For many of our customers, the concept of engaging with their employees in an insight community is very new. To help make the transition to this new engagement model, we've prepared a master list of questions that our customers can think about (and discuss with their Customer Success Manager), to help prepare them for employee engagement in a community setting.
Scope
- Would the community be focused on a specific time period? For example, run for 1 year to focus on an organizational restructure, or re-brand?
- What do you call your “employees”? (Could be staff, partners, etc)
- How do you define “staff”? eg: includes head office, warehouse, call center, casual workers, contractors, consultants, co-ops and interns, maternity/paternity leaves, disability etc.
Research Calendar
- What kinds of things do you ask now that you could ask your employees through a community instead?
- What new questions could you ask about corporate and departmental priorities, program development, training, customer feedback and knowledge?
- What could you track on a regular basis? (eg: ask front line staff for 3 pain points from that month, and 3 awesome things that happened)
- What spur of the moment questions could come up that you could quickly get answers to?
- Could you track new hires from Day 1 through Year 1 and get their feedback along the way?
- How could employees help you build your innovation pipeline and test/validate before going to market?
- Are there any topics that are legally off limits to you?
Communication and Logistics
- Do your employees have a corporate email address?
- Do your employees have an Employee ID number managed by corporate / head office?
- How do you provision / deprovision employees today?
- How do you currently communicate with “all staff”?
- Do you have an Intranet or other portal already established for communication?
- Do you have a communication policy for frequency of contact with your employees?
- Expectation and ability for employees participating in the community inside/outside of work hours?
- Expectation for what device they would use to participate (ie: work or personal devices)?
- What is your internal communications voice / tone / branding?
- Are there promotions you can do around the business to encourage participation? (eg: posters promoting the community, showcasing results, etc).
- Can you present reports as infographics instead of flat reports?
- Who will you share results with before they go out to the full business?
Data Management and Security
- What data do you want / are you able to synchronize? (eg: department, location, title)
- What are your data security requirements? Note: it’s better to start the discussion early as this will take more time than a customer community
Rewards and Benefits
- Why would an employee want to participate in your community? What do you see the benefits being?
- Are you thinking about offering incentives? Do you have “brag swag” you could use?
- What do you need to be careful about to avoid incentives being “compensation”? (eg: probably can’t do days off, money beyond a certain amount, etc).
- How will you share back results and outcomes?
- What are you comfortable sharing back? Full reports, portions of reports, nothing? To build trust it is important to be as transparent as possible and to share back as quickly as you can.
- Who will need to sign off on results before they get shared? How can you streamline the process?
For more information regarding employee insight communities, check out this post.
