Driving Internal Engagement
How can you ensure on-boarding success and long-term value creation for all employees?
Scaling Adoption
We have found that, especially for larger organisations, the big-bang approach - opening up the platform to everyone from the beginning - will not lead to success. Adoption at scale happens gradually, it is best to segment your user base and open up access to the tool using the tiered approach laid out below.
Your core creators
Start with your core creators - these are typically your more technical users that work with notebooks. Data teams, engineers, bio-statisticians, scientists, etc.
Kyso is not like other community-driven platforms. Twitter, for example, is only useful if there are many users. With Kyso, however, there is a high-value use-case even for an initial small segment of users who can:
Publish and share reports with other users:
Review each other's work.
Collaborate over global report & inline commenting.
This creates more transparency and reduces duplication of work across teams. These conversations are indexed for future search.
You can trust this group to contribute, add & engage with content, and discover ways of using the platform. They will also set the cultural norms of the hub and the bar for quality of contribution.
They will be the early and most active contributors that build momentum for adoption and pull other users in.
Management and business stakeholders
Once you have full adoption within a small active group, posting and collaborating on reports, you have succeeded in seeding content and have a growing base of helpful, relevant conversations.
Now it's time to scale to management teams and other core business stakeholders who usually have the longest email chains - siloed conversations - with the technical users from the first group. You want to break these chains, and allow them to ask questions openly, track projects and have access to a single reference point. This group of users can now openly ask questions, make requests, and track projects from inception to the deliverable, all on one single platform.
Knowledge consumers
This is the last level where you now release the platform to the organization at large, to democratise access to all data-based reporting and discussion. This is when organic growth becomes viral. If the first two stages have been successful, the value of the network will grow with each additional user.
By adding a large number of people onto the knowledge base, the network can generate an enormous amount of added value. The whole business can now use Kyso as a consistent and verifiable source of information where anyone can search and discover knowledge that may be relevant to their