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Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums - which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

In speaking with many marketing executives in recent weeks it became apparent that many companies are still using their marketing department as a dumping ground for people who are no longer fit for other jobs - sales people who no longer want to sell, developers who cannot code anymore, or customer service people who are tired of hearing complaints.

I thought that this behavior had disappeared in the late 80’s or early 90’s, when many companies started to realize that marketing was actually one of the most strategic things a company could do - apparently not.

If you don’t staff your marketing department with the best possible people, then how can you expect them to deliver? You might as well get rid of it all together…

Have you noticed how many people talk about other employees as if they owned them? “I was talking to my marketing director”, “have you met my lieutenant?”, are common occurrences in corporate speak.

If the person you are talking about has some sort of loyalty to you, then that type of speak may not bother him or her. If there is no personal loyalty, that person probably resents being talked about in that fashion.

But even if there is some sort of personal loyalty - does it really belong there? If you answered yes and your are in a position where other people report to you I suggest that you get a good career counselor, as your world is about to be rocked pretty hard.

The answer is of course NO. An employee’s loyalty should first and foremost be with the customer - no matter what the person’s position in the company is. Next in line are their peers, followed by the product or service that customers are “hiring” from your company. As a manager, you don’t even make it on the list.

Oh, and by the way, just in case you did not get that memo either - those same people don’t work for you either. Hopefully they work for the customer, but whether you like it or not, they work for themselves.

Many organizations worry about how employees feel about their management, their owners and their companies, and what they might say about them about it in public. The paranoia is so high that the number non-disparagement agreements that employees are asked to sign is at an all time high - with some companies going as far as making people sign non-disparagement agreements that cover their entire family.

Focusing on controlling what employees might say about you in public is a sure road to killing any possible enthusiasm and passion around your company, its products and its management. What companies should do instead is to focus on figuring out how employees feel about themselves in the context of being employed with the company. If you can help employees feel good about themselves, then they will automatically feel good about you and your company, and you would never need non-disparagement agreements.

Just like you cannot control what your customers say about you, you cannot control what employees will say about you either. In fact you should take a totally different tack - encourage your employees to talk about you, and deal with the good and the bad that comes out of that.

It is disturbing to see how technology-phobic parents and teachers can impose restrictions on all of our kids which can result in missed education opportunities, or worse strange behavior towards technology and the Internet.

One such example appeared on the BBC News web site today, where they report that teachers have called for web sites such as YouTube to be shut down as part of efforts to prevent pupils and staff being bullied. Wow - how dangerously stupid! I mean, cannot they just adapt new techniques to avoid bullying online instead of calling for the shutdown of those sites? I bet you the next thing they will do is to prohibit access to YouTube and sites like it for all the kids in the their schools - a really dumb move.

That is exactly what happened to my son. He has been to computer camp over summer for years now. The first year they let them do whatever they wanted on the web. Then they started prohibiting online games during recess times. It got progressively worse to the point that this year they can no longer go on the web. A computer camp without being allowed to surf the web - that is almost as bad as a tennis camp without tennis courts. What are they thinking?

I can just see some worried parents who have no clue what the web is all about, outside of the sensationalized (and disgusting) stories of the pedophiles who find their victims online as promoted by Dateline NBC and other such programs, asking the school to not allow their child to access the web for fear of being stalked or being approached by bad people. This being a very litigious society, the school lawyers are probably choosing to have all access prohibited rather than just limiting access to those kids whose parents are clearly clueless. And the unfortunate result is that kids like my son, who have been online since they were still in diapers, and who have learned how to stay out of trouble online, much like we were brought up to stay out of trouble offline, can no longer enjoy their computer camp and have to give up the learning that they are yearning for.

Sure there are bad people online, and while I am not sure how the online percentage of bad people compares to bad people in the real world, I suspect that the number is actually lower. But it does not matter, even if it is higher we cannot rob our children of the education that will make them competitive to meet the needs of a few Luddites. We have to develop methods to teach them how to stay out of trouble online the same way we thought generations of people to stay out of trouble offline.

[Tags: YouTube BBC online access education predators]

In the latest issue of Forbes, which is jam packed with articles on the power of networks, some better than others, they are also announcing their new Corporate Org Chart Wiki - a collaborative application that enables people to document the internal networks of any corporation.

While there is currently not much up there - the thought of having ordinary people, including company insiders and outsiders, collaborate on the creation of the real networks inside companies is a fascinating experiment. Of course, that only works if employees are not afraid to speak up - which seems to be a persistent problem in most companies.

