of job satisfaction, better performance, higher commitment to the organization, and reduction in intent to quit.

    Therefore, if organizations can just change how they on-board new employees by thinking about socializing new employees into the organization rather than just training them, organizations can improve performance through new employees who are more satisfied at work, perform better in their jobs, are more committed to the company, and have a lower intent to quit.

    So how do organizations socialize new hires instead of just training them? This is where enterprise social networks (ESNs) come into play.

    Where ESNs Come In

    In most cases, a new employee completes a new hire training class and then is shuffled to a desk surrounded by people in their department. Most of what a new person now learns about the company comes from their immediate surroundings, which is only a microcosm of what the company is all about.

    What if a new person ends up sitting in between the two most negative people in the company? What influence do you think they will have on the new person? Enterprise social networks open up the entire company to new employees, and empowers new people to interact with anyone in the organization no matter what department they are in or where in the world they are located.

    In the remainder of this post, I share four ideas for how to use enterprise social networks to more effectively on-board and socialize new employees into your organization.

    Four Ideas for Implementing Effective Socialization on ESNs

    1. New Employee Group: Create a group on the enterprise social network and assign all new hire employees to this group. Encourage new employees (perhaps defined as people hired within the past 0 to 12 months) to interact with each other, share stories of their on-boarding experience, and otherwise support each other.

    2. Assign New Employee Community Manager: Many companies have community managers to facilitate interactions between companies and their customers. The idea is to improve customer engagement. Why not assign a community manager to improve engagement specifically among newly hired employees?

    3. Encourage New Employees to Reach Out (with Direction): One of the most important benefits of enterprise social networks is that they allow employees to easily communicate with people beyond their immediate network. The new hire community manager should encourage new employees to reach out to people all over the organization, which could mean reading posts of others, finding people with expertise, asking questions of people they find interesting or commenting on the posts of others.

    This reach out should be structured in order to get new hires started. One example is a scavenger hunt. All new employees could be given instructions to seek people out using the enterprise social network. Some assignments could be to 1) find three people who share a hobby or interest with you by searching employee profiles; and 2) find three people in departments or with skills and expertise you want to acquire and send them a message asking them a question about how they got started. There are many ways this can be done.

    By providing structure to early activities, it reduces the anxiety of what to look for and also gives new people the confidence to continue to reach out and build their network on the enterprise social network as they progress with the company.

    4. Provide Links to Resources Related to Their Job: As a learning and development professional, I can tell you that the worst thing you can do is cram everything people need to know about their new job into the new hire training. It is too much. New hires get overwhelmed and forget much of what was taught anyway. Enterprise social networks allow you to strip out much of the content from the new hire training, and provide it to your new people over time, and in the moment of need. Use enterprise social networks to post resources when needed and also allow users to share these resources with each other.

    A Natural Opportunity to Improve Performance

    Enterprise social networks provide a natural opportunity for vastly improving how newly hired employees are socialized into organizations. By leveraging the power of enterprise social networks, your new people can be more satisfied at work, will perform better, and will stay longer. How could you not want that? If you are not using an Enterprise Social Network yet, it’s time for you to try Zyncro for free.

    The ideas above are just the beginning of what can be accomplished on enterprise social networks. How are you using enterprise social networks to on-board and socialize new employees into your organization? Share your stories in the comments below.

    Bill Cushard (@billcush), a new author to our Zyncro Blog. Bill is writer, blogger and learning experience (LX) designer and facilitator. He has extensive, in-the-trenches experience in creating learning programs that incorporate semi face-to-face and social learning methods. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

     

     

  • Ana Asuero 9:00 am on April 29, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , enterprise social network, ,   

    The future for companies is to become social, mobile, and cloud: the keys from Zyncro 

    Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

    Editor’s note: Today we bring you this post that we wrote in Spanish for Eurocloud, the Spanish Association of SaaS and Cloud Computing Providers. We though it would be interesting to look at how the future for companies will be social, mobile and in the cloud.

    Companies are experiencing a transformation process marked by technology platforms and defined by the convergence in everything social, mobile, and cloud-based. The buzz word SoMoClo is a concept that provides companies with a new opportunity to transform their business processes using technology solutions.

    The SoMoClo trend is another symptom of how technology consumerism has evolved. We use applications that are designed for synchronizing with the cloud, sharing content on social networks, and of course, to work from mobile devices.

    This also adapts to the business world. Many of you have been using your personal devices at work for some time; you access social networks to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in your sector to see what your competitors are doing, you use online storage to save and access your corporate documents from home without having to use a virtual private network. And all this in a scenario where the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend is growing, mobile devices improve each day and the cloud is becoming something easier to adopt.

