Prompt's TechBlog

Following on from the previous post, more membrane stuff.

It's not just the membrane between a company and its customers that's important. There's another conversational membrane to consider: the one between a company and its employees. That's not just one membrane, though, it's actually lots of them: between the board and managers; between managers and staff; between departments; between head office and regional offices; between individual employees; and so on.

Again, blogging could be the answer.

This time, in the form of an internal blog. Or more than one blog, perhaps. In fact, internal blogging could be a pre-cursor to launching an external blog; a safe way of getting staff used to the medium, of getting a company more attuned to the wider blogosphere before attempting to engage with it.

But how does an internal blog break down the internal barriers?

It gets people talking, people who might not otherwise talk. It gives them somewhere to talk.

Rather than sending an email around the company on a specific issue, why not blog it instead - leave it there open for comment, open for debate? People who haven't been involved in drafting it may have some excellent ideas - that frustrated overqualified graduate stuck in an admin job, for example; or someone in a department that's having a quiet period. Large companies are often full of untapped talent and spare capacity.

Even if a certain post elicits no ideas or comment, the fact that it's there at least fosters the feeling that everyone is able to participate in the running of the company; that there is a forum for people's ideas, indeed an incentive to have ideas. Particularly if people's ideas are seen to get a response. And if everyone is working towards the same goal, why shouldn't everyone have a voice?

Perhaps one of the least intimidating arenas in which people can raise their voices is a blog - less intimidating than meetings, for instance; especially ones with your bosses. Indeed, meetings aren't always the best places for ideas - often creative ideas only come with time to think. And once that idea does come, whether it be a comment or worthy of a post of its own, with a blog there's somewhere to put it. It doesn't even have to be fully formed, or something that the poster knows how to achieve - if it's on the blog someone else can provide the finer details.

Before I decided it was about time I tried to make it in writing, I worked in some dispiritingly bureaucratic places, places where management was remote and out of touch, where communication was neither timely nor immediate, where new policies (that usually made employees' lives worse) were heard about only when they had been implemented, where staff consultations were no more than amateurish questionnaires full of leading questions - I could go on, or rather I couldn't, which was why I left them all.

Believe me, it saps morale. It kills ideas. And it certainly doesn't inspire loyalty or a feeling of involvement and participation in common goals. And I don't just speak on my own behalf, at times the mood in some of those offices was as grey as the offices themselves (having grey offices probably didn't help matters either).

To be effective, a company doesn't just need to be aligned with its customers (see point 6), it needs to be aligned with its employees. The places I'm talking about, as far as I could see, weren't exactly aligned with either. And had an internal blog been introduced... well, things wouldn't have been instantly better; that would have taken some while. Still, it would undoubtedly have helped.

Perhaps, then, internal blogging will have the most impact for those companies where not too much is wrong, the ones looking to freshen up or push on.

Even in organisations where a radical cultural change is needed, though, there always has to be a first step, someone has to poke those first holes in the membrane. As first steps go, starting an internal blog could be one of the best.

Labels: corporate blogging, Hugh McLeod, web 2.0