But studies show it’s taking much longer for employees to ramp up and get work done. 89% of new hires say they don’t have the optimal level of knowledge to do their job, and the typical mid-level manager takes 6.2 months before they start to add more value than they have consumed. That’s a lot of time wasted. In fact, IDC estimates that the average worker spends up to 35% of their time just looking for information in general.

A day or a week of employee orientation is typically not enough. Effective employee onboarding is a much more in-depth and ongoing process. Organizations using enterprise social networking, however, are seeing accelerated learning from day one.

Scania, a global organization known for building trucks and buses, is using enterprise social networking to reduce the time and cost of on-boarding new employees. Their service organization, one of their largest growing and revenue producing business segments, provides road-side assistance and maintenance for more than 1500 dealers worldwide. But preparing team members to handle a wide variety of scenarios and logistics—everything from emergency assistance to insurance matters—can take up to a year. So the service team started using tibbr to share knowledge and improve their response time to emergencies. Team members were able to deepen their expertise in a wide variety of areas and situations by connecting with the right experts and accessing a history of solutions to address their customers’ needs, ultimately saving time and costs.

Employee onboarding needs to be simple and easy. Managers shouldn’t feel burdened with the task, and businesses shouldn’t spend a lot of time and money on training. Effective employee onboarding enables employees to easily navigate and access the people, files, data and conversations they need to start making an impact from the beginning.

To see how effective employee onboarding works, try tibbr for your organization.

On June 13th, tibbr customers Pasi Nikkanen, Head of Digital Channels at Tieto and Karrasch-vom Steeg  of Allesklar, will share stories of how they were able to drive instant business results throughout their organizations. Other agenda items include a tour of the tibbr Apps Marketplace, detailed use cases, and a panel of experts discussing how to increase a collaborative culture within organizations. Located at the Allianz Arena, home of the Bayern Football Club, this event includes an exclusive guided tour of the stadium. More information available here (in English) and here (in German). (with links to both reg pages. )

Registrieren Sie sich hier:

http://info.tibbr.com/201306MunichEvent_MunichEvent2013-06GR.html?src=sales_em

Agenda and registration page:

http://info.tibbr.com/ENMunichEvent_Registration.html

Any enterprise social networking platform needs to be friendly to the slow adopters too…

Everything is hectic. One employee is complaining that they can’t find a certain file. Another employee’s sporadically emailing people to figure out if they should add tax for a particular PO. Sales reps are calling to figure out what stage the contract is in.

There’s no avoiding the scramble at quarter end. But a couple years ago, the TIBCO finance department found a way to make things a little better. By using an enterprise social network, the finance team streamlines accounting close information and communication, and even enhances collaboration with their auditors.

Saving Time & Not Making Mistakes

To increase efficiency and reduce errors, employees share best practices on a private subject within the network. One employee advises that his teammates add tax for orders from Spain; another employee explains that a certain vendor is always being charged tax when they shouldn’t be and offers tips on how to recalculate. The subject works as a live Q&A, for employees to search and reference, helping them find in-depth answers and eliminate errors.

Cutting Out the Email Clutter

“Before tibbr, I was always cleaning out my inbox all of the time,” said one employee from the finance department. With almost 90 people on one email distribution list, employees would receive hundreds of emails, many of which had the same title.  One email, for example, had 60 replies which everyone was CC’d on. Employees would have to open each one to find out if it pertained to their work.

By moving email conversations over to a private “Accounting Close” subject on tibbr, employees see a transparent history of the latest reports, conversations and so forth. Employees post status updates, so everyone knows the latest stage without sorting through their inbox.

Bringing Reports into a Social Context

Much of what TIBCO finance does is based within financial applications. Currently our ERP management system pulls reports (transfer reports, general ledger reports) and sends automated messages into tibbr, so the right employee from finance knows when to get started on the next step. The messages include links so employees can go back to the original report destination. Before, the process used to be email heavy, but now employees don’t have to email each other to know when something’s processed. Plus, they can post messages, provide further details and collaborate in context of the latest reports to help make better decisions.

A Better Handoff to the Auditors

Typically auditors are handed a flash drive or receive a secure transfer with all of the necessary requests, but now the finance teams shares all reports securely on a tibbr private community. According to our auditor, the new way “gives us an opportunity to work directly with the right people.” Otherwise the auditor would have ask who to talk to with follow-up questions about specific reports.

“One thing when you’re dealing with auditors, they’re always asking ‘where is this?’” said a TIBCO employee. “tibbr provides one place for them to find it.” By providing a history of documentation (contracts, invoices, purchase orders etc.), tibbr saves the finance team time from answering (often repeated) questions.

So, rather than running around asking questions, getting bogged down by emails or experiencing analysis paralysis because they’re spending way too much time looking for errors, folks in finance can focus on close responsibilities, deal processing, financial analysis and other daily business activities.

You don’t have to look further than the uprisings across the Arab world to recognize the power of social tools, and this transformative power applies to business as well. But for an enterprise social network (ESN) to be genuinely useful, it needs to go beyond the “Facebook for enterprise” model.

In evaluating the usefulness of any social platform, here are four essentials to look for:

1. Getting work done faster. Enterprise social networks are more than giant digital water coolers, and this is where ESNs need to rise above the typical consumer social experience. Social in the enterprise is not just about “following” Sarah in finance, but following your expenses and getting status updates on them. It’s not just about knowing which songs your friends are listening to on Spotify, but “listening” for changes to your purchase order. Not just about sharing and commenting on posts, but acting on posts (e.g., from your business apps). Not merely checking into a location, but actually getting relevant business information about your location and surroundings.

2. Information where and when you need it. As our mobile devices blend into our work lives, for most organizations “bring your own device” is now a given, and any useful ESN needs to account for this. It should be native and fully functional on every smartphone and tablet, from an iPhone 5 to a 5-year-old BlackBerry and everything in between. Every office and individual has its own device and system preferences, and no one should be excluded because of this.

Beyond being device-agnostic, enterprise social must also leverage the unique abilities of our smart devices. Mobile adds the exciting dimension of location, which should absolutely be used to provide contextual information. For example, the same device that can check you into your favorite coffeehouse or movie theater, should be able to check you into a business location — or tell you when you’re walking past a warehouse palette which is running low and needs to be restocked.

3. Enterprise has secrets — protect them. Every business has secrets, and your social network should know how to keep them private. In addition to securing your data, this means being able to control access to info and conversations on a need-to-know basis. For instance, the sales department may ask the finance department to share some statistics and data they can leverage in their sales pitches, and instead of sharing their entire portfolio, the finance department can chose to selective share only the relevant data.Security clearance levels are not only cool in espionage movies — they are essential best practices for modern business.

Another important aspect of privacy familiar to any organization which does business across continents is that different regions have different data protection laws. Your ESN needs to be able to meet with compliance standards everywhere or it’s a nonstarter. [continued...]

Andre joined us for a webinar, hosted by Principal Analyst Angela Ashenden from MWD Advisors, to talk about how enterprise social networking is transforming business at Yellow Pages Group.

“In a digital world it’s more of a continuous sales cycle and customers will upgrade or cancel their products in a much more continuous and unpredictable cycle,” Andre said. “Our sales and marketing organization and our fulfillment organization needed to adapt to it. That’s really a profound transformation from our perspective, and that drove the need for a collaboration platform.”

Andre explained several benefits Yellow Pages receives from the tibbr social platform:

• Mobility – “Our team is highly mobile,” Andre said, with reps meeting with customers across the country. “We need to make sure that we enabled our mobile sales force and that we had very open communication both from a content perspective, but also from a flow of communication between the various departments. We wanted to make sure people could refer back to all of the conversations that took place.”
• One Central Place – Part of the reason Yellow Pages went with tibbr is because they wanted one place to centralize knowledge and interact with various tools they use: Box.com, Taleo, Liferay portal and so forth. Yellow Pages also deployed single sign on, so employees would only login once. “The solution is a composition of both software as a service as well as an in-house solution,” Andre said. “I think over time, this becomes the de facto way of doing things in enterprise deployment. … The solution is available for our employees whether they’re in the intranet or outside of the organization, whether they’re at Starbucks or from home.”
• Expertise Location – Rather than asking your colleague down the hall, “With a collaboration platform you broadcast your message and people are more easy to reach,” Andre said. To further leverage expertise, Yellow Pages also implemented a global search feature. “So with use of a simple keyword, people could find information from a different angle, from a different perspective, which makes those answers far richer than looking at one specific area.”
• Faster Onboarding – “There’s a history of conversations,” Andre said. “There is formal documentation and then there is informal knowledge, where you meet the people and discuss… Now people with access have a faster ramp up.”
• Interdepartmental Conversations – “We need to make sure the interactions between various departments were a lot tighter,” Andre said. With tibbr, “We have interdepartmental conversations that I think with other platforms would not have occurred.”

Along with the benefits mentioned, Andre added that they chose tibbr for it’s ease of use, multilingual functionality, advanced mobile apps, integration capabilities and security.

Just after a month of deploying tibbr, Yellow pages has had 25,000 posts. Plus, over 80% of users added their profile picture – a good sign of engagement. “The level of adoption has been very good,” Andre said. “The people in sales appreciate it a lot.”

Next week we’ll dive into the key steps Yellow Pages’ used to drive adoption. So stay tuned.

In order to “sell” the idea to management, here are five areas to focus on…

Hone in on What Your Boss Wants

Put yourself in your manager’s place and figure out exactly what goals need to be met. Is it obtaining profits? Onboarding sales reps faster? Or, meeting investor and shareholders demands? Think about their current goals, then decide on which business objectives will help them meet their goals. (For further insight, look at these 6 Questions to Ask Before You Buy-In to Enterprise Social.)

Make sure to include high-level, company-wide objectives, so other teams and departments can benefit as well. The power of the network lies in collective knowledge sharing, idea sharing, expertise discovery and more, so think big picture. Ultimately the objective should catalyze a community. Once you have your top objectives, hone in on the expected return, why it’s worth investing. This leads us to our next question…

What’s the ROI?

At the end of the day, executives want real numbers. But, unless an organization has some sort of process-centric metric in place, hard ROI numbers are difficult to come by for most communication tools (just try to calculate the ROI of email or phone calls for that matter). However, we can provide an estimate for the kind of improvements your business will see. In general, businesses…

• Increase Productivity - by 25% company-wide
• Increase Access to Experts – by 30% across the board
• Onboard Employees Faster – 77% experience faster access to knowledge
• Reduce Expenses – 40% report reduced operating costs
• Improve Innovation – 20% create more successful products and services
• Increase Customer Satisfaction - by 50% through collective knowledge sharing
• Cut Travel Costs – by up to 44%

Along with these statistics, it helps to include examples of how businesses have experienced quantifiable benefits. Here are a few to illustrate:

• In just 6 months after deploying a social platform, Cordelta, a professional services company, realized a 30% improvement in internal communication response times.
• Apache Corp., an oil and drilling company, uses enterprise social networking to crowd source answers to problems in an effort to cut over $700 million spent on trouble costs. Drilling advisor Randy Wagner said, “tibbr [enterprise social networking] has come at exactly the right time to get in there to make sure we know what’s going on with folks around the world and cut that 25% trouble cost.”
• iHealth Trust, a nonprofit organization in the healthcare sector, is helping the average health practice group save 50-70k a year by removing the need to fax patient referrals. As a replacement, the organization has over 12,000 physicians receive online medical referrals on an enterprise social network, where they can collaborate more effectively.

Anticipate the obstacles
Managers are great at foreseeing problems with a new project. As soon as you’ve decided on the most significant business benefits, try to figure out possible issues you might run into. Then provide a solution for each one. To get your head in the game, check out our article “3 Myths About Enterprise Social Networking Dispelled,” which will give you all of the information you need to address foreseeable obstacles.

Never Go Into Battle Alone
Before rolling out a social platform your manager wants to know whose onboard, so it’s critical to rally support from senior managers. Reach out to someone your manager trusts, like the head of HR or the director of sales. Sales managers and HR managers alike are always looking for new ways to onboard employees faster. Getting the right senior management involved will show the value of the project cross-functionally. Ultimately the best results from enterprise social come from a mix of audience-specific and company-wide initiatives. So proving that the senior managers see the value in this will only enhance your argument.

Time to Inspire
No matter how good your data is, how you present it to executives managers is everything. Along with showing how enterprise social will solve their business problems and illustrating real ROI-examples and figures, make them feel that the project is theirs to own and lead. Outline steps for how they can meet with various departments and executives to bring them on-board. Most social networks grow quickly, but need a little word-of-mouth marketing from the get-go. Show them how they can spearhead this company-wide initiative.

There you go. We hope we’ve given you all of the tips you need to approach executive management. If you have more questions, feel free to send us a tweet @tibbr.

The marketing team sets up a Dropbox account to share collateral; an account executive uses Yousendit to send a big file to a customer; an assistant logs in to Google Docs to save all of his notes; and a dozen or so employees just signed up for a free enterprise social network to collaborate on a project. Meanwhile, all of this goes unnoticed by IT unless someone like Ivan just happens to come across it.

According to Symantec Corp., 77 percent of all businesses have experienced rogue cloud situations, or unauthorized use of cloud services, over the past year. Of those businesses, 40 percent have experienced exposure of confidential information.

IT could easily setup a gateway to block employees from signing up for cloud-based services or apps, but this costs money and limits employees in some ways. The last thing IT wants to do is to slow down efficiency and prevent employees from easily sharing and accessing information. Even so, these apps come with a slew of challenges as well:

• No protection over the company’s informational assets
• Lost data due to inappropriate measures for backup and recovery
• Lack of basic security such as VPN connections
• No proper access control: lax username and password protection
• Limited infrastructure control due to individual sign ups rather than corporate accounts
• Lack of integration with current systems
• No top-down, company-wide deployment
• Limited ability for legal discovery

It’s no wonder Ivan is panicking over the kind of trouble he could get into. What if an employee comes under litigation, but there’s no way for IT to access all of their files? What if an employee leaves the company and suddenly a manager needs access to all previous assets? How much time and money could it cost to recover these sort of things?

Here’s how IT folks can get a handle on the situation. First, IT should have a security policy informing employees on where they can/cannot store or share company information. This policy needs to be information-centric and people-centric to allow optimal knowledge sharing and learning. Second, IT needs to adopt technology that is platform agnostic. For example, an enterprise social network or any communication tool needs to integrate with various applications and visa versa to essentially make information accessible and actionable from one place. At the same time, this platform should give IT the administrative rights to approve applications employees bring in to the company while still giving employees the freedom to explore and find applications they find most useful and efficient.

“Going rogue” isn’t always a bad thing, as long as IT maintains access to all proprietary information and employees can get everything in one place.

For a platform-agnostic enterprise social network that meets all your organization’s security requirements, checkout tibbr.

Enterprise social initiatives that have a clear and compelling purpose from the beginning tend to succeed. These should naturally motivate employees to use the network and see the value of participating. Employees should know what specific problems it will solve, what employees gain themselves, and what overall value it will provide their organization.

But, simply asking “What business problems are we trying to solve?” is a big question to start with. Let’s break it down further. The following questions will get you thinking about ways enterprise social networking can address some of your top business concerns.

o   How can you speed up the employee onboarding process?

Organizations large and small struggle to help employees locate the information they need. Files are locked in file systems, emails are kept separate, and managers don’t have time to train employees on where everything is or how things work. Onboarding can take weeks to months. A robust enterprise social network combines systems and content with a knowledge-sharing community, so employees can view a history of information and conversations—and learn much more than from a first-day training session.

o   Is it easy for employees to locate expertise within your organization?

Sometimes intranets and directories aren’t enough. Employees need to know who knows what within your organization. A new sales rep, for example, might need to find someone who has experience with a specific type of customer request. By searching conversations or simply posting a question to an enterprise social network, the sales rep can immediately discover and involve the right experts to potentially close the deal faster. Sometimes the best knowledge transfer happens simply by connecting employees to the right people.

o   Does your organization have a process for increasing innovation?

Sure employees generate ideas in meetings or even standing around the water cooler, but having a central place for employees to submit ideas is far more productive. The social element allows employees to critique, provide suggestions, and start involving the right players to make the ideas go to market faster.

o   How does your organization share knowledge, market insights, industry news, competitive intelligence and even customer feedback?

Via email? Hopefully not. Organizations need a way to leverage the knowledge of their employees company-wide without disrupting their day-to-day activities. Businesses use internal networks to share feedback on what customers are saying and the latest updates on what competitors are doing, ultimately enhancing their products and services. Enterprise social networking brings the latest information in, so employees can act on it and make more insightful decisions.

o   What projects do you need to deliver?

When it comes to delivering a project involving multiple people and teams, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page and collaborating in real-time beyond regular status reports. A Casino Resort company, for example, needed to roll out their new loyalty program to multiple hotels and casinos, involving many hotel managers and IT managers. Employees could view all communication on the project from one place within the network—reducing excess emails. Social platforms streamline the focus of the project with everyone onboard, and no one is left out on important messages.

o   How does your organization handle exceptions, escalations, even crisis management?

When exceptions happen, organizations need to escalate the issue and communicate with all of the right stakeholders to make the appropriate decisions. This can be for issues as small as a delay in a client’s shipment to much larger crises. The World Economic Forum, for example, uses enterprise social networking to discuss world issues with global leaders. If a Tsunami hits the coast of Japan, for instance, the Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe can post a video of himself asking for assistance. Minutes later, they can start collaborating on the most appropriate and quickest ways to provide the best support. Not all issues can be resolved with hard numbers and data. Social collaboration plays a big part in creating the best outcomes.

Most of us can’t leave home without our keys, wallet and smartphone. Our mobile device is not only our social line, but also our way to stay plugged-in to work. With over 30% of enterprise information exchanged on smartphones, it’s now essential for employees to be able to receive information and get work done from their mobile device. The latest release of tibbr’s mobile apps meets this requirement.

tibbr allows employees to take action on key business processes right from their smartphone. For example, a manager can approve purchase orders right from the enterprise social app. By supporting a variety of business systems, tibbr’s mobile app lets employees do their work from one interface.

56% of tibbr users already use their mobile device and tablets as the primary means to access tibbr. With this information in mind, we spent an inordinate amount of time over the last year analyzing user data, feedback and overall trends to provide a compelling mobile experience. This release is a culmination of these efforts. While it’s difficult to capture what we have done in a short blog post, I would characterize the release with the following…

Ubiquitous Access

From the $20 HTC phone to $600 retina-display iPad, we wanted to provide an experience that was feature rich, compelling, built from the ground up, while recognizing the form factor and key activities users perform on mobile. Businesses are looking for mobile apps that enable users to get work done in the context of their app, without leave that space and toggle between apps. Furthermore, to fit the needs of a diverse consumer market, tibbr is available for a range of mobile platforms, including Android, iPhone, and Blackberry.

From Consumption to Discovery

We are changing from a society that simply consumes information on mobile to expecting to discover that nugget of information that is relevant to me. Now tibbr users have discovery panels, akin to the enterprise social graph, and can find trending posts, people, documents and apps that are personalized and relevant to them, based on who and what they already follow.

From Consumption to Action

It’s one thing to access the things people are saying, but tibbr takes it to a new level integrating a variety of systems so employees can take action and get work done from anywhere. Users can approve expenses and other line of business items from one interface, without being chained to their desktop computer.