PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

The new era of community
value
Connecting many thousands of
geographically dispersed global employees
can seem daunting. However, two trends
ease the difficulty of this task: the first
is the rise in self-organized behavior of
individuals within the enterprise, and
the second is the development of nextgeneration,
social-enabled communities
which achieve connections and bridge
white space.
The dramatic and continuing rise in usage
of the social web across all demographic
groups has increased the everyday
employee’s familiarity with transparent,
interactive online behavior, leading to
an equally dramatic change in cultural
behaviors both outside and within the walls
of most organizations. As a direct impact of
this trend, employees have
become increasingly comfortable
knowing, and sharing, more about
themselves and each other, setting the
stage for increased connectivity.
Rather than looking to discourage these
connections, leading organizations are
harnessing this trend by channeling the
desire for connection into value-producing
communities. These communities may
have many purposes — improving technical
competency, problem-solving, innovation,
customer or partner relationships, or
affinity groups, to name a few — but
perhaps just as crucially, they serve the
vital purpose of segmenting an enterprise
of thousands of people into smaller, more
human-sized units (Dunbar, 1993).
Well-functioning communities are crucial
for the formation of well-functioning
ties. They can provide a mechanism for
“ These communities serve the vital
purpose of segmenting an enterprise
of thousands of people into smaller,
more human-sized units.”
employees to build up social capital,
form personal networks based on shared
interests and experiences, and develop
trust with one other. Engaged and vibrant
communities can quicken time-to-value for
new employees and become an incentive
for them to remain, while also serving
as a vehicle for capturing and retaining
the knowledge of employees leaving the
organization — creating greater cultural
durability in good times and bad. These
communities can become the keepers of
intellectual capital, continually refreshing,
refining and extending it over time — as well
as archiving it via a process that satisfies
shifting compliance requirements. They can
create a channel for employees to provide
value, as well as a channel for recognition
of that value in a compelling and credible
context — and at the scale and level that has
maximum impact on the individual.
Communities can also promote innovation.
Once formed, many of these communities
can — through a combination of active
management, competency development,
training and engagement programs —
be effectively transformed into small
startups within the enterprise. Generation
and harvesting of pioneering ideas from
within and across these “intrapreneurial“
communities can provide crucial
differentiation in crowded product and
capital markets. And coordinated correctly,
this small office culture can be distributed
among employees who then feel loyalty to
the same set of organizational priorities —
no matter where in the world they may sit.
For these communities to flourish and
provide differential value, they must
be explicitly sponsored, appropriately
resourced, and actively managed (see
Figure 1 and 2).
For enterprise executives looking to the
future, the skills used in managing and
driving internal communities to create
value can directly translate into market
differentiation. Strong and weak ties
already span the boundaries between
suppliers, partners and customers — they
are not, however, being invested in at a
rate or level that equals their potential
value. This is especially true with external
engagement for those enterprises with
historic legacies and flagship brands.
By investing in strong community
management skills today, executives
can take a first step toward developing
talented mangers for tomorrow’s
external communities.