    There are experts who consider that soon employees won’t just ask for better smartphones. They’ll go beyond that and will ask to have contents available through their cells and easy access it through the tools they normally use. Employees will want simply to be able to use their favorite tools that they use in their private lives in the work environment.

    With the explosion of Big Data (according to IBM, we generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes per day), organizations need to convert that consumer trend into a strategy for transforming their business processes. SoMoClo is here to stay. The world is already social, mobile, and cloud-based; companies shouldn’t wait to do it too, seeing the cloud as the means of delivery, the social side as the shared service, and the mobile side as an omnipresent access. The leaders of organizations will need to rethink their processes because SoMoClo needs to be integrated in the company and will represent the next chapter in the Internet transformation, expanding collaboration to new levels of productivity.

    The figures already point to a positive change. According to data from the IDC, 2012 represented a turning point in the implementation of the cloud model in Spanish business, duplicating its penetration rate on the previous year, reaching 29%.

    The benefits of working in the cloud for businesses

    The benefits of working the cloud for businesses are easy to identify. Among others, it helps to reduce costs and increases service levels and productivity. In fact, it is estimated that the budgets for cloud computing will grow by 25% by 2015. Cloud technology is cheaper, more usable, more accessible, faster and easier to implement. What’s more, it makes applications more mobile and collaborative.

    Zyncro helps organizations to reap the benefits from working in the cloud

    At Zyncro we understand the business benefits of the cloud and we help organizations that are transforming their business model to make it more social, mobile and in the cloud thanks to our platform.

    For that reason, we integrate with a wide number of serivces in that line, on our continuous search to become the first social software platform capable of offering integrated access to organizations’ entire documental contents.

    Zyncro started its journey to centralize and socialize corporate documentation with its integration with the renown SharePoint from Microsoft (November 2011), becoming the social, collaborative, mobile, and user-friendly layer of major enterprise systems. This integration trend continued with Zyncro’s association with the Google Apps suite, more specifically with Google Calendar, Gmail (July 2012) and notably Google Drive (September 2012), and the technology unification process Zyncro has sought from its outset was reinforced with its integration with other social networks, cloud-based productivity apps, ERPs, or even business intelligence systems. A few weeks ago we announced our integration with Dropbox, the leading cloud file management system, and shortly we will launch our integration with box.

    Our goal is to continue helping organizations to reap their maximum potential by using social technology applied to the business world. With this vision, we continue our strategy to add sources that host business knowledge in a continuous search to improve the functionality and capacity of our platform, and become one of the Enterprise Social Networks with the greatest capacity to adapt to the most popular services on the social web and enterprise software.

    Ana Asuero (@aasuero) works as Social Media Manager at Zyncro. She is an expert in corporate digital communication, social media and social media marketing. She has previously worked on institutional communication, media planning, advertising campaign strategy and market analysis projects.


     

  • Jorge Ávila 9:00 am on April 22, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: enterprise social network, , , social communication,   

    Social Communication: The new communication standard in businesses 

    Editor’s note: Today we would like to welcome a new Zyncro Blog author, Jorge Ávila is founder and CEO of @tresensocial, a company dedicated to promoting the professional use of social media in organizations. He is a trainer and keynote speaker in social networks and technology. An Activist’s soul, with a Businessman’s mind and a good Samaritan’s heart. We are especially delighted to have him as part of our usual bloggers, welcome Jorge :)

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    Social CommunicationDuring the era of email, some of us were blessed with the present that technology gave communication. We used it both in our professional and personal lives. But nowadays, that is not enough.

    In recent years, Social Communication (based on the social media model) has opened the way to such a point that today we know it will be the new communication standard both within and outside any company.

    Social Communication brings many benefits that our businesses are thankful for immediately, like for example:

    • Capturing not just information on your business, but also the conversations your team have around it. In other words, not just the documents that define our operations, but the why and how we have reached that point
    • Eliminating emails where your participation is not required, but at the same time, keeping this information available to you, as in Social Communication you only receive notifications when you are mentioned specifically or when something you have marked as interesting “is triggered”
    • Capitalizing on the talent available throughout your organization, as everyone can contribute (in visible conversations), no matter what their area or position within the company is
    • Integrating contributors in the exact point of the conversation, with all its context available, giving a more efficient communication than dozens of old emails can achieve
    • Having a direct communication, and hence improve our working environment; communicating is complex, and even more so if we have intermediaries that may cause (involuntarily) misunderstandings. Thanks to social communication, nowadays it is easier to have a direct dialog with our entire organization that will help us to transmit our message correctly. We all love being able to start a conversation with our leader

    Companies around the world already use this communication model, and even are inviting their providers and customers to their collaboration platforms, thus creating a collaborative ecosystem throughout the value chain.

