The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, published last week, finds a deepening sense of distrust in governments, businesses and institutions. The annual global study, which questioned 30,000 people in 25 countries, reveals a dramatic shift in the value people place in information sources – which, in turn, has some interesting implications for communicators and intranet managers.

Across the globe, blame for the financial and political chaos of 2011 landed at the doorstep of government, as trust in that institution fell nine points to 43 per cent. In seventeen of the 25 countries surveyed, government is now trusted by less than half to do what is right. In twelve, it trails business, media and non-governmental organizations as the least trusted institution.

The private sector fared slightly better: trust in business fell from 56 percent to 53 percent, with countries like France and Germany, in the heart of the Eurozone economic crisis, experiencing double-digit decreases.

“Business is now better placed than government to lead the way out of the trust crisis,” said CEO Richard Edelman. “But the balance must change so that business is seen both as a force for good and an engine for profit.”

One of the biggest changes over the past year is the decline in trust in CEOs, which fell by 12 points. Faith in government officials fell like a stone too this year, down 14 points to just 29 per cent. It’s not unreasonable to assume this is reflected inside organisations too, so many will want to look again at CEO blogs as a means of increasing visability and trust in senior leadership. Over on Intranetizen, Jonathan gives some sterling advice on making executive blogs work.

Employee advocacy could be one way out of the mire. The survey found that credibility in average employees rose dramatically this year, so they are now the most trusted resource within an organisation. To capitalise on this, organisations must work harder to ensure their employees are informed and engaged – and then trust them to talk on the company’s behalf. This approach – what Edelman call radical transparancy – empowers employees to drive the conversation amongst their peers.

But to do this, organisations and leaders need to trust their employees first; companies which block access to social networks are preventing their employees from advocating on their behalf, and so missing a huge opportunity to engage with customers.

The barometer found people need to hear the same information about a company three to five times before they will believe it. This emphasises the importance of a proper communciations strategy which mixes on and offline channels to ensure the message gets out there. 

At the same time, trust in social networks as sources of information grew  by 75 per cent over the past year. Smart companies, then, will take advantage of this and embrace the value of conversations (by employees and the public) as a means of establishing identity and trust.

One corollary of this is that the growth in use of social networks, both internally and externally, means news travels fast. Employees can easily find information about their own company online, and all too often will hear (and believe) news from external sources before they do from their own manager.

This has huge implications for company transparency; corporate communciations structures need to keep pace with the changes. A good, social intranet – and improved access to these from a range of devices – gives organisations the means by which they can get their message to staff before they hear it from elsewhere. But this isn’t just a case of building it – leadership buy-in, and changes to the way corporate comms work with social intranets are essential to make it work.

Edelman’s report sets out long- and short-term approaches to rebuilding trust. In the short term, trust in a business is firmly tied to the bottom line. But future trust is more strongly linked to softer, societally-focused factors such as business ethics, placing customers ahead of profits and treating employees well. In the current environment, informed, engaged employees are best placed to communicate that message to the public – and intranets have a vital role to play in building that engagement.

Photo credit: Thorinside on Flickr

While UKGovCamp overwhelmingly focuses on how we use digital to engage with the public and improve public services, I firmly believe that to make that happen we also have to make public authorities themselves work better. So I was keen to have a session on intranets.

Fortunately, so was Stuart Murdoch of Surevine. It turned out to be a popular topic – so much so that we had to get a much bigger room. Stuart’s take on things was rather different from mine; he’s introduced social intranets at many organisations, and is a firm believer in social to make a better digital workplace.

Whereas I’m more critical of social for social’s sake, and feel the real value for intranets over the next 3-5 years is in transactional, making the intranet deliver real business value and helping people to do their jobs better. So this made for quite a lively debate, and we all had plenty to say.

Stuart contends that people are the most important part of intranets. I’d agree that the focus is fast moving away from documents and policies; content is no longer king, and the intranet is no longer simply a vast repository of HR documentation. Nor, the group felt, was the primary role of the intranet to push information at people.

