Slides from Kelly Osborn at the U.S. government's National Archives, from an event January 16, 2014, Driving Employee Engagement Through A Social Intranet.

1. Driving Employee Engagement
through a Social Intranet
Kelly Osborn
Community Manager, National Archives
Kelly.Osborn@nara.gov
January 16, 2014
National Archives Office of Innovation and the Federal Communicators Network

2. THE PROBLEM
Facts about NARA:
• Lots of people work in lots of different places
(more than 40 facilities nationwide)
• Brain drain caused by retiring staff
• Outdated technology
• Risk-averse agency culture
• Buried expertise
• Shrinking budget

3. Also?
According to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey Results,
we’re consistently one of the worst places to work in the
Federal Government, and we don’t trust our leaders.

4. THE PITCH
Can we make a positive change at the National
Archives by empowering employees to foster
communication and collaboration from the
ground up, instead of the top down?

5. Internal Collaboration Network
Our Internal Collaboration Network
(ICN) is a platform that uses social
media-based software to enable
staff to better
communicate, collaborate, and
build communities. Its features are
similar to those found on social
networks such as Facebook and
LinkedIn, but are used in a
professional context.

6. But what is it, really?

7. Useful functions
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Profile pages
Contacts (“friends”)
Groups
Workspaces
Status updates
Discussions/Forums
Tagging
Project Management
Blogs (team and
individual)
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Wikis
Team calendars
Robust search functions
File sharing
Ratings and polls
Announcements
Flags for abuse
Social bookmarking
Mobile capability
(eventually)

8. Step 1: Find a champion

9. Step 2: Identify and clarify your objectives
• What is the business need? Determine this
first. Then look at technology. Then think
about design.
• What goals can reasonably be accomplished?
• How do you measure success?

10. Explicitly state what you want your
network to accomplish
• One NARA (transfer best practices/knowledge across NARA
units)
• Out in Front (building our internal infrastructure with
innovative tools)
• An Agency of Leaders (empower staff throughout the agency
to lead)
• A Great Place to Work (opportunity to participate and
collaborate, allowing for trial and error; encouraging
creativity, using technology to empower staff)
• A Customer-Focused Organization (improve work
processes, get answers to customer questions quickly)
• An Open NARA (make internal information, including
decision making, accessible to staff by default)

11. Step 3: Research
• Talk to other agency networks, internal
stakeholders, and vendors
• Find out about best practices and lessons
learned
• Ask, “What’s the worst thing that ever
happened?”
• Useful phrase to use for fellow govies: “Might
you share that documentation with us?”

12. Define requirements by gathering
input from EVERYONE
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Legal Counsel
Human Resources
IT Security
Records Management
AFGE (Union)
Acquisitions
Policy
Social Media
Web Programs
Knowledge Management
COOP (Continuity of Operations Plan)

13. Address “risks”
• What if someone says
something mean or
negative on the
network?
• What if people waste
their time on the
network?

14. Best practices from other agencies
• Find out what your users’ “pain points” are and make
sure the system addresses these issues.
• Usability is key. Make it “stupid simple” to use.
• You can likely address most concerns about the
network (legal, HR, union, etc.) in the terms of use
policy.
• Recruit subject matter experts to serve as community
leaders.
• Don’t allow anonymous postings.
• Don’t spend too much money on the system, but do
carefully calculate the true costs of different options.

15. What have these networks done for
other agencies?
• Revolutionized knowledge capture and transfer
(“wikified” US Army field manual)
• Uncovered hidden talent so every staffer can fully
contribute to the mission of the agency (State
Department’s expert locator)
• Captured and shared “unwritten” knowledge (State
department’s procedures for visiting dignitaries)
• Prevented duplication of effort (DoD’s Aristotle project
search)
• Diversified working groups (NASA’s Spacebook
expert/interest search)

16. Step 4: Get ready, because the rest is a
long slog, all uphill

17. “Where’s the ‘real’ work?”
Steve Radick, “If You Want a Culture of Collaboration, You Need to Accept the LOLCats Too” (January 5, 2012;
http://steveradick.com/2012/01/05/if-you-want-a-culture-of-collaboration-you-need-to-accept-the-lolcats-too/ )

18. It’s all just puppies and kittens!

19. It’s NARA, but it’s still not work, is it?
• 250 replies
• 2400 views

20. Information exchange
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56 likes
Almost 600 views
20 comments including a follow-up from Micah

21. Collaboration
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800 views
34 comments
About a dozen different parts of the agency

22. Innovation
• 300 views
• 46 replies
• Input from across the country

23. The complex relationship between an
"information" intranet and a
"collaboration space"
• Different audiences require different levels of
access (employees vs. contractors, for
example)
• Intranet as storehouse for official documents
• This is a conversation, not a press release

24. Managing stakeholder relationships
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Make your critics early adopters
Encourage conversation
Share liberally
Write an “in case you missed it” every week
Help your users write content that people
want to read

25. Measuring engagement and using that
to inform a broader strategy
Technology adoption lifecycle: Everett Rogers’ bell curve

26. 1% rule of Internet culture
1% of the population creates the content that 9% edits or comments
on, while 90% view and silently judge you.

27. Identifying issues preventing wider
adoption
• Managers nervous that their staff will make
them look bad
• “I don’t have time for that” (and neither does
my staff)
• Work conditions and access to computers
• Technology flaws

28. Separate the issues
• Technology problems are fixable!
• So are training issues
• But technology alone will not solve a culture
problem

29. Take your community seriously
Kelly Osborn
Kelly.Osborn@nara.gov
@kellygo