    Of course, implementing them is not a platform issue. In a subsequent post I will look at the processes required for correctly adopting Social Communication in organizations. Meanwhile, let me share a “curious” fact: social networks like Facebook and Twitter have been “training” our employees in using Social Communication for years; so it wasn’t a bad idea to open social networks to employees after all, right?

     

     

  • Billie Lou Sastre 9:00 am on April 12, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , enterprise social network, ,   

    3 ways an Enterprise Social Network can change your company 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    Possible

    Most companies face the challenge of implementing an Enterprise Social Network from a technology perspective and can fall into the error of understanding that when they incorporate this new work system they are creating new social relationships, and that this will bring the great value to be business. We must think about the approach to follow when rolling out Enterprise Social Network projects, as this should be based on the four pillars that will really help to create value for your business:

    1. Encourage people to share.
    2. Capture knowledge in your organization
    3. Allow members to take actions, make decisions
    4. Give greater importance to the employees

    Having an Enterprise Social Network means that operations and processes within your company also start to change. This happens when the day-to-day processes change because your Enterprise Social Network allows your organization to establish new relationships, new behaviors in employees and key groups in your company.

    Here we have 3 ways in which an Enterprise Social Network like Zyncro can change the way you work in your company:

    1. Resolve problems faster and more efficiently. In your Enterprise Social Network, knowledge in your organization is captured, and it also enables you to find that knowledge easily, as we already told you in a previous post on how to perform searches in Zyncro. Over time and proper implementation, employees discover that they can resolve their queries and doubts in the Enterprise Social Network itself, breaking down language and geographical barriers.

    2. Involve external people in your organization. How many times have you heard that a project you are working on or leading is being held back because you don’t have fast, up-to-date feedback from your suppliers or customers? This problem can be solved by creating specific work groups for each project and inviting your suppliers, customers, stakeholders, providing access to up-to-date documentation and real-time feedback. Inviting people outside your company to certain work groups enables you to work in a completely innovative manner with your stakeholders.

    3. All the information in the same place. Many processes and operations work perfectly well in some companies, but when that is not the case, they usually generate an endless number of emails, calls, meetings, etc. Your Enterprise Social Network can help you to improve these processes by keeping all documentation centralized in one place, converting it into an “object” with an Activity Stream, going from chaos to order. You can check out our Activity Stream infographic and discover all the information you can manage in your Enterprise Social Network.

    Thought of any more? Are you working in an Enterprise 2.0? You can try Zyncro free and enhance productivity and knowledge in your company.

     

     

  • Billie Lou Sastre 11:09 am on March 25, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , enterprise social network,   

    ‘We want to implement Zyncro for our more than 4,500 partners (employees) at Starbucks’ 

    Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

    Diana González StarbucksToday we have the pleasure of presenting our interview section where we speak with companies that have already implemented an Enterprise Social Network successfully. Here we have our interview with Diana González, Organizational Development Manager at Starbucks Mexico. Diana is responsible for personnel development processes, working environment, and the Starbucks enterprise social network communication project called “PARTNET”.

    How did the need to implement an enterprise social network arise?

    It emerged from the need to have an interactive communication medium that could reach across the entire organization uniformly, migrating unidirectional communication media to bidirectional media for more than 4,500 partners (employees).

    How did use of Zyncro start at Starbucks? What projection do you see for it in the organization?

    We started with a pilot group of directors and middle managers totaling approximately 50 people, communicating formal and informal information about their daily activities between them. Today we have almost 600 users: directors, executives and middle managers. Our aim for 2013 is to reach more than 4,500 partners (employees) in the organization within 6 months.

    Starbucks-Partnet-Start

    Of all the functionalities in Zyncro, which one would you highlight?

    The versatility to generate formal and information communication: “Corporate news”, “personal news”, “groups”

    What benefits did Zyncro bring Starbucks? In what way are you encouraging the use of the Enterprise Social Network?

    We are encouraging employees by:

    • Providing a calendar of cultural activities where they can share their experiences and facts about their work spaces.
    • Creating groups with formal information – Organizational communications.
    • Creating groups with informal information – Bidirectional communications to share experiences and best practices.

    What has Zyncro meant for managing internal communication at Starbucks?

    It has resulted in a change in the communication method in the company. Now we have a bidirectional communication channel, currently targeting middle management in the operation.

    “The goal of implementing an Enterprise Social Network at Starbucks is to establish a dynamic bidirectional communication channel that reaches the entire organization, including operational positions.”

    And what about you? Have you tried Zyncro? Did you know you can start to use it free and work collaboratively in your company?

    Try it free here!

     

     

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