A couple of people talked about the value of building a community around information. It’s one thing publishing hundreds of pages of HR policies, but barely anyone will be bothered to look for them. The social intranet could enable people to ask questions, and get answers from internal experts, who can then signpost them to information or resources they need.

One person suggested that “social can help you find the people in your organisation who can help you do your project”.

However, this is based on a simple fallacy; that these people want to be found. In almost all cases, in large organisations people are heavily silo-ed. An individual’s objectives relate entirely to the team or department they work in. Their performance will be measured on this, and in many companies (particularly in financial services) individuals will get financial rewards based on the value they deliver to their own team and projects – not anyone else’s.

If you work in Group Risk and someone rings you up out of the blue, having spotted that you speak Russian in the company expertise finder, you have no particular incentive to drop what you’re doing and help, do you?

Next we moved on to the question of what the intranet is and who it’s for. This isn’t as straightforward as it once was. Local authority intranets, for example, deliver content to council employees. But as departments are being merged into cross-borough shared services, and private firms and voluntary sector firms take on the role of service delivery, the simple question of who is the audience for an intranet isn’t at all clear-cut.

In such a diverse landscape, the one-size-fits-all intranet is no longer sufficient. Dan Harrison suggested we move beyond the idea of the intranet; the internet includes millions of sites, so why should the workplace web have only one? The answer is the heterogenous intranet, comprised of a variety of sites and services that meet the diverse needs of users.

Another participant gave the example of the RAF, which has different levels of intra- and extranet sites with different groups given access to each according to user need, blurring the boundaries between internal and external sites.

On the Twitter backchannel, Alex Manchester suggested the city as a metaphor for the digital workplace, with different suburbs and neighbourhoods that people visit for different reasons. Think of the corporate front page news as Piccadilly Circus, collaboration as Shoreditch, and the HR policy pages as Pinner.

We moved on to the question of how you encourage people to participate in social intranets. Most were, like me, pretty cynical about gamification, asking what value it delivers for either the individual or the organisation.

A few participants noted bottom-up, grassroots solutions often had more traction than corporately imposed ones. One example given was where a Yammer pilot was replaced with a corporate (Sharepoint) tool that quickly fell flat.

But bottom-up solutions often exist for a reason; where people find the tools they’re given at work aren’t up to the job, they’ll find their own – whether that’s using their Gmail due to tiny inbox sizes, or starting a Yammer network to collaborate on a project.

The key difference with grassroots solutions and small-scale pilots is that they are allowed to quietly fail. This process of trial and error enables people to find the right solutions that marry technology to organisational culture – a process that a big Sharepoint project is rarely able to go through.

A big variable here is organisational demographics; different solutions are needed for organisations full of knowledge workers and those with a high proportion of workers out on the coalface. But for both types (and all those in-between), the question of whether social functionality is what people actually want or need should really be asked before top-solutions are imposed.

Social is not an outcome. Making the organisation work better should be the desired outcome (measured in money saved, projects completed more quickly, enquiries dealt with, etc.). Social functionality can be part of the solution, but should fit alongside redesign of processes to make the intranet deliver real business value and efficiency.

McLuhan’s focus was language; he argued that language doesn’t describe that which is in the world, but rather, we can only see the world through the medium of language. Language is limiting; our tools don’t let us do whatever we want, but instead limit and often dictate what we do.

His thesis is that while the way we work, think and communicate have led to tools being designed the way they have, once this design is finalised it closes the loop and that tool influences how you think or behave.

To take an offline example, albums are around an hour long simply because this was how much music would fit on a vinyl record. But this persisted long after the physical media was replaced with one where length was no longer so constrained; the shared understanding remains that the art form of the album is “a collection of approximately an hour’s worth of music”. Even after the arrival of the MP3 player, the concept of the ‘album’ remains, with the download market set up so music can be sold in two sizes: single songs, or ‘albums’. An arbitrary decision about vinyl production has shaped the listening habits of four generations.

