My Profile Page on Handshake

Last week Google launched Google+, a social networking site, designed to compete—and beat—rival Facebook. Google+ aims to make “connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.” Initial reviews have been positive.  I haven’t attempted to use Google’s new toy myself, but as a 7+ year- user of Facebook, I admit that I’ve grown tired of the site…or maybe just the people I connect with on it. My friends’ status updates used to make me laugh, but now they depress and make me feel like a voyeur.

I feel the need to break away from my Facebook-tethered past and Google+ may help me to discover alternative ways to connect, share, and create. While Google+ may not rival Facebook anytime soon, this battle has serious implications for the sharing and connecting that goes on within your organization.

Basically, it puts even more pressure on your organization to employ or develop tools akin to top social networking sites if you want to enable your employees to connect and create value. We at CEC see many companies wasting tons of time and money on employee-sharing platforms that simply can’t compete with employees’ personal options.

Fortunately, there is one company that we think has a solution to rival its Facebook “competition.” The MITRE Corporation.

An Opportunity to Be Seized

We’ve recently profiled MITRE’s social networking site, “Handshake,” as one of the best that we’ve seen. The name “Handshake” alone conveys the intention of MITRE to create an online experience that mimics those we have in person. CEC members, you can dive deeper into the case study and learn why it works better than your average SharePoint MySite or other clunky technologies. For everyone else, imagine a hybrid of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Match.com that suggests content and people of interest based on your online activity. (Note: Handshake also connects MITRE employees with people that they work with outside of the organization. Hence my profile screen shot above!)

The REALLY cool thing about MITRE’s platform that I wanted to share with you here is that it creates a whole new opportunity to measure value at organizations. And, if your Corporate Communications team owns or co-owns the intranet and internal social media tools, imagine what this means to your efforts to demonstrate the function’s value and creativity!

Of course, MITRE started off measuring the usual suspects—participation (over 61% of MITRE’s 7,000 employees use Handshake), number of discussion threads and groups, and time on the site. Their philosophy, which I agree with, is that they need to drive critical mass participation of the platform before they are truly able to assess how it is being used to support the business.

“Use Cases” > Volumetrics to Signal Success

To do just that, MITRE is beginning to conduct “use cases” to study adoption, motivation, incentives, and impact of the tool on the business. MITRE will ask individual users and groups to state their business goals up front. MITRE’s team will then follow up at a later time to assess which factors helped or hindered in the attainment of the original goal. These use cases will help identify ways to speed adoption, remove barriers to achieving value, and institutionalize best practices. They may be in the early stages of tracking these new metrics, but they are already hearing encouraging stories about employees’ using the tool to create value in ways otherwise impossible*. Examples below:

Innovation

A MITRE scientist was tasked with envisioning what the company’s workforce will look like in the future and how it will need to adapt to support emerging needs. He launched a discussions group called “MITRE 3.0,” where over 1,000 employees contributed ideas to help him envision future needs and work practices. Because participation cut across titles, roles, and regions, he feels confident that he has input from the entire organization to develop new ways of working.

Networking and Idea Sharing

One MITRE employee vented his frustration that the company was no longer hosting show-and-tell exhibits for internal research projects. In response, other employees suggested that, together, they should host a science fair. Without corporate encouragement or prodding, employees got together, in person, to share ideas, meet people they previously hadn’t known, and spot opportunities to work collaboratively on related projects.

Collaborative Problem-Solving

Here’s a fun story from the Corporate Communications team. The team used Handshake to create a MITRE Alumni group to help identify MITRE employees in historical photograph archives. Monthly, the team shared photographs in Handshake and asked employees to help identify who was in the picture and where the event took place.

How to Get Started

As you think about your own internal technology tools, how are you assessing their value?

If you’re just getting started, don’t simply rely on volumetric measures to determine success, but think about ways to measure whether:

• Employees capture value from these tools — that is, how indispensable is it to their success at work?
• Employee create value from these tools — that is, which employee behaviors are enabled by the tools that contribute to your company’s strategy?

I’d love to hear other creative ways you’re determining why and how employees are using technology and communication tools at your company.

CEC Related Resources

• Peer Learning Platform (The MITRE Corporation)
• Internal Social Media Vendors
• Ongoing Evaluation of the Intranet and Internal Social Media
• CEC Intranets Working Group—to ask your peers “how do I…?” questions
• Building a Change-Ready Organization: How can I enable employees to build a stronger network of support?

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Q&A: Overcoming Stakeholder Pushback to Implement Internal Social Media
• How Low-Effort is Your Intranet?
• “Usability Is Our Obsession” – UniCredit on Internal Social Media

*Laurie E. Damianos, Donna L.Cuomo, and Stan Drozdetski, “Handshake: A Case Study for Exploring Business Networking for the Enterprise, Inside and Out” The MITRE Corporation, 202 Burlington Road, Bedford, MA 01730, USA