Leveraging the Newsfeed to Improve Adoption, Engagement and Productivity

Contents

The Dawn of the Digital Workplace

A shift in perception

Solving the Push versus Pull Dilemma

Advertising solved a similar problem

Reinventing push versus pull in the Newsfeed

Why Discovery Cards are Essential to Collaboration

Out-of-the-box with Beezy

Engagement is key

Why Employee Engagement Should be Your Primary Objective

Making engagement part of your strategy

Engagement begins at the executive and CEO level

Summary

About Beezy

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Almost every company, from the massive multi-national to the small startup, has tried and failed (and then tried again) at building an intranet as part of a broader “digital workplace” strategy. And with all of the money, time, and resources these companies have spent, the result has been largely the same: information is not being updated, their environments lack the features that people need, and as a result…nobody uses them.

Most intranets have failed…but why?

Let’s begin by looking at your most recent intranet efforts: Your team had a vision for a new digital workplace, and a plan to implement. The market is flush with vendors and solutions, all of them clamoring to provide the greatest turn-key solution and services on the market — and you likely purchased what turned out to be more “services” than actual “solution.” However, the design was an improvement over your last attempt, and it appeared to integrate well with your existing SharePoint sites and content. Plus, your end users seemed to be enthusiastic.

Then you went live, and within weeks the level of engagement on your environment trailed off. What happened with all the initial excitement around this new way to work? Well… there’s a simple answer: people had jobs to do, and the new intranet ended up adding more work than business value.

For individuals, making the intranet experience functional took a lot of effort, and core functionality was missing. As team members adopted other spot solutions and tools, important conversations were simply not happening on the intranet. People were not ready to pay attention to something new on top of their already busy daily workload.

Employees gravitate toward tools and solutions that help them get their work done. If people are not using your intranet, it may be an indicator that your site is failing to deliver core business capabilities.Failure doesn’t happen overnight, but the pattern is unmistakable. People stop logging in, unless they need to upload a document or want to read the latest blog post from the CEO that is only available from the front page of the intranet. As sites and content begin to age, they stop being updated…which makes the environment even less functional. In other words, people move on.

A shift in perceptionHowever, something changed a few years ago. While every internal communications or HR manager out there was about to give-up on the concept of the intranet, a wave of new enterprise collaboration capabilities entered the market — with social tools, machine-learning, and advanced features to help

The Dawn of the Digital Workplace

teams better communicate, share, and innovate. And even more interesting was the fact that IT and their management teams were not the ones driving this wave: end users were discovering and promoting these tools and capabilities themselves, sometimes outside of the purview of IT.

Employees began to demand that their companies support these new social collaboration capabilities — which caused many management teams to scratch their heads. Why were employees suddenly self-motivated to use these new enterprise collaboration tools and not the formal intranets they had built?

At the root of the issue is one fundamental truth: employees just want to get their work done.

Enterprise collaboration provides communication and social collaboration dynamics that allow people to work more efficiently. It can also offer subtler advantages, such as social reputation and gamification features, which have become powerful adoption triggers. Many of the features that have made social networking sites the most heavily trafficked websites on the world wide web have found their way into the intranet ecosystem.

We have entered the dawn of the Digital Workplace.

But for many companies, walking away from your intranet is simply not an option. In most organizations, large or small, intranets play an important role in disseminating internal communications, providing a view into important HR policies, giving easy access to business critical tools, and more. Intranets are not a passing fad — they are an important aspect of the modern workplace.

Fortunately, there is a solution emerging from the enterprise collaboration space – and these next-generation intranets are defining the modern digital workplace. They are balancing formal and informal communications, making the user experience more social and dynamic, tying advanced capabilities to the needs of the business.

The latest analyst surveys and industry reports show that this move away from the traditional intranet, with its static content and limited range of capabilities, toward a more functional, collaborative and social environment is the direction innovative corporations are heading.