The same is certainly true online. It’s years’ worth of your reading and searching habits which determine the priority Facebook gives to updates from your friends. But this quickly becomes circular, so that in time you no longer see updates from some friends, and they’re filterered out of your life, while others get more of your attention. In the early days of Facebook, it was us – as consumers – who shared our updates, uploaded our pictures and moaned every time a new feature was rolled out.

But here we are years later, with Facebook serving us up a homogenised diet of updates (in a feed feature no one seems to like), stalking us across the Internet, and auto-tagging us in pictures – and we just suck it up. Because, well, what choice have you got? You’ve got to be on Facebook these days, don’t ya? etc.

As on the Internet, so in the enterprise. In its infancy, it’s the organisation that shapes the intranet, designing it around the needs of internal users. Or at least, that’s the theory. In truth, organisations get the intranet they deserve, with flaws and compromises and sometimes just bad decisions.

But thereafter, it’s the business that has to live with this, and it’s the people within it who have to suffer the consequences. The decisions you make at the design stage will affect the way employees work every single day, for years.

The language used on your intranet – from labelling to tone of voice – both reinforces and shapes company culture. So, too, does visual design, technology and content; all of these things say something about the type of organisation you are. They impact on engagement and retention. Claims to be a hyper-efficient organisation working at the forefront of technological change cut little ice with the workforce when they still need to download a form in Word, print it, sign it and post it to apply for remote access to your network.

Intranet design shapes the way the business works. Done well, social functionality can break down silos, enable people to work more effectively and support flexible working. Done badly, design costs money – in reduced productivity, disengaged staff, abandoned processes and channel shift. A badly designed form might be a necessary compromise right now, but it’s a big bundle of irritation that could be annoying colleagues long after you’ve left.

What do we do about it?

1. Don’t make your intranet bad in the first place. This seems obvious, but it happens all too often. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard intranet managers describe the latest feature on their intranet as “well yes, I know it’s a terrible idea, but the CEO’s insisting on it”. Time invested in getting all your senior stakeholders to sign up to the principles of User Centred Design early on will pay dividends later on as it gives you the option to suggest any Bright Ideas are user tested (and changed) before being bolted on to your intranet.
2. Identify your fail points and make the business case for making changes. Got a bit of functionality that everyone hates? Find out why, work out what it’s costing (not necessarily in cash terms – task completion time, or numbers of abandoned transactions are all powerful arguments for change) and sort it out.
3. Design for the organisation you want to be, not the one you used to be.
4. Focus on making things work the best way they can, not replicating offline formats or existing practices on the intranet. I’m yet to experience a single instance where anyone loves a printed document so much that they’d rather have a PDF than a page properly formatted for web.
5. Improve, all the time. All too often, intranets are seen as a project, to be overhauled over the course of a few months then left for another five years until it’s once again woefully out of date. Good intranets continue to innovate, adding on new functionality to support changing needs and deliver organisational goals.

It was McLuhan who coined the phrase the medium is the message. Your intranet is your medium; what message does it convey to your organisation?

It’s fair to say this has long been recieved wisdom for those managing internal forums and social intranets. By requiring users to post using their own name and logon, the theory goes, you encourage self-moderation. Intranet managers will tell you proudly that they’ve only had to remove a handful of posts in years of running forums.

For the most part, I think this is the right thing to do. Dave’s post alerted me for the first time to the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, which is as applicable within the firewall as on the greater internet.

But although it’s generally true, it doesn’t follow that it should always be the case. Anonymity does have its uses – many people (myself included) have a public and private self on the internet, just as we might reveal different sides of ourself inside and outside of work.

I wonder, then, if there’s a case for anonymity inside the firewall? Although that sounds like an oxymoron, it just might work, in the right circumstances. Hear me out on this one… If openness enforces self-moderation, doesn’t it also run the risk of encouraging reticence? Of silencing criticism?

