Over the last few months, I have been working with colleagues on ‘experiments’ using social technology to help us better share our work internally and externally.
After many conversations across the team – both on Yammer, our internal sharing platform, and face to face at our team day in December (read more on that here), we have created an organisation-wide ‘experiment’ to see if we can all usefully share our work for the benefit of colleagues and our wider community. It will run for three months, which we hope will give everyone time to participate.
The aim of the experiment is to use social tools to:
1) Be better connected with DM colleagues
2) Share the work you do for DM
Why are we doing this?
Because if all DM colleagues were to share something each month we would have a lot of useful information about the work we do which we can use to market what we do and help grow what we do. Sharing one thing a month might not seem much but if all 40 of us do it then that’s potentially very powerful.
Sharing internally should help us work more effectively.
Why an ‘experiment’?
Experiments are a useful way to try out something new and to focus on what we learn along the way. We can make some assumptions about what the experiment will achieve and measure our activity to see if our assumptions were correct.
The basis of this experiment
There are two fundamental principles that underpin this experiment:
1. Colleagues are trusted to share useful and relevant information about their work
2. Colleagues can choose how to share useful info
The aims of the experiment:
1. To see if all colleagues are able to use social tools to share their work internally and externally
2. To see what form of sharing works for colleagues (will it be audio, images, blog posts) – it will be good to see preferences of colleagues.
3. To see how much content we create
4. To see what impact this has on our followers/interaction on social media and between colleagues on Yammer
How it will work
• Each one of us is to share (internally on Yammer and externally) something useful about the work we are currently doing for DM each month. Internal sharing will be done on Yammer as that is the platform we use and externally it can be done however someone would like to share something.
Measure of success
We will measure how much is shared and compare versus previous three months (on Yammer and externally) and look at the impact in terms of interactions/followers. We will also look at whether this has been useful for the organization and for all of us who have taken part.
I will also be curating all the information we have shared at the end of each month so that we can see what we have all been getting up to.
