Social media for communication inside the enterprise

Nationwide moves external success indoors

Businesses in many sectors already harness social media in their customer-facing operations. Customers use social media and many want the companies they buy from to communicate with them through the channel. But it is not a straightforward switch to transfer customer social media strategies to internal operations.

Many companies have cracked the customer service function, but most are just beginning to adopt social media internally.

Nationwide Building Society is the largest mutual society in the UK, with 15 million members and customers and 17,000 employees. It has been adopting digital technologies to support its customers for some time and is digitally mature. It was the first company to launch a retail internet banking service, in 1997.

“We are cool with digital,” says Ewan MacLeod, head of group digital capability at Nationwide. The building society has 2.6 million active internet banking users with 620,000 daily users, as well as a mobile banking service. It has improved customer services using video conferencing for mortgage advisory meetings and a 24-hour Twitter customer service.

The building society is 168 years old this year. MacLeod says it is engaging with customers using social media, but only just beginning to adopt the technology to communicate internally. “We grasped social media externally but, to lay the foundations to become a social business, we had to make sure we have the right infrastructure.” For example, he says the company needed connectivity, the right devices and an enterprise app store.

MacLeod says the first step to get internal teams collaborating was to install wireless across the organisation. “We need blanket superfast wireless before we think about social collaboration.” The company is now rolling out iPhones across the company and setting up an enterprise app store.

The company has a target of becoming “a digital society” by 2019, he says.

Grant Thornton staff collaboration

Financial and business services and accounting firm Grant Thornton has gone much further in introducing social collaboration internally. The company has 4,800 staff and decided in 2012 to transform how it works internally, using social media.

“We wanted to change our brand – not just our logo, but the way our people interacted internally and with clients,” says Greg Swift, CIO at Grant Thornton.

The company's corporate culture changed from one of risk-aversion, to expecting to use social media. “This is a huge shift that came from the top, our CEO,” says Swift.

Swift had the support of the board of directors and all service lines for his plans, which removed possible roadblocks: “We had vertical and horizontal support for this,” he says.

Grant Thornton started by developing practical rules, simple guidelines and establishing what Swift calls "an enabling culture". He says the company had to learn when to move on, if something wasn’t working.

The company did not want to put people off getting involved – because cross-company participation was essential for success – but it did want to provide some guidance. "We did not want this to sound heavy, because that is the first thing to turn people off,” says Swift, adding that the company wanted staff to learn through participation. He says it was important project leaders understood social collaboration is not for everyone, and it didn’t “ram it down people’s throats”.

Avoiding the pitfalls of internal social media

The company came up with ten rules for using social media internally, which Swift describes as “really just common sense”. It also created a centre of excellence to support users and provide training.

He says the biggest worries about people misusing social media, which can be both embarrassing and legally risky, are largely overcome by staff behaving themselves on social media because they know people such as the CEO are also participating. “Knowing that members of the board are following you on Twitter is the best social media contraceptive. It is not going to stop me doing it, but I am going to do it safely.”

So Grant Thornton’s company-wide Social Business Programme was born.

It was already using social media but not internally, across the whole company. “We were already doing social with things like LinkedIn and Twitter, but did not get too involved as a company, because we thought people should have their own accounts that aren’t linked to the company, so when they leave it is no longer associated with us.”

Swift says the company wanted to go to the next level and went to market to look for an internal platform: “We looked at the market and decided Jive met our needs.

“This was because of the use cases. There were over thirty case studies with real testimonials we could dive into. That is what swung it for us.”

He says sound project management principles and governance were important.

The company started at the top. The first thing to go on the new platform – rebranded "Jam" – was the CEO’s weekly blog. “Interestingly, his hit rate trebled,” says Swift.

“All the senior leadership are now using it.”

The company now has about 3,500 people self-enrolled on the platform. On an average day 2,009 people visit the site. On average, 80 new pieces of content are created on the platform each day. Jive helps the workforce understand what their colleagues do, says Swift.

Jive takes Bunzl beyond the noticeboard 

Bunzl is a FTSE 100 company which supplies consumables to UK enterprises. For example, it can supply everything in a retail store that is not for sale.

The company has 90 businesses globally which draw revenues of £6bn a year. In the UK and Ireland it has 18 businesses with a turnover of £1bn a year.

James Cam, UK and Ireland IT director at Bunzl, says the company wanted a new intranet to replace a .Net-based noticeboard. By chance he came across a tool that fitted what the company needed.

He says the company was in a meeting with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) one day, and PwC's consultants repeatedly referred to a communications tool they were using. Cam says this turned out to be Jive's collaboration tool – which appeared to offer benefits for Bunzl: “We suddenly became very interested in this because of the challenges associated with our business – we are very decentralised.”

The disparate nature of the firm – which collects, stores and delivers consumerables across the world – makes it difficult to embed a single corporate culture and way of operating across the business. Cam says it is a real challenge to say what Bunzl is, because it doesn’t have a culture. Rather, the separate businesses across the world are all run differently.

“Each business has a very distinct personality, which tends to be based around the managing director,” he says.

He says that, although different regional organisations at Bunzl do pretty much the same thing, they all do it differently – with different levels of success. “There is very little knowledge-sharing going on, so when we saw the tool we thought: ‘This is going to work – this is going to revolutionise Bunzl,'” he says.

And Cam says senior management got it too: “The great thing is, the board bought into it straight away.”

Some of the managing directors were scared of using Jive – so we did some reverse mentoring, with youngsters teaching older members of staff to do things like blogging

James Cam, Bunzl

Social media from trial and training to roll-out

Bunzl got a free copy of Yammer and invited staff to use it. After a successful trial the company then looked to the market and decided Jive was the most business-focused. 

The company started using it in November 2012 and, in an intense period of adoption, rolled it out to employees in the UK and Ireland.

Senior management buy-in is absolutely vital and they need to be seen to be using the tool, says Cam.

“The real challenge I had was that some of the managing directors were scared of using Jive. We did some reverse mentoring, with youngsters teaching older members of staff to do things like blogging, as well as setting up sandboxed environments for people to try out the platform.”

He says this didn’t work with everyone – there are always those that would never use a social tool – but, with the support of senior management, found it broadly worked nevertheless.

The company set up a social media policy and gave advice: "To save users from themselves and not create problems in the social environment,” says Cam.

How to make social media work for your internal communications

He says the key to adopting social media, and making it work as a business tool, is to look at your business processes and work out how you can support them with social media. “If you don’t do that, all you have is Facebook and that will die in no time at all.”

Cam says different parts of the business set up their own groups on Jive, which proved one way of getting good business process value. Because groups can be set up in the cloud, departments such as the acquisition team can use it to streamline what they do, by improving collaboration in a secure environment.

Cam’s advice to businesses thinking about taking up social media internally is to balance work and fun, and make it easy for users to log in and navigate it: “If you don’t make it easy, they won’t use it."