An organisation which struggles to encourage honest critical dialogue might find they are better able to achieve this by giving people the anonymity they need to speak freely. 

Even where anonymity is given, it isn’t always believed. To give an example, in almost any organisation’s staff survey, around one-third of employees never really believe it is anonymous, and a sizable proportion of those will hold back on saying something negative for fear of the consequences.

The central issue is one of trust. To participate usefully and honestly in online forums, employees need to trust that their employer – an in particular, their own line manager – won’t hold what they say against them, or criticise them for having participated at all.

While most employers would say their senior management culture is one which is accepting of ideas, fear of line management – either real of perceived – is a commonplace even in otherwise well-functioning organisations. Similarly, people are often reluctant to say anything which could be perceived as being critical of immediate colleagues in case it upsets the apple cart.

Self-moderation does indeed enforce good behaviour, but the side effect of this is that it enforces compliance, silences dissent and prevents disruption. Yet disruption can be productive and useful. It generates ideas. It questions.

What would happen if you let employees hide behind a nickname and avatar and say what they really  think? Would they take part? Would you be surprised what you hear? And would you do anything in response?

Which brings me back to the issue of trust. Trust is a two-way relationship. For organisational dialogue to work productively, both sides need to trust each other. Employees need to trust managers to listen, and leaders need to trust their colleagues to make a useful contibution.

In some organisations, the cloak of anonymity could help to establish the first part of that trust relationship, and reassure colleagues that leaders are, in fact, really listening; once it exists, it’s easier to step out of the shadows with a greater degree of trust and openness.

And so, too for internal communicators. With so many colleagues away, decisions aren’t being made and there’s a dearth of campaigns, updates or announcements. This means publications are unfilled and intranet pages reek of last week.

But while the papers have an endless supply of celebrity trivia and the annual parade of attractive a-level students picking up their results, corporate communicators have no such luxury. So how do we deal with slow news days?

Catch up with old news. With some space and time to spare, have a look back at the past few months and think about projects or initiatives which didn’t get as much attention as they deserved at the time. Are there any updates? Can you report on progress? You might earn a few brownie points by giving them some publicity now.

Recognition. Hertzberg’s work on motivation found a significant proportion of people are motivated to work because of the recognition they get for it. With budgets tightening and under-inflation payrises talked about for many, now’s the time to focus on those non-financial rewards and motivations. By taking the opportunity to recognise the hard work our colleagues have been putting in, we can better motivate them to say, stay and strive.

Admit defeat. Silly season is an international phenomenon – one familiar in offices around the globe. With so many colleagues – especially those with children – away, making significant changes or announcements is always going to prove difficult; any important communications made now might be missed by those colleagues who are away.

Why not take some time to focus on some housekeeping tasks, to make sure your intranet is running smoothly, ready to hit the ground running in September (I’m tidying up our A-Z, which is proving more interesting than it sounds!)

How do you deal with slow news days on your intranet? Does it even bother you? Post your comments.

Now things have calmed down a little I’m looking at where we go next. Now we have a proper platform in place the options are – while not exactly unlimited – certainly wider than before. But where to start?

One of the (many) difficult things about intranets is that they’re behind closed doors. With websites you can just take a look at what other organisations are doing and nick all their best ideas build on best practice. With intranets, it’s not that simple – but it’s certainly possible.

I’ve been making a real effort to do this lately. First up was IBF24, a 24-hour live webcast from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. This blended interviews with industry leaders with live intranet tours from some of the world most prestigious companies, including British Airways, Ernst & Young, Thompson Reuters and the BBC.

This was an ambitious but hugely successful event, with over 700 practitioners joining in from 16 countries. According to IBF, around 100 questions were asked (though imho this number would have been a lot bigger if they’d engaged the Twitter stream more actively from the start).

Then last week I attended the Mastering Intranet Management course run by industry experts Melcrum. This was an excellent two-day event covering some of the key issues for intranet managers today, from building a business case to creating a governance model, and from communications planning to evaluation. It was delievered by Sam Marshall from Clearbox Consulting and John Baptista, a professor  of Information Systems at the University of Warwick. My only criticism was that it tried to fit too much into two days, but that’s perhaps inevitable given the wide scope of intranet management work.