[Tags: influence networks org chart]

The latest issue of FAST company has an interesting article on how the traditional business organization is meeting democracy and how that could radically transform the way we think of enterprises in the future.

It’s not a new notion - the idea of the “externalized” project-based organization and talk about the impact of the disappearance of friction in communication, cooperation and collaboration on traditional corporate business models and the power that goes with it have been around for a long time. It has become an agreed upon fact that in this interconnected world, size and scale of an organization no longer ensure viability. The notion that only large companies have enough resources to market their products to mass markets of consumers, and to fund serious scientific research, has been shattered for a long time. According to the article, recent scientific breakthroughs in the area of nanotechnology may now break one of last remaining reasons for large companies to exist - namely that they are the only ones having enough capital to build and run manufacturing plants. Heck, even Caterpillar now thinks of itself as an “intellectual property company!”

So are we moving towards a world of a billion single-person enterprises? Probably not soon enough…

[Tags: future of work organization 2.0]

In a couple of different discussions (on this blog as well as on the Future of Communities blog) I was taken to task over the suggestion that a company could eliminate their marketing department and replace it with customer communities much like what happened at Ducati.

Over at the Future of Communities blog I looked at what it would take to replace a traditional marketing department with a more lightweight community-based group - concluding that while you may not want to get rid of your marketing department, you should definitely look into making it much more community-driven.

[Tags: communities community management marketing community marketing]

That is the new way of working at Best Buy, which was written up in both Business Week and the New York Times.

Imagine this - not getting rewarded for face-time in the office but instead for getting projects done, all meetings are optional, work from the beach, work while hunting, work from the road, you chose - as long as your projects get done!

This new work environment at Best Buy is called Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE. By next March, 75% of all Best Buy corporate employees will be on the program. A modified version of the program is also under development for people who work in stores - although it is a little harder to imagine how face time will be eliminated in those customer-facing positions.

Sure, there are a lot of companies that have gone virtual over the years, including pioneer HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems. But no company of this scale has ever taken it to this level - allowing for a great deal of employee self-organization.

Interestingly enough the program did not come from the top down but instead began as a covert guerrilla action that spread quickly and eventually became a revolution within the company. The top brass at Best Buy really needs to be commended for embracing this change instead of killing it. These practices have been tried in many start-ups, only to be killed when VC’s bring in the “professional” or “seasoned” “senior” managers.

Come to think of it, many innovative things get killed or never see the daylight when those “guys” move in…

[Tags: virtual office face time future of work self organization]

Communities are hot - with every other company rushing to deploy them to enhance their innovation processes, their new product introduction success ratios or their customer satisfaction ratings. Yet at the same time most companies seem to be very busy destroying what is perhaps their most important community - their employee community. And they are doing it by affecting one of the fundamental forces that drive communities - trust.

Indeed, according to the American Management Association (free but requires registration - via “It’s time to start trusting the workforce” article by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Business 2.0 - not yet online), 76% of companies monitor employee web site connections and 55% retain and review email messages. The number of companies tracking telephone calls, including amount of time spent on the phone and phone numbers called has grown to 51%, up from 9% in 2001. And this does not include companies who require periodic medical checks and random drug usage tests.

So while the balance of power between consumers and companies has shifted towards the consumer in the last few decades, the balance of power between employees and companies has clearly shifted towards the employer. We have to give up our right to privacy in return for a paycheck. And what good does that do? Employees at companies like that feel disenfranchised, lack motivation, distrust their company and management, badmouth the company, etc… Not exactly the motivations that can lead to great results.

The good news is that employees can bail - and with a strong economy, hopefully many at those “big brother” shops will do just that. According to the Business 2.0 article, signs of this happening are already here, with the number of executives, salespeople and production personnel exiting their companies more than doubling since 2003, and with the number of technical and professional people who leave going up 70% in that same time period! Maybe someone will start realizing that the cost of labor in high employee turnover environments goes through the roof. Just ask Walmart - where recent research on their low wages vs. employee turnover compared to Costco’s makes for a well documented case study on the impact of employee turnover ratio vs. the real cost of labor.

It all comes down to “return on information.” If employees do not see personal benefits in return for the personal freedoms they give up - they will bail. With employees being perhaps the most valuable asset a company can have, it is amazing how many of them squander it in the name of “control.”

[Tags: employee communities employee relations work environment trust]