Collaboration has evolved from document-centric to social-centric platforms and tools, driven more by the consumer social networking platforms than traditional knowledge management solutions. Within the typical intranet, communications personnel want to “push” content to ensure that the content they

Solving the Push versus Pull Dilemma

want to promote is sent to every last employee, while employees want to see only the content most relevant to them personally by “pulling” the content through various automated, or discovery feeds, through search, and through social connections within their personal and work networks or communities. There are valid reasons for using both strategies, but finding the right “mix” of push and pull can dramatically impact intranet adoption and engagement.

Organizations that are successfully making the jump from static intranet to the modern digital workplace are those that are redefining the mix of “push” communication (broadcast messages, news, announcements) versus “pull” communication (information that is personalized, community-related, and based on personal connections) within the enterprise. These companies are transforming collaboration, recognizing that finding the right balance between these two forces has a direct impact on employee engagement.

Not too long ago, one of our customers was forced to shut down an outdated intranet and temporarily use their “corporate social network” to serve as their primary Intranet front door. There wasn’t much thinking behind the move: it was something driven by an IT infrastructure change. But it was viewed as a temporary solution, with the goal to move from there to a newly-built digital workplace with advanced capabilities. But to everyone’s surprise, this relatively small intervention of moving to a more social platform boosted the adoption rate of the new homepage by more than 5 times!

The reason for the rise in adoption is actually quite easy to understand: the outdated intranet was all about PUSH (one-way internal communications, HR messages, letters from the CEO, etc.) whereas the social network was all about PULL (my communities, tags I follow, my colleagues, and so forth).

As a product company, Beezy learned from this example. What we took away from this customer engagement was that employees need their homepage to be focused primarily on pull activities if we ever hope to have them incorporate the intranet and its content into their daily routine. At the same time, the benefits of pushing information to them (whether automated or curated) are clear form an organizational stand-point. Leadership teams want to be able to quickly and easily disseminate information – but how that information is shared is key. This small but important learning became a major factor within our product design process.

As an enterprise collaboration product company, we asked ourselves: What is the right mix between push and pull? But more importantly, what is the best user experience (UX) to support any given mix,

and to help employees find the right content, people, and ideas at the right time? At Beezy, the quest to answer this UX question became our passion.

Advertising solved a similar problemAfter testing out several new ideas for an improved Digital Workplace layout, the Beezy product team ended up following a path along which we often find ourselves — looking at what has worked elsewhere. We asked ourselves: what if the problem that we are addressing between push and pull has already been solved in the consumer internet? Is the relationship of Internal Communications to the Intranet similar to the relationship of advertising to consumer social networks? How did Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn solve the problem of pushing “unsolicited pieces of content” while keeping adoption at its highest rates?

The first part of the solution suddenly became obvious to us: Newsfeeds are extremely efficient at driving adoption, and inserting small amounts of advertising into the newsfeed flow didn’t seem to hurt the traction of the social giants, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Flipboard. We started playing around with the idea of “injecting” pieces of push or “discovery” content within the Beezy newsfeed, and quickly saw great results in terms of visibility and employee engagement.

The second part of the answer is less of a UI problem and has more to do with the “intelligence” of the push system. One of the reasons why people “accept” the inconvenience of small doses of advertising in their newsfeed is because ads are becoming more targeted, more intelligent, and more relevant to the employee based on their online activities and personal network. The frontier between advertising and useful content is constantly being pushed — moving them from purely annoying to, in many cases, relevant content.

Reinventing push versus pull in the NewsfeedAll of this research on how to effectively manage push vs pull content had a direct impact on our most recent release, which includes an innovative newsfeed that nicely combines two type of activity cards: Follow-up Cards and Discovery Cards.

The most frequent card-type is the Follow-up card: fresh content pulled from your communities, tags, or the people you follow. Just behind it in frequency is the Discovery card, and the idea behind them is to insert small doses of content, automated information, or a call to action — all of which can be pushed to employees in an intelligent, less overt way.

