Information is power – give power to the people!
I try to keep to the principle that I should tell staff everything unless it has to been kept confidential, rather than the ‘need to know’ basis that some people use.
As an example I started a blog at our company about five months ago. Except this isn’t one of those boring CEO blogs where I tell everyone what I have been doing and how important I am and after a few months everyone is bored and it stops being posted to. This blog is completely open for staff (there are about 150) to use and communicate with:
- any member of staff can post to it (anonymously if they wish), just by sending an e-mail. Most of the posts are news of what is happening in the organisation so everyone is up to speed.
- anyone can comment, again anonymously
- we run polls on issues to find out what everyone thinks and we always go with the majority decision. If it is an issue which is already decided then we won’t run the poll, what’s the point, people have to trust the process
- There is a suggestion box which can again be posted to anonymously
- People can sign up for things or make choices through forms on the site
- Subscribing by e-mail is an option and over 40% of staff subscribe this way. There is an RSS feed but there is only one subscriber – we haven’t got the most tech savvy staff!
What this has given us is a very active company blog with over three posts a day, plenty of comments and suggestions and staff that feel involved in decision-making. It also means I don’t get hassle for simple decisions.
For example, at Christmas we always give an extra day’s holiday but each year it changes which day it is on depending on when Christmas falls. This year we ran a poll and 70% chose Jan 2, so that is what we are going with. In previous years if I had just picked this date the 30% would have complained that I had got it wrong, now they can see that it is what the majority want so they won’t complain.
When we first started plenty of people said to me that there had to be more controls and having freedom for anyone to post anything anonymously would be a problem. In fact no-one has abused the system at all and everything that has been put up has been useful news. Anonymous posting has allowed people who are nervous about commenting or posting to be able to do it without fear of getting into trouble, and I get a much more honest picture of what is going on. Anonymous posting has been really important to get things working.
I strongly recommend you think about setting up something similar but the key is to keep it as open as possible. Trust people not to abuse the system, they probably won’t.
I’m thinking about how to use wikis next but I haven’t figured our what they are best for, any ideas?
1 Comment
October 10, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Nice information….The idea that people act responsibly is really novice to some but the right way to build success.