Case

Organizational Experiment Proposal

Gartner reports “by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today.” Social networking has become such an essential mode of communication in everyday life, it is no wonder that companies are trying to capitalize to improve internal communications. Can a social intranet truly bring value to the work environment? With some solutions pricing near $300K - $500K annually for a modestly sized company, companies should feel one hundred percent confident such a solution would generate value before following along with this trend.

To gauge the effectiveness of social intranets, we hope to dig deeper into the two components most social intranet solutions claim as a part of their value proposition. First, do social intranets truly drive increased morale? Second, is this higher morale coupled with higher productivity amongst employees? If we were members of the HR organization for a company attempting to understand this fact, we would engage one of these software companies and request a 3 month demo of their product. First, we would grant access to a random sample set of users across the organization. We would also randomly engage a control group within the organization to measure employee satisfaction scores against. We’d administer an employee satisfaction survey before deploying the software trial, and periodically throughout the demo to try and isolate whether those with intranet access had higher scores. Second, we’d choose a hiring class for a single department and once again choose a random sample set of employees to expose to the intranet full of relevant training materials. We would then measure key KPIs of these trainees to see whether those with instant access to the materials through the intranet, had increased performance compared to those who had to learn through normal communication...