When looking at our newsfeed, you’ll see a blend of card-types, all of them personalized to your profile based on your community memberships, the people and activities you follow, and the content and keywords that are important to you.

When a user uploads a document into an Engineering community, for example, a Follow-up card is generated for all of the community members to see and interact with. Someone new to the system who interacts with members of the Engineering community may see a Discovery card suggesting that they join the community. We visually differentiate the two cards using white backgrounds for Follow-up Cards and more engaging solid colors and icons for the Discovery Cards.

“Employees need the homepage to be focused primarily on pull activities if we ever hope to have

them incorporate the site and its content into their daily habits. At the same time, the benefits of

pushing information to them (whether automated or curated) are clear from an organizational

stand-point.” Maximo Castagno, Beezy Chief Product Officer

The Beezy newsfeed is proving to be a very effective way to deliver a balanced flow of push and pull content to employees, and many of our customers are in the process of making the Beezy start page the main entry point for their digital workplace.

Follow-up Card

Discovery Card

Most enterprise collaboration initiatives start off with enthusiasm, and a high level of engagement among employees. However, without constant nurturing, the level of participation can quickly drop off. Employees today need almost constant visual and mental stimulation. The more static your environment, the more quickly people become blind to your content. Look at some of the most successful sites on the worldwide web today — the social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter — and you will see a constant stream of content and links and advertisements that encourage people to “discover” new content, new communities, and new people. This discovery content is provided along the sides of the user interface, as well as through “Discovery Cards” within the newsfeed itself.

This constant refreshing of content means that the newsfeed is continually being updated with suggestions that are (mostly) relevant to the individual based upon their activities and interactions with members of their personal network. Advertising aside, this idea of “nurturing” the user interface is essential to keeping people engaged. The more engaged your employees, the greater the potential impact of your collaboration platform — which makes Discovery Cards essential to collaboration.

The newsfeed should be at the center of enterprise collaboration, because it provides three essential functions that encourage participation and collaboration:

• Discovery content, which is what the organization wants the user to care about, and what isrelevant to the user based on the communities and users they follow, by their search criteria, andby their online work activities. An example might be a list of suggested people to follow.• Follow-up content, which is what the user cares about, including content they need to be awareof (when people mention them, or assign them tasks) or actions that will help the network itself. Anexample might be a request from a peer to review and edit an important document.• Recovery content, which is a history of what the user has done. Usually found on the user profilepage, this is content created by actions within the collaboration platform, allowing the user toretrace their steps. Examples might include a document uploaded to a sub-site, or a threadeddiscussion that happened the day before, both of which the user forgot to bookmark or tag.

Discovery and Follow-up Cards are commonly part of your intranet home page newsfeed. Social communities, which are created around business units, projects, and other areas of interest, also include discovery and Follow-up Cards within their individual newsfeeds — all of which roll up to the user’s top-level newsfeed, aggregating content across all of their communities.

Why Discovery Cards Are Essential to Collaboration

Recovery cards, however, are more typically found within an employee profile page — which is similar to the SharePoint MySite, keeping track of all of the documents a user has uploaded, conversations or comments made, and sites followed. Furthermore, the profile page newsfeed tracks everything a user does within the platform so that steps can be retraced, and activities easily located.

All three components of the newsfeed play equally important roles in collaboration, but what sets the discovery content apart is that these cards are largely automated and dynamic rather than activity-based, as with follow-up and recovery cards. Essentially, Discovery Cards are “injected” between Follow-up Cards so that the user is able to discover new things while reviewing activity within their network. Discovery Cards are a powerful way for individuals to break out of their collaboration silos, discovering and interacting with people, ideas and content that are relevant — but may not otherwise be found through traditional search and collaboration activities.

