Organisational Wikis – Build Your Knowledge Base

Okay. So we’ve all grown up watching Dr Phil and Oprah. We all, therefore, are well-versed in the importance of communication; both within a interpersonal relationships and within larger-scale relationships such as that between employers and employees.

Plainly, if we don’t talk to one another, problems don’t get solved, highs and lows aren’t shared and individuals feel isolated. On an interpersonal level, this results in crazy-nuts divorce rates. On an organisational level, it results in wasted resources and high staff turnover.

I promised you a few articles on the outcomes of the HR Futures conference and will dedicate the next few blogs to fulfilling this promise. One of the most fascinating points arising from discussions at the conference concerned organisational Wikis. For example: Bearing Point’s Mike2.0 I’ve worked within big companies. I understand the culture of wanting to guard information from employees. Marketing and HR can be protective about how much information they like to be released. For this reason, the concept of having an internal wiki, where staff can blog and interact on forums, adding information to the knowledge base over time, is terrifying. Companies regard it as a threat to cohesion.

It’s kinda a form of censorship, isn’t it? But we all know, suppression of viewpoints, the gagging of folks with bereavement or complaint about a community – it simply doesn’t work.

The use of the wiki within a company can have benefits. Internal communication is enhanced in a cost-effective and time-effective manner:

• A new employee to a company can post a blog introducing themselves, and current employees can welcome them. This is how community is built.

• General information about company direction can be enhanced. This is an extension of the open-door policy championed by many forward-thinking CEOs. However, it is much more time-effective than having a literal open door.

• Where groups within an organisation are working on projects, all members can be kept abreast of developments, thereby making the need to constantly email and CC everything redundant.

• People external to the oragnisation can make contributions to knowledge and projects, thus enhancing extra-organisational links and relationships.

• A well-used wiki can allow people to work from home. The advantages of this are enormous for work-life balance and for cost-cutting.

As a society, we need to shrug off this constant need to be right, to protect incoming and outgoing information. One of the main problems with how organisations manage staff concerns the way communication takes place. It is often seeped in censorship and riotously funny officespeak. Wikis allow for an open and honest discussion within a society. The discussion may go places that are uncomfortable. Information exchanged may not always be “correct”, but this is most certainly offset by the enhanced relationships between people and the speed and efficiency of relaying messages through this approach.

HR Futures Conference Take-outs

My wife, she’s always saying how much she loves a good wedding. Once an invite comes in the mail, she gets excited and speaks of nothing else until the day of the event. And then after; after she wants to debrief about it…how did I like the bridal dress, what about the food, wasn’t the food just delish. All that. Me? I’m not big into weddings.

But I love a good conference.

Last week I attended Michael Specht’s HR Futures conference. The event was a one-day intensive get together, with a focus on directions for HR and recruitment. Industry experts like Thomas Shaw from Recruitment Directory, spoke about Web 2.0 in recruitment. It was great to get together with some of these folks, many of whom were nothing more than blogs on a screen before I had the chance to meet them.

Anyway, just as my wife likes to debrief about her weddings, I like to break it down about conferences. (I promise, what follows will not include an assessment of anyone’s outfits!)

1. Social media in recruiting is on the radar: the take-home story on this is that most folks acknowledge the social media form of recruiting is the way into the future

2. Enterprise Wikis will form the future of content collaboration within an organisation

3. Blogs/comments should be seen as a vehicle for discussion for an organisation not something to fear. The term “social proof” was kicked around a bit by me. This describes validation from sources outside an organisation. I’m not keen on the word “proof” now. It denotes something definitive. I prefer the term “social-evidence”.

4. Job boards have some work to do to be part of the social recruiting platform.

In all, a good show, with heaps of blog-fodder. Stay tuned as I unravel, in blogs to come, some of the predictions about future directions in recruitment.