Fellow delegates came from a broad range of public and private sector firms in the UK and abroad – and once again a highlight was the chance to take a look at other intranets and ask questions of those managing them.

At both IBF24 and the Melcrum course, a key theme was the need to tailor your intranet offering to your organisational culture. The intranets I took a peek at offered widely varying functionality and style – but each were successful as they met the needs of the company. So Clifford Chance‘s expertise finder and Ernst & Young‘s dynamic org chart people were both impressive pieces of kit, but not at all suitable for my own organisation (or, most likely, in each other’s).

Another frequent discussion was the evolution of the intranet. There was a strong feeling amongst many taking part that the term ‘intranet’ may not be sufficient anymore, with the scope of our work now encompassing collaborative workspaces, transactional services and much else besides.

IBF’s Paul Miller suggested that the intranet is on the way out, to be replaced by a broader ‘digital workplace’.

Whilst it’s true that intranets continue to evolve beyond their original one-way communication function, it’s probably too early to say the intranet is dead. Again, culture is king; in some organisations the digital workplace brings significant competitive advantage, but in others it’ll be a long time before online collaboration replaces old methods and face-to-face meetings.

The role of the intranet manager is to look at business objectives and organisational culture, and work to implement technologies that suit both.

It’s this marrying of technology and culture that makes looking at other intranets so interesting

I’ll be walking the talk tomorrow, presenting my own workplace intranet at IBF’s Intranets Live along with people from UNHCR and Oracle. Join us live online, and follow the Twitter stream – I’m guessing the hashtag is #IBFLive. (EDIT: wrong! It’s #intranetslive)

I’m following that up next week by taking my turn to present at Intranetters, a small regular gathering of London-based intranet types, and have arranged a few reciprocal show-and-tells with intranet teams in other companies.

Intranet management can be a solitary occupation; most organisations have one (or fewer) people with responsibility for the intranet, and even the biggest firms have only a small team. But by networking with other intranet managers and sharing ideas, problems and strategies we can all learn a little to take back to our own organisations.

This year’s Neilsen report found intranets are becoming a higher priority for organisations, intranet teams are growing in size, and increasing numbers feature mobile accessibility and social networking.

On the face of it, the improved functionality comes as no surprise. Mobile internet and social media has grown exponentially over the past few years. Our experience of using the web creates expectations of the kind of content and functionality we want at work too; as we rely on our iPhones to do everything for us when we’re out and about, we expect to be able to use our intranet on it too.

That intranet budgets and teams have continued to grow despite the long recession reflects a growing realisation that intranets can deliver real return on investment for organisations.

Significant and measurable returns can be made by making information easier to find – quite simply, less time spent searching for things is more time people can spend doing something worthwhile. Functionality like self-service HR can see sizable reductions in administration costs.

Less easy to measure, though, is the value of the intranet in improving engagement. Last year’s MacLeod Review on Employee Engagement (from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) found that more widespread adoption of employee engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.

Good intranets not only make life a little easier for colleagues, they improve communication, facilitate collaboration, enable people to connect and have their say, and help workers feel part of their organisation. This, in turn, encourages employees to say, stay, and strive.

Another study out this month, from communication research specialists Melcrum, would suggest organisations have heeded Macleod’s call for greater focus on engagement.

In the survey of 2,212 senior communicators, 40% said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of those who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organisation’s intranet in 2010.

The results of this study show that not only are organisations investing in good intranet design, but also in functionality and content. When asked about channels used for internal communication, the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide, with a clear majority believing webcasts and video would grow in importance in 2010.

Respondents highlighted a wide range of business benefits from investment in internal social media. These included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).

Both the Neilsen and Melcrum studies show intranets are maturing. Increasingly they’re moving away from being a simple repository of information and becoming instead a platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.