Out-of-the-box with BeezyAs we have worked closely with some of the world’s largest SharePoint and Office 365 deployments to improve enterprise collaboration, we have identified a number of common Discovery Cards that benefit the majority of teams. These cards are not static components on the page, as with the top navigation bar. Instead, with each page refresh the Discovery Cards change position so that users won’t become “blind” to them. Instead, each time the user reaches the home page newsfeed, the mix of cards is updated with the latest Follow-up Cards and a refreshed set of Discovery Cards. The Beezy solution offers a number of out-of-the-box Discovery Cards to help enrich the end user experience, improve adoption, and drive engagement, including the following:

Of course, many organizations will also have unique requirements and will want to develop customized Discovery Cards. For example, an organization may have a policy to publish all new job listings internally before initiating an external candidate search, allowing current employees to apply for the job — or to share with their personal networks. A discovery card could be created that draws data from a SharePoint list to help surface relevant roles based on the user’s current position, job function, or community membership. These cards can be built to also utilize SharePoint security trimming, or to leverage profile page data, so that employees only see those roles published to specific security groups, or which match their profile criteria.

In addition, an Office 365 (SharePoint Online) or hybrid environment will benefit from the automation and machine-learning capabilities of the Office Graph to generate even more dynamic Discovery Cards. The Office Graph is one of the most innovative developments to come out of Microsoft in a decade, and is the key to many of Office 365’s latest features, including the Delve search experience.

As organizations make the move to the cloud, it makes sense to include Office Graph integration in your planning. Having robust and extended user profiles can directly improve cross-team collaboration, and will provide better “talent-finder” search results.

Beezy and Office GraphFor Beezy customers, we already extend and enhance the Delve experience for customers in cloud or hybrid environments, allowing organizations to offer both automated and “curated” content within the newsfeed.

As highlighted in a recent press release and related video, the Beezy team have developed a number of Office Graph integrations that improve performance and relevancy of common tasks, and

Engagement is keyAs many organizations have come to understand, an employee that is not actively engaged in their work can have a negative impact on the company’s bottom line. When individuals are not engaged, they are not creating content, they are not sharing ideas, and they are not expanding the collective knowledge of the organization — all of which are the fundamentals of a successful collaboration environment. Engaged employees, on the other hand, drive business value.

While there are many strategies that you can employ to improve employee engagement, one of the lessons learned within organizations that have successfully deployed and maintained social collaboration platforms is that the user experience must be nurtured. Microsoft has built tools and content and best practices around ‘customer success management’ because they acutely understand the relationship between nurturing and engagement, which leads to collaboration success. Enhancing the user experience through Discovery Cards is a powerful nurturing tool for your collaboration environment.

encourages stronger collaboration and engagement across teams. For example, by prompting users to add skills and expertise — and identify the skills and expertise of their peers — these Discovery Cards can lead to more complete user profiles.

For more examples of Office Graph Discovery Cards and the innovation coming from the Beezy product team, check out our YouTube channel.

How engaged are your end users? According to a recent Gallup study, not very — and that lack of employee engagement is directly impacting your bottom line. The question then becomes: how do you reverse the trend? Within enterprise collaboration, the degree to which employees are actively engaged impacts the overall success of your platform, and therefore your organization’s ability to innovate across that collaboration platform. Clearly, when individuals are disengaged, they are not actively creating content, sharing ideas, or expanding the collective knowledge of the organization, all of which are fundamentals of a successful collaboration environment. Engaged employees drive business value, which is why employee engagement should be your primary objective.

When we think of employees who are actively engaged, a number of traits may come to mind: integrity, trust, enthusiasm, communication, collaboration, contributing, and productivity, to name a few. Engagement is as much about understanding your own role as it is about understanding the purpose and objectives of the broader organization. People need to feel empowered to get their work done, trusted to accomplish what has been assigned, have necessary feedback mechanisms in place, and a proper support network and training. Highly engaged employees are able to leverage the work and ideas of others, extending and iterating on their own output. An engaged workforce builds upon its own success.

