Intranet Journal
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Intranet Case Study: Using OpenRoad's Social Software
4/4/2007
For many years, there have been calls for companies to listen to their employees, to empower their people, to become a learning organization. Millions of consulting dollars have been spent, thousands of leadership seminars concocted, and countless mission statements have been rewritten.
Despite this, it has proven difficult for most firms to move beyond a traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control corporate culture. A company's theory may be, "We're sincerely interested in learning, improvement, and empowerment. We want to give our people all the tools they need to interact." But in everyday use, their theory is more likely to be driven by a need to remain in control and a desire to suppress negative opinions. This theory-in-use usually wins out, explaining why many employee empowerment initiatives fail.
In April 2006, Intrawest Placemaking -- a real estate development concern with regional offices in North America and Europe -- undertook a technical initiative focused on driving espoused theories into theories-in-use. Using OpenRoad Communication's ThoughtFarmer social software, they built a democratic, collaborative communication platform that could capture the company's intellectual capital and strengthen the workplace community. The result was a read/write, employee-maintained internal web site that has permanently changed the way the company interacts.
Intranet innovation
Employee web sites, or intranets, have been around for more than a decade. Most follow a one-to-many publishing model: a small group of editors publishes pages and documents that are viewable to a large group of users.
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OpenRoad's primary goal with ThoughtFarmer is simple: turn all users into authors. All employees at Placemaking can add, edit, and annotate content on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. With the exception of a few policy documents, Placemaking's intranet is a completely open and malleable collection of current thoughts, processes, and learnings.
By turning every user into a contributor, OpenRoad envisioned several benefits for Intrawest Placemaking:
Shortly after ThoughtFarmer launched, Placemaking began to see an impact. People began having dialogue on the intranet and started sharing ideas. They started creating content. And this new collaboration brought real business value -- one project manager shared an idea that saved $500,000 on one project: the construction of a 61,000 square foot, heated-tile entranceway for a new condo-hotel. The idea could be implemented across the organization in future developments. (See below for details on that $500,000 savings.)Fewer barriers to knowledge sharing. By letting users publish their own content with only a few clicks, they would be less likely to hoard knowledge and more likely to share it. No distortion in knowledge transfer. Ideas would be exchanged person-to-person, in one step, eliminating distortion and filtering. An increase in employee engagement. Users that could add and edit content would feel a sense of ownership over their intranet. Because the leadership of Placemaking would be putting considerable trust in employees, employees would, in turn, be more likely to trust the company. Self-healing content. If a user saw an error, he or she would be able to fix it immediately. No excessive burden on a couple of administrators. The users would be the editors. Content maintenance would no longer require a dedicated team.
A second goal of OpenRoad's ThoughtFarmer platform is to turn co-workers into friends. ThoughtFarmer creates an internal workplace community, exposes the existing social network at Placemaking, and clearly ties all content to people. It also brought more clearly into focus the critical roles that humor and creativity play in defining Placemaking's organizational culture; a culture that, according to employee surveys, is a key component of what makes Placemaking a great place to work.
The principle community-building feature of ThoughtFarmer is "Place" pages, a personal area where each employee can add a profile, upload photos and documents, create pages, and share favorite links. Every change an employee makes to the intranet -- every comment posted, file uploaded, or page added -- has the employee's name by it, linked back to his or her "Place." Other employees can follow the links, learn about each other, explore each other's content, and develop relationships.
OpenRoad expected this community-building to have several positive impacts for Placemaking:
ThoughtFarmer achieved these desired effects: Placemaking employees on separate continents are now "meeting" through the intranet and gaining insight on each other's ideas, thoughts, and innovations around real estate development.Build cohesiveness across Placemaking's geographically dispersed workforce Improve the attraction and retention of new talent-especially with "Generation Y" employees Improve the willingness to share knowledge due to the formation of stronger networks and relationships
Pervasive use
Placemaking had a traditional, one-to-many intranet prior to ThoughtFarmer. Since the launch of the collaborative intranet, use has increased tenfold. Use is also pervasive. There were 1,486 unique users in the second quarter after launch; with just over 250 employees, this means that over a thousand non-Placemaking employees (mostly employees of the parent company, Intrawest) used Placemaking's intranet. As one Intrawest employee wrote, "I love the dynamic nature of your intranet. I wish the rest of the organization would go the same route. I find it difficult to go back to [the corporate intranet] after using the Placemaking intranet … thank you for sharing this wonderful resource with the rest of the company."
Reduced Cost
Placemaking's vision for the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet was to develop, launch, and maintain it without an increase in staffing and with a minimal capital investment. ThoughtFarmer's "everyone-as-editor" concept complemented this plan perfectly, as it resulted in an employee web site that is group-maintained by the entire company. With all 250-odd Placemaking employees as editors, the intranet is constantly updated and self-healing.
Attracting and Retaining New Talent
Intrawest Placemaking strives to hire talented people, and the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet provides Placemaking with a strategic hiring advantage.
The generation of employees currently entering the workforce grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet plays a significant role in their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as casually as they swap songs and videos. When this generation joins a firm only to find a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model, they can become disappointed and unengaged.
By contrast, ThoughtFarmer embraces the principles of openness, participation and interactivity that are the norm for both "Generation Y" and the online social systems they dominate, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. One recent hire at Placemaking commented, "The intranet rocks!! What an incredibly powerful tool."
Uniting a Geographically Dispersed Workforce
Placemaking has six regional offices in Canada, the United States, and Europe in addition to the home office. Most of the more than 250 employees at these offices have never met face to face. But ThoughtFarmer has brought these people together and helped them to feel like part of a community, rather than just employees of the same organization.
As employees upload photos, anecdotes, and reveal more of their individuality and personality, the popularity of the intranet continues to build.
The Idea That Saved $500,000
Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, was overseeing the construction of a 61,000 square foot, heated-tile entranceway for a new condo-hotel. The project would traditionally have required the radiant subcontractor to return for each of the 33 concrete pours to lay piping amongst rebar. Then Hartigan had an idea: instead of laying tile, just complete the slab, lay all the radiant piping on top, apply a two-inch layer of colored concrete with an aggregate, and then polish it.
Hartigan's innovative method saved $500,000 on a $2 million job, improved coordination among the trades, reduced the project timeline, and gave a stunning, better-than-tile appearance. Hartigan then created a page about his experience on the ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet. Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. Other construction managers planned to use the technique on future projects.
Placemaking manages dozens of multi-million dollar developments a year. As Hartigan's technique is implemented, Placemaking will save millions of dollars. Without Placemaking's everyone-as-editor collaboration system, ideas such as Hartigan's could never have been shared in such a discoverable, accessible, permanent format.
Impact
The impact that ThoughtFarmer has made at Intrawest Placemaking is summed up by Drew Stotesbury, president of Placemaking:
"One of the benefits associated with the Placemaking intranet, the Portal, has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and quality of collaboration across our organization, a feat which was a challenge in the past due to a geographically distributed employee base and email saturation. The Portal evolved in a short time from a simple news posting board to a living community which supported the sharing of news, ideas and information.It allowed our critical roles, our development and construction managers, to share innovations that had an immediate impact on the efficiency and quality of our developments. It allowed our employees to share personal information, strengthening relationships between team members who often worked miles apart. It communicated that our leaders trust and value our employee base, now the authors of our intranet, and promoted accountability."
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