Making the business case for an ESN — Virpi Oinonen at IntraTeam Event Copenhagen

Virpi Oinonen @Virpi is famous for her business cartoons and is an enterprise social network evangelist and consultant.

Virpi has two up-coming ESN workshops, one in Dublin, and one in Birmingham UK.

Employee engagement is a side effect of good use of an enterprise social network. The priority is to have a purpose for your ESN, it should help the organisation achieve objectives and solve problems.

We need to find out what hurts, and see if social communication can help.

An ESN connects employees to solutions – many brains are better than one brain. Email hold and kill knowledge, an ESN frees people to help others. Conversations endure, and can be referenced by others (outside the original conversation) again and again in the future.

Don’t simply install and roll-out an ESN across the organisation, instead, experiment and give the ESN to a few teams who need to communicate and collaborate on a certain specific problem.

Managers may believe that they have all the information they personally need – but funnily enough, when they ask for something, people jump to give it to them. That’s not the experience of all employees. Email is not efficient, effective, or even fast.

If you’re emailing more than three people, it’s likely that your conversation should be in a Group on the ESN. Doesn’t have to be on the open general channel of the ESN, teams and colleagues can have specific Groups of channels for projects and topics.

Do you mean to be, or say, that you are an agile responsive organisation? Then empowering everyone to connect and work with everyone they need is an obvious step forward.

• Download Virpi’s presentation

Virgo Oinonen @voinonen Get people to use your ESN. Beautiful "comics" to illustrate! #IEC16 pic.twitter.com/OHfoQ0OjmC

— Stefan Hult (@StefanHult) March 1, 2016