Talking or listening ? What does your intranet reveal about your management style?

Guy Kawasaki wrote a post in his blog How to change the world about a talk given by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Guy's favorite quote was "You don't learn very much when you yourself are talking".

I was struck by how this comment applies to intranets that are too top-down (which is the case of most).

Intranets are the ideal tool for management to listen to employees, which of course means bringing a strong bottom-up dimension to the intranet.

Unfortunately, most intranets do not know how to listen.

A few suggestions...

• Have feedback buttons on all pages, where employees can respond to the authors of the pages
• Run frequent short polls on the home page, and share the results with employees
• Don't be afraid to ask real questions, such as: "does the intranet help you save time?"
• Then publish the results, with no editing!
• Initiate a blog from someone in management and  leave comments open
• Let people rate content pages, noting them "very useful", "helpful", "nice to know"
• Start an entreprise-wide encyclopedia like the Wikipedia, and let people define the organisation's vocabulary and acronyms

More ideas...?

Technorati Tags: intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet strategy, intranet2.0

Comments

[giacomo mason]

instant polls about organization directly in home page

every news is open to reader's comments

let news and document's organization open to rising behaviours (e.g. most download documents)

Tak the list of Top users (people that use a lot comments, forums and other stuff) and use them as beta-tester for innovations

[Matt Moore]

Jane - agree with these. Other options:
- Some form of collaborative bookmarking around pages.
- Offering a blog to anyone.
- Using old-style Forums & Bulletin Boards

Most of these activities fall under the 3 headings of:
- Rating / Reviewing top-down content
- Commenting on top-down content
- Creating / Collaborating new content

Also linking the intranet to other corporate communications channels (F2F gatherings, conf calls) can also be powerful - assuming that those aren't also top-down fests.