November saw the Employee Portal Evolution Masters event arrive in Berlin, and while we weren’t there ourselves we kept an eye on the #epem hashtag on Twitter, relying on our contacts in the intranet community to keep us abreast of the latest developments.
We couldn’t cover anywhere near all of the #epem chat in one post, but that’s not what we’ve decided to do with this blog post; rather, it was one tweet amongst the many that caught our eye and got us thinking.
@lukemepham, who we’ve mentioned before as a particularly perceptive intranet tweeter (check out his blog at http://www.intranetjob.co.uk/), was watching a presentation given by one of the organisations involved which was aimed at addressing social media as a way to encourage community; during this presentation, it seems that the company in question explained how they employed social media on their intranet in a really rewarding way for everyone involved, and that their users may have enjoyed the initiatives as the company itself benefitted from them.
However, it seems that the resulting KPIs taken from the initiative in question missed out one important element. As @lukemepham says: “Oh shame, none of the kpi’s were about fun. Nobody measured how happy it made people. Missed opportunity?”
It’s a very valid point. Of course, the organisation in question seems to have set out to measure a defined set of data from its social media initiative, conducting that initiative to great success, and getting the positive KPI data they wanted – job done, within the terms set at the beginning of the exercise. But outside of that data range, there could have been a whole host of other information and statistics (or metrics for US English readers) that may be somewhat less immediately tangible, but could be of equal importance to the success of a social media initiative, and of an intranet as whole.
Those stats/metrics would be about happiness; about fun; about how much users enjoyed the social media initiative, and how much they enjoy using the intranet as a whole, both in conjunction with and in comparison to the initiative in question. You might say that happiness is a difficult thing to measure (relative or absolute? subjective or objective?) but getting data on happiness is something that various people and organisations would like to do, not least the UK Government with its plan for a ‘Happiness Index’. You can debate what such measurements would tell you, and how you would go about taking them (good article on this subject from the BBC here), but there are ways you can measure happiness.In fact, intranet people do it all the time to gauge user satisfaction.
You could use your intranet’s polling tool, if you have one, for one-click surveys, you could use more complex forms with workflow (again, if you have them), you could make intranet satisfaction part of people’s annual reviews, or you could always use the good old-fashioned method of just talking to your users about it. You have to make sure that people actually like using your intranet, that they actually want to log on to it without being forced, because intranet usage becomes a chore then you’re going to drive people away.
Of course, discussing how you can make your intranet enjoyable to use and so keep your users happy is of course a big enough subject for a million other blog posts – from content strategy to available functionality, and everything in between – and you can find a few related posts elsewhere on Intranet Ideas, but the main point is really that @lukemepham was absolutely spot on.
Fun and happiness are essential parts of intranet usage and strategy, whether you call them that in so many words or make it a more formal debate about usage statistics – they’re two sides of the same coin, to use a cliché. If you make your intranet exciting to use, you won’t have a problem getting your users on there and using your functionality, and your KPIs will come out looking great. Even if you don’t rate happiness as a traditional KPI, it underpins all of the other KPIs you can possibly measure. Make sure that you don’t forget about it.
Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.
Is Happiness an Intranet KPI? – Intranet Ideas…
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Its a fine line with Intranets. Still see companies a bit afraid of the word “fun” when it pertains to their Intranet.
Tim,
Indeed – this seems to have been the case here, with “fun” being seen as unimportant to business goals.
Do you think that it’s just a question of terminology? That is to say, the business benefits created by increased usage – that is, the “fun” factor – are accepted as useful KPIs when presented as such, but disregarded when the ‘F’ word (Fun, of course!) is used to define them?
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