Six Technologies To Increase Employee Participation

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Information Technology / 2007 Top 25 Entrepreneur

Steven Vicinanza

June 11, 2008

One of the biggest challenges a CEO faces is how to get employees fired up about the company and his or her vision. How do you create active participants who can evolve and implement the vision from passive and often reactive participants? Luckily for forward thinking CEOs, the Web has spawned a number of recent innovations that many companies are picking up on to do just that. In today's blog, I'm going to summarize six new Web technologies that will invigorate your staff and help create that participatory organization we all desire.

Besides fostering active participation, the six technologies share a number of features. They are all Web-based and run from a browser. They are low cost and relatively easy to install and configure on the corporate network. They are also very easy to learn and use on a daily basis and so have little training cost. Because they require so little overhead to procure, set up and use, these technologies are especially popular with small businesses.

Yet despite their low cost, these technologies provide substantial business benefits including increasing employee productivity, energizing employees, facilitating telecommuting, promoting a high customer-touch environment, and building brand recognition and customer loyalty.

1. Web-based Document Sharing
This technology has evolved as an alternative to storing files on a file server. The term " document" is used loosely to refer to a word processing file, spreadsheet, image file, PDF, audio or even a video file. Document sharing software allows these files to be stored into the system and retrieved using any Web browser and an Internet connection. The advantages over a straight file system are the ability to manage version control and track changes, finer grained security, and integration with office productivity software. It can also allow for online access to documents by customers, prospects and partners. Giving multiple users seamless and easy access to creating, locating, and updating documents is a cornerstone of a participative organization.

2. Wiki: A Funny Name But Powerful New Tool
A Wiki is a Website where every user is a Web master and they actually create the site as they go. This promotes participation from all interested parties and eliminates the need for someone to have responsibility for formatting and publishing – though many Wikis do have moderators to help structure and manage data inserted by end-users. Wikis are enormously popular and extremely useful for things like internal documentation of systems and procedures. Because everyone maintains them, there is very low administrative overhead.

3. RSS
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the third technology. Think of RSS as a radio channel for text. It's great for publishing frequently updated information such as news and blogs (see below). Similar to pushing information via email, the RSS feed differs in that users must explicitly subscribe to the feed with an RSS reader application. Readers are built into Web browsers and are even available for Blackberrys and PDAs. Typical corporate uses include news feeds to journalists via an online press room and feeds to customers for product updates and support. Think about the power of setting up an RSS feed for your employees, customers, and even your PR firm where you publish the information once and it instantly gets pushed under the noses of all interested parties.

4. Web Survey
New tools now allow you to quickly and easily create surveys that employees, vendors and customers can participate in. Many tools have pre-built templates for surveying customer satisfaction, market research, employee or organizational member opinion, and more. The tool handles creating the survey, administering it, and even displaying results graphically. What was once a prohibitively costly proposition for most small businesses is now only mouse clicks away.

5. The Blog
Another pervasive new participatory technology is the blog (short for Web log), which allows easy creation and maintenance of a string of online commentaries or a diary. CEOs at large corporations use blogs internally to help communicate their vision to employees on a regular basis. Blogs are also used externally as a less formal way of communicating with customers, prospects and investors. While most blogs are authored by a single individual, group blogs are not uncommon and allow a group to create a running diary of a project or customer interactions [ Editor's note: The Catalyst Expert Blog – what you're reading now – is a good example of a group blog by like-minded entrepreneurs and small business owners.]

6. Webinar
The final participative technology is the Webinar. The term is a combination of Web and seminar and the technology enables just that. The Webinar features a single presenter who presents from anywhere to anyone from a handful to possibly hundreds of participants. The visual is accessed via a browser and consists of anything that can be displayed on a computer screen, usually a slide show, but often a live demo of a piece of software. Participants connect to the presentation via a Web link and can also dial in to a teleconference for the audio portion. The audio allows two-way communication as the presenter can take questions from the participants. A Webinar is much less expensive then a meeting room and the participation level can be quite high as attendees don't need to leave their desks to attend. Webinars are highly useful in a wide variety of situations including virtual sales meetings with remote staff, new product rollouts to clients, presentation to prospects and product training.

There are many products and services available to implement these new technologies. Just do a Google search and you'll find any number of potential products. One that stands out is Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007. It features document management, templates for Wikis and blogs, RSS feed aggregation (though it can't send out feeds), and point and click online survey creation. Definitely worth the free download from Microsoft's Website.

So there you have it – six radical technologies that are fostering the participative organization. Happy blogging!

About Steve

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