Why Employee Engagement Should Be Your Primary Objective

Making Engagement Part of Your StrategyEngagement is not something you can resolve through technology alone. Technology enables, but employee engagement oftentimes requires a cultural change.

Within the SharePoint community, the topics of adoption and engagement have come to the forefront within the past few years as organizations have struggled with overall platform usage. As with most new

technologies, when SharePoint is initially deployed, end user adoption (employees who log onto the system) and engagement (employees actually leveraging the capabilities to accomplish business tasks) is very high. However, within a very short span there tends to be a sharp decline.

When there is poor alignment between technology and business, it impacts the clarity employees have around job expectations and perceptions of job performance. A common pattern seen within many poorly planned SharePoint environments is a general lack of understanding of the business use cases against which SharePoint was deployed. In these oft repeated examples, SharePoint planning is based around features of the platform rather than upon end-to-end business scenarios, which may utilize one or more of these features — or require additional development or third-party solutions to enable (the build versus buy problem).

While it is understandable that organizations are wary of spending additional budget on extending SharePoint capability, many of these same organizations fail to understand the costs associated with supporting a platform that does not accurately support the needs of their business. And then they wonder why employees are disengaged.

Engagement begins at the executive and CEO levelWhat does it take to improve employee engagement? It takes more than a change in wording within your employee satisfaction survey. It requires a cultural change — and changing culture takes a long time. Implementing the right technology can help enable this cultural change, but even more important is how the technology is implemented by management and influencers within your organization. And even more important is an executive team that practices what they preach — standing behind the cultural change, and using the platform themselves.

A company that has embarked on a meaningful path toward improved employee adoption and engagement will need to take a closer look at their systems, and ensure that the cultural, management, and leadership changes are supported by the right tools and capabilities to allow for this increased level of communication, collaboration and contribution.

SummaryIntranets fail when they are unable to deliver compelling features that enable people to get more work done, improve communication with partners and peers, and more easily find the content and expertise they need. You can fix this by delivering an intranet experience that does more than post static content.

At the center of Beezy is the newsfeed. It is increasingly the way that people consume data in the modern digital workplace. As a user experience, the newsfeed is familiar, it is intuitive, and when it is employed within SharePoint it can dramatically improve adoption, engagement, and productivity.

Look closely at the most popular sites on the worldwide web, and you’ll quickly recognize some common features between them. Whether or not you’re a fan of them, most Information Workers tend to begin their days on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter — or on aggregated news sites that increasingly look and function like these social networking juggernauts. And the common feature across all of them? The newsfeed. Once logged in, the newsfeed becomes dynamic, personalized and relevant based on who you are connected to, what is happening within your network, and the content and activities you consume. It is at the center of our social experience, and it is where we go to stay informed. That is the power of the newsfeed.

The newsfeed is at the core of the Beezy solution because it is the best way for people to connect with their content and internal communities within SharePoint, plain and simple. It is a powerful way for individuals to discover and interact with the people, ideas and content that are relevant to them. In short, leveraging the newsfeed keeps employees engaged in SharePoint.

Beezy is the premier enterprise collaboration solution for Office 365 and SharePoint. We make collaboration within your organization easy and relevant. By extending the Microsoft productivity stack, we unify the digital workplace and empower end users to better communicate, share, and collaborate across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.Multi-nationals like Vodafone and Transocean utilize Beezy to make the world smaller, and bring teams together daily. Customers look to Beezy to help them hone their differentiation, improve operations, and align teams behind initiatives and rally individuals to act. As a US technology company, with development in Europe, we understand how important it can be to bring teams together.Learn more at http://www.beezy.net, follow us on Twitter @FollowBeezy or visit our Facebook page. You can also reach us by email at info@beezy.net

About Beezy

http://www.beezy.net@FollowBeezyinfo@beezy.net