Feb 08 07
Shel Holtz - The Intranet Advantage
Noted communication expert Shel Holtz joins us to discuss his recent book The Intranet Advantage. Renn Vara talks to Shel about how to properly use Intranets for corporate communication, and how to use them as part of an internal strategy as opposed to the entire strategy itself. Content includes RSS, intranets, landing pages, blogs and more.
Click here to play this interview.
Renn also provides a communication tip (see our CommTips blog for more), giving a simple method for formatting impromptu speaking ops. Called upon to talk at a meeting? To present unexpectely? Listen to this tip.
Full transcript after the jump
Scott Sigler: Welcome to More Than Talk, a monthly conversation about corporate and executive messaging. More Than Talk is produced from the San Francisco studios of SNP Communications, creating and implementing messaging strategies and training for leaders of Fortune 500 companies since 1992.
Renn Vera: Hello! Thanks for joining us. I’m Renn Vera. On this edition of More Than Talk we’ll be talking with Shel Holtz, author of the book, “The Intranet Advantage: Your Guide to Understanding the Total Intranet and the Communicator’s Role”. Shel has more than 30 years of expertise in the field of organizational communications and his area of focus has been in using online technology for strategic employee communications. Shel, welcome to More Than Talk.
Shel Holtz: Thank you, pleasure to be here.
Renn Vera: The book has a lot to do with how communicators inside corporations use intranets. Can you first tell us some of the common mistakes that you see being made with intranet communication?
Shel Holtz: One of the big mistakes that a lot of organizations make with intranets is that they perceive that it is an opportunity to publish out to employees rather than configure information based on what they need in order to get their jobs done.
The reason a lot of people don’t use the intranet is because they can’t find what it is they’re looking for on a task basis. The reason people go online to the intranet is because they need to fill out a form; they need to know what the policy is around a certain type of an issue.
There’s something about their job they need to get done and if the intranet can’t help them do that faster, better, more effectively, more productively than the old ways of doing things people would revert to the old ways.
So, as opposed to being a platform for people to publish at, it needs to be a platform for employees to get their jobs done. And most of them are configured that way either for a navigational or hierarchical standpoint or even from the point of view of the content that is up there.
Renn Vera: What should they be doing as it relates to getting information now?
Shel Holtz: Well, I think there’s a variety of things. One is making sure that the news is on the home page, so employees see it even if they’re navigating to the content that they need in order to get their jobs done. And they see succinct, articulate headlines that tell them what’s going on.
I think that you can also couple email with the intranet. In fact, I’ve always defined the intranet as ‘the Internet inside your organization’ and therefore email is a part of it. Push email out to people. Let them scan the headlines and click to the full story on the intranet if they interested in it and implementing RSS on the intranets so that employees can subscribe.
People get these emails in every company I’ve gone to, email that has one news item and it says, “The sales server will be down for an upgrade on Saturday morning between 1:00 and 5:00 am.” And employees go, “I don’t need to know that.” Let employees who need to know that subscribe to the IT or the server update feed so that they can learn that and everybody else can be left alone.
Renn Vera: You know, Shel, what you’re hitting on actually, you’re describing what news organization or network news organizations do with their news consumers.
Shel Holtz: Exactly!
Renn Vera: And why is it that the corporate communicators then don’t use what they know that works in the outside world? Why they don’t use it inside?
Shel Holtz: I think a lot of IT departments are unaware of it, which is not a slam on the IT departments. They’re killing themselves maintaining legacy systems, working insane hours just to keep the Lotus Notes databases running.
But I think there’s a lack or awareness, a lack of understanding. I’ve talked to people in the IT who say that they’re still working on RSS as a concept because they want to figure out what the server load is going to be, like streaming video or something. I think that people just don’t understand it, they haven’t looked into it and they don’t know what is it yet.
Renn Vera: Or they haven’t translated that which they know into the corporate environment yet.
Shel Holtz: That’s true too. Yes.
Renn Vera: So then, let’s talk about a little bit about this idea of landing pages and portals with in the intranet. There’s a series of landing pages that exist out there now, and departments to all these websites and to all these landing websites. Why is that a mistake? What is the pitfall for them?
Shel Holtz: It anticipates or it expects that employees are going to know which department owns the information they’re looking for. And I think that’s a hell of a presumption. I think in a lot of instances, employees have no clue which department owns the information that they are looking for. It also puts the taxonomy in the hands of the department.
I worked with one organization where nobody could find the mail room. It turned out it was because it was called Document Delivery Services and nobody there looked for it under that jargon. If it were constructed from the point of view of the employees, that clearly would have been labeled as the Mail Room, regardless of what it was officially called..
Renn Vera: Why do we do that?
Shel Holtz: Well I think part of it, goes to the history of intranets which were originally a lot of departmental sites created on the fly that were eventually aggregated under a menu, in sort of a federation model. And to take that after it has really expanded and evolved into thousands or tens of thousands of pages and completely redo it under a philosophy that says, “This is going to be focused on how employees use it rather than content they want to push out to them.” That’s a hell of an undertaking. It’s time consuming, it’s expensive and a lot of organizations that already don’t perceive substantial ROI from their intranets just aren’t interested in investing that kind of time and money.
Renn Vera: Which does makes sense on a practical level. You talk also that the strategy behind communicating, that they’re leaning very heavily on the intranet and you’ve described so far some misuses of that. But over all is it a bad strategy to use the intranet for all communications?
Shel Holtz: Well I think so, there’s nothing wrong with housing communications there, but then there are couple of things to keep in mind.
First of all the intranet is purely a poll. You know I have a friend who has this wonderful line he uses when he does talks on this. He says, “Here‘s something that you’ll never hear the employees say, ‘Honey, no breakfast for me this morning. I got to get work early because employee communication says “New Content in the intranet” and I got to get in there and read it’”.
Employees, as I said before, are very task- focused. And if you put on the benefits homepage that November 15th is the deadline for enrolling for your benefits this year, you got to expect that 99% of the employees are going to miss that deadline because they had no reason to go and look at that page. You’ve got to consider the best method of communicating a particular message and sometimes you know that’s going to be posters on easels in the hallways.
Renn Vera: What you’re saying is we should be looking at a comprehensive approach, not abandoning other forms of communicating, like you said the poster on the hall. Even a town hall meeting where you get everybody in a room.
Shel Holtz: The face-to-face continues to be one of important and influential forms of communication. It’s the one roll of hardwired for and it’s critical. Prints continue to rock. I mean, you can still take print with you and read it on the bus or the train on the way home. You can mail it to people’s homes.
And one of the nice things that I used to like about employee publications was employees took them home and put them on the coffee table and the spouse would read it. And the family had the sense of investment in that organization. You can’t do that with the intranet.
If you had a 3,000 word story explaining why you’re earnings where the way they were, people would sit and read that. They could take it to bed they could it take to the bathroom. You don’t see people doing that with their laptops.
Renn Vera: If I would use an analogy with this, this is like the combination and the usefulness of newspapers, magazines, radio and television in our modern world. We don’t abandon one for the other. They all kind of combine to provide different elements of news and entertainment.
Shel Holtz: Right! New media don’t kill old media. Old media tend to adapt. They have to look strategically if the audience were communicating with. I talked to one guy. You’ll love this. He was the Vice-President of Communications for a very large telecommunications company. And he told me that they had abandoned print all together in favor of the intranet and I asked how many of these employees had access to the intranet. And he said 45%. And the rest were out in the field, digging ditches and installing phones and stringing wires on telephone poles.
And I said, “Well, how you get information to those guys?” And he said, “We send an email every week to supervisors telling them what they need to communicate to those employees.” So you can imagine it, incredibly inconsistent delivery of messages from supervisors to employees. If they could have put that in print and sent it to all those employees, they would have had consistent message delivered to every one of them.
Renn Vera: This is a common mistake that happens when new media is introduced. People feel that they need to abandon the old to adopt the new .
Shel Holtz: First of all, the metaphors that we used for the intranet, and the Web frankly, are very comforting. We talk about publishing webpages. Well you’re not publishing, you’re ftp-ing. And it’s not a page or anything even remotely like a page.
So this is the lingo that we’ve adapted. And I think for senior management, they say, “I can publish pages without paying the cost of print. They look at the short-term dollar savings without looking at what it does to productivity, job satisfaction, commitment, engagement, and those types of issues that have bigger dollar impacts down the road.
[Theme Music]
Scott Sigler: You’re listening to More Than Talk. We’ll be right back with Renn’s interview with Shel Holtz, author of The Intranet Advantage, right after this communication tip
Renn Vera: And now for this week’s tip. As a leader, you’ll never know when you’re going to be called upon to give an on-the-spot opinion or be asked to participate in some sort of impromptu speaking engagement.
Here’s a little formula you may want to try. It follows the journalistic method. It goes like this: tell them what you’re going tell them, tell them and then, tell them what you told them. It’s basically that three-step model. And here’s how we do it in practice.
It’s a four-step process. Iit begins with a words, “I have something to say about,” and whatever that topic is. The second part is, “The way I see it,” and then explaining the way you see it , which is really where you give your opinion. The third part is, “The reason I see it that way,” and then you explain why you see it this way. And then you end it with, “So that’s why I say this about this topic,” basically following the formula: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them.
Try this the next time somebody catches you in the hallway and ask for your opinion on the given topic. And that’s it for this week’s tip.
CommTips is a blog created for corporate communicators with short monthly communication tips aimed at executives and their audiences. For more CommTips, go to www.snpnet.com and click on the CommTips button on the left hand.
Scott Sigler: You’re listening to More than Talk. Let’s get back to the interview with Shel Holtz, author of The Intranet Advantage.
Renn Vera: Let’s go back for a quick to the intranet itself and try to define again for us what are some better ways for corporate communicators to be using the intranet to communicate with their people.
Shel Holtz: I think one of the things we should look at is the use of some of the social media that has evolved over the last few years. There’s still a perception among a lot of organizations that only people who are authorized to publish to the intranet should be allowed to. Meanwhile out on the web, we have blogs and wikis and social networks and Myspace.
To give you an example, you going into most organizations and go to the employee directory. And you have to know the last name of the employee to be able to use it. Why can’t you have a Myspace type of utility on the intranet that says, “I’m looking for somebody who speaks Tagalog and programs in C++,” and get a list of people who put that in their profile and turn that into a knowledge directory.
Why can’t employees share their knowledge in their blogs? Because of a philosophy that says employees are wasting their time if they’re doing this stuff and not doing their work, as opposed to perceiving it as a new way of getting your work done. So I think employing some of the collaborative tools that are out there is one way that the intranet can be vastly improved.
Another is through the use of content management systems so that the people who are publishing to the intranet are not just those who have taken the time and trouble to learn how to code in html. Make it easy for people to contribute knowledge, contribute news, contribute resources that other employees could find valuable and useful in getting their jobs done.
Renn Vera: Are you talking about things like wikis?
Shell Holtz: Yeah, absolutely.
Renn Vera: And for those folks who don’t know what wiki is, describe what a wiki is?
Shell Holtz: A wiki is a collaborative website where anybody can add or edit content that has been published to it without having to know html, which is the scripting language of the web. It’s a much easier scripting language.
For example, just add asterisk in front of a line turns it into a bullet. So there are companies that are embracing that. By and large, most organizations still see the intranet as a very close place where only people who have been given the authority can publish. So that’s a very limited number of people sharing their knowledge.
And this goes way back. There were organizations 10 years ago that wouldn’t consider a message board or a forum on an intranet because then employees would just waste time as opposed to seeing it as a place where employees could share knowledge.
Renn Vera: Going on that, are you seeing some companies beginning to adopt these ideas or are you thinking we’re so early in this that this are still considered radical ideas?
Shel Holtz: Oh, they’re still considered radical. There are definitely some companies doing it but they are the exception to the rule.
Renn Vera: If you put your crystal ball out there, do you think this is something that is going to be adopted over time by corporations?
Shel Holtz: Oh eventually yeah, absolutely. I just think what you’re going to need is for management to see that there is some practical value in this. There is some, I hate to go back to the acronym, but ROI, that they can accrue from the use of the intranet. I think most management still see the intranet still see as some sort of necessary evil because they have to have a repository of this content, which is mostly forms and org charts and the like.
Renn Vera: We got a bit of library somewhere.
Shel Holtz: Right.
Renn Vera: This is all terrific, Shel. Anything else that you want to let our audience know about?
Shel Holtz: The one thing that I see a lot of organizations dealing with this is notion of a portal, which I usually an IT project. And when they say portal, they’re saying Portal with a ‘capital P’, as in a software implementation project. SAP, Peoplesoft, these are the kinds of organizations that are promoting these projects. They usually cost a minimum of a million dollars and take at least a year, and most of them fail.
And the reason they fail is because primarily there are not enough portlets, which are the little content containers that go on a portal page, from which employees can choose in order to have one-page access to all the resources, tools and information they need to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis.
They usually go in there and there are 14 portlets and half of them are things like weather for your town. So you got a very nice portal and no reason from employees to customize it. So it’s seen as an IT project rather than an employee knowledge or employee communication project
Renn Vera: Will the Google search help with this, if you have for instance a search tab so you could just type anything you want. Is that a solution or is that not enough?
Shel Holtz: Its better than a lot of cheap and free and ancient search engines I see on a lot of intranets. But it’s still not going to help if the content is not tagged appropriately or the words that are in the page are not what people what are looking for.
I mean, Google only finds what’s out there, and if everything says ‘Document Delivery Services’, then you’re not going to find the Mail Room. I would like to see organizations embrace internal versions of del.ici.ous, for example, the social bookmarking site.
So if I find ‘Document Delivery Services’ and tag it the Mail Room, other employees can find my tag and get to it. And by the way there’s an external sevice that is providing that for intranets. I don’t know how well-known it is but…
Renn Vera: What it’s called?
Shell Holtz: Cogenz. C-O-G-E-N-Z.com . It’s a del.icio.us-type service for intranets.
Renn Vera: Well, Shel. thank you so much for sharing your time in this.
Shell Holtz: My pleasure.
Renn Vera: Good luck with the book!
Shell Holtz: Thanks a lot!
Renn Vera: That was Shel Holtz of Holtz Communications and Technology and author of the book “The Intranet Advantage: Your Guide to Understanding the Total Intranet and the Communicator’s Role”.
