Why your organization needs a town square
Anyone who has spent enough time listening to founders of successful companies will soon realize that one idea starts to pop up quite a lot. It's that no matter what the product or service is, just as important as the technical stuff is getting the culture bit right.
Businesses often invest in online project management and collaboration spaces. This is seen as an obvious need by many organizations to help drive and track productivity. But what if there was a need for another kind of space that businesses don't recognize?
Investing in a social space for your organization can pay dividends in the long run. No matter what kind of employee engagement activities you plan, nothing can replicate the magic of people coming together and sharing thoughts and ambitions organically. When it works right, it can act as a town square for the organization.
Let's take a look at some ways in which it can help.
Allowing anonymous employees to question the CEO
Communication in an organization shouldn't be a one-way street. But unfortunately, in many businesses, it is.
Businesses need to realize that there must be an exchange of ideas and opinions instead of top-down communication. Communication must flow both ways between the company's management and the larger workforce — voices from the lower rungs of the hierarchical ladder should also make their way up. This makes a company more adaptable and resilient.
In the absence of such channels, the management can react to issues only when it's already a bit too late – for example, when a product issue that was known internally to a small group causes customer backlash, or when some internal employee discontent has been simmering and intensifying over time. With two-way communication, the management can identify issues and scope for improvement or change. It means addressing issues closer to when they develop or emerge rather than when they have reached a boiling point.
By allowing anyone to start forum discussions, social platforms such as Zoho Connect facilitate bottom-up communication. It gives the leadership visibility into the easy-to-miss details and a crucial worm's eye view. And it gives employees the chance to inform the actions of the leadership.
Our CEO and a panel of our leaders conduct a weekly open house session that is open to all 18,000+ employees. Employees usually start posting their questions for the CEO on Connect an hour or two before the session starts. Anonymous posting is enabled so this means that it allows employees to speak their mind and ask questions relevant to them. The open house session acts as an osmotic interface — in both directions. It allows leaders to touch upon future policy shifts or challenges faced by the company, and it allows employees to raise issues that are bothering them. This means that no party is caught off guard and when major changes happen, they do not seem as if they were imposed on them.
Unleashing innovation
A surefire way to stifle innovation in a team is to stick to the same perspectives, voices, and ways of doing things. Ideas come to life when different perspectives come together.
This is why businesses need a place where employees can share ideas and suggestions freely. It can help an organization become a fertile hotbed for creativity.
For example, an employee recently made a forum post asking for ideas to streamline feature requests. Ideas, screenshots, and flowcharts poured in from other teams, and employees were eager to contribute and share their knowledge/experience. The contributors included the current CEO of Zoho.
A good social platform can help teams source ideas from the rest of the organization. In Zoho, thanks to Connect, this is something that keeps happening.
Let's take our writing at The Long Game: we published a piece that came to be purely because our colleague (from a totally different team that handles our appointment scheduling app called Zoho Bookings, and sitting 300 miles away) happened to share his experience and learning around his experiment with honest marketing on Connect. The comments section for this Connect post was buzzing with employees from across our organization stating how the experiment inspired them to think outside the box.
Sure, ideas can also be shared, perhaps in a large group on a messaging software. But at the end of the day, there are limitations to text messages.
On a social platform, however, ideas can be developed into elaborate and comprehensive pieces. Well-thought-out arguments can be made. Teams can lay bare case studies of their work, helping other teams gain insights to refine their processes, catch or leverage some trend they may have missed, hone in on some new technology, identify a new market, figure out a new strategy, etc. The list is endless.
Letting your vision and values trickle down
This is an obvious one and something we have gotten into in our other blogs.
It is hard to overstate how beneficial it is for a company to have a solid vision and philosophy for being that underlies the organization. When there is a value system in place, this then needs to permeate every level of the organization. This becomes complicated when the company scales and there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of employees. Sure, the founder's personal value system can influence employees in a small business, but in a larger company, is this possible? This is where having a social platform can really help disseminate values across the organization.
Having a virtual town square is why we don't just get monthly business updates from our CEO but also his musings and observations as he travels through Germany on what sets small and medium German companies apart from their global peers.
Letting the hive thrive
When a social platform works, it can become a repository of wisdom, inspiration, creativity, strategies that have worked, strategies that did not, tales of perseverance, interesting anecdotes, etc. Sometimes, the best things in life are those that you cannot quantify, and having a bustling town square for your organization is something you can't put a price on.