Victoria Mellor, CEO of Melcrum said: “There is a fundamental shift happening with how information flows inside an organization. Peer-to-peer online networks are enabling real-time feedback from employees to inform decision-making, not to mention facilitating collaboration between remote workers.”

With budgets tight, the pressure is on for organisations to demonstrate value for money. But with growing evidence of the business benefits of investment in intranets and internal social media, it’s clear they’ll play an even more important role in 2010.

After spending some time lolling about on the beach, throwing shrimps on the barbie and wandering around town wearing a hat with corks on, I decided to head out of the city for the obligatory bush walk.

As I drove out of the city in search of some bush to hike in, I realised that Sydney is huge. It takes literally hours to reach the city limits. My (Australian) host explained that this is a result of Sydney’s short history.

Sydney: this is where it all began

You see, although the area around what’s now Sydney Harbour was home to Aboriginal settlements for many hundreds of years, the modern city is a relatively new one.  The roots of today’s city began with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. This was a ragtag band of soldiers, convicts and a few entrepreneurs looking to make a few quid.

They set up camp in the area that is now central Sydney, naming it New Albion. From these humble beginnings the city has grown. And grown. And grown.

As a city built largely in the age of the car, on land that is seemingly limitless, Sydney has  become characterised by urban sprawl. In fact, it’s now the third-largest urban agglomoration in the world.

It struck me that the story of Sydney is very much like that of your average corporate intranet. Most began life, like New Albion, as a bit of a side project, with no clear aims or objectives.

Sydney's urban sprawl 1917-2031: a bit like your intranet

And just as land and resources seemed limitless to those looking for their quarter-acre plot on which to build a family home in Sydney, so too does seemingly limitless server space encourage intranets to grow exponentially.

An explosion in car ownership enabled Sydney to grow to its present proportions. Similarly, the emergence of piss-easy CMSs meant that anyone can be an intranet’s content author, allowing them to add to the urban sprawl of your corporate intranet.

So, just like Sydney, the history of many intranets means they’ve become bloated and difficult to navigate.

But this is where my metaphor falls down.  Sydney householders would certainly be a bit miffed if you were to knock their homes down or move them to somewhere a bit more sensible. But for intranets, that’s certainly possible.

Here’s are some ways to prevent or fix urban sprawl on your intranet:

1. Decide what your intranet is for. An obvious point, perhaps, but it’s important to set clear objectives for your intranet.  Think not only about what you want to achieve, but how the intranet will help you get there. Be both specific and realistic.
2. Get to know your audience. The intranet should reflect the culture of the organisation. Adding discussion groups to your intranet will not make people want to participate if there is no existing culture of participating within the organisation. Find out what users want, but speak also to those who don’t use the intranet much to find out why.
3. Best before end. Set expiry dates for all content pages, with owners or authors required to review them at set intervals to ensure they’re still accurate and up-to-date.
4. Is this yours? Pages without owners are the intranet equivalent of those boarded-up houses along the North Circular. If no one cares enough about the content to take responsibility for it, it’s likely few would miss it if you were to delete it.
5. Remember the law of diminishing returns. Every additional piece of content added to your intranet makes it a little bit harder for the user to find the actual information they need.
6. Help people find their way around. Investing some time and money in getting your information architecture right will soon pay for itself.  Don’t just rely on the main menus, though: use the left-hand navigation lists and the footer of each page too. Help people get back to the section home,  the home page, and to other related pages. But people have different ways of looking for things, so a good search engine and A-Z are needed too.
7. Raze your city to the ground. It’s not an option that’s open to city planners, but there are strong arguments for scrapping your intranet and starting again. A clean slate gives you the chance to get your information architecture and governance structures right, before developing your content from scratch so it really meets the needs of your audience. This nuclear option is an expensive one, but one that shouldn’t be dismissed entirely.

Over the coming months I’ll be thinking a lot more about intranets and how we can make them better. What are your tips for keeping your intranet fit for purpose?