Achieving Impact with an internal community can only be achieved if there are employees who participate. And despite the use of tips, best practices and roadmaps, it remains a challenge to make internal communities successful. These tools often try to simplify what is actually quite complicated. Often based on own insights and experiences, and anecdotal in nature. And that certainly offers a fascinating insight and can inspire, but you should always approach it with some caution. Even if a proposed approach has demonstrably worked in one organization, that is no guarantee of success in another organization. In this article, we dive deeper into the influence that organizational culture has.
First, back to the basics
Wrong starting points and not (or too limited) taking into account the organizational context are important reasons for the failure of many adoption processes. Based on this finding, together with the University of Twente, we investigated which factors play a role in each adoption process and in each organization. We have determined six important factors.
Six adoptionfactors
- Expected performance improvement: the extent to which someone experiences or expects the use of internal digital media to contribute to day-to-day operations.
- Expected effort: the degree to which a person experiences or expects that it takes effort to use internal digital media. This is both about the technique (‘how does it work?’, ‘can I also access it with my phone?’) as if for time and opportunity.
- Reputation: the extent to which someone experiences or expects that the use of internal digital media contributes to their own status within the organization.
- Perceived use of colleagues: the extent to which a person experiences that colleagues with whom he/she collaborates offline are active on internal digital media.
- Perceived use of executives: the extent to which someone experiences that direct executives and higher management are (also) active on internal digital media.
- Standards for collaboration: the extent to which someone experiences that collaboration and knowledge sharing are already commonplace within the organization.
Thus, we know that these six factors play an important role in the adoption of internal digital media in any organization. We did not yet know whether the importance of each factor always weighs equally or whether some factors increase or decrease in importance in specific organizational cultures. That is why the University of Twente has carried out a follow-up study on the influence of organizational culture on the six adoption factors.
Dimensions of culture
The organizational cultures are defined on the basis of the Competing Values Framework (Quinn & Rohrbaugh). This framework defines organizational cultures based on, on the one hand, the internal or external focus of the organization and, on the other hand, the degree of flexibility and change versus the focus on stability and control. This creates a matrix with four cultural dimensions:
Of course, every organization has several cultural dimensions within it, but there is usually one dominant one. That is the cultural dimension that has been taken as a starting point. In different organizations, it has been investigated whether there are adoption factors that are more or less dominant in the different cultures. That is indeed the case.
For example, in a hierarchical culture, the expected participation of management is the dominant adoption factor for employees to participate in the platform, followed by the expected participation of colleagues and the expected contribution to the work. Of course, an unsurprising conclusion, but it is striking that once employees are active on the platform, the dominant factors for remaining active are different. The expected participation of colleagues, the contribution to one’s own (internal) reputation and the expected effort it takes to participate then have the most impact. The expected contribution of management has then suddenly become less important.
We also see the distinction between user and non-user in market-oriented cultures. The dominant adoption factor for employees to become active on internal digital media is the expected contribution of colleagues, for already active users it is the contribution to their own internal reputation.
With each cultural dimension, it is other adoption factors that are dominant. Moreover, there are still differences between employees who do not yet use internal digital media and employees who do.
What can we do with this now?
The studies teach us that at least six factors can be identified that play an important role in the adoption of internal digital media in any organization. Any adoption strategy should therefore take these six factors into account. The studies also show that a’ one size fits all ‘ adoption strategy is unlikely to be effective and that indiscriminately copying a successful approach at one organization certainly does not automatically lead to success at another organization.
First of all: these studies still do not offer ready-made answers, because there are none. The results of the studies do offer the opportunity to develop fine-grained and intelligent adoption strategies that are tailored to the specific organizational culture and take into account both the needs of users and non-users of the platform. In short, the studies provide a basis for developing an adoption strategy that does work.
We understand that we do not answer all questions with this article either. As we said at the beginning, a complex issue like adoption is difficult to capture in 1,000 words. Do you therefore want to know more about these adoption factors and how you can use them to come up with good adoption strategies? Feel free to contact Peter at peter@evolve.eu or call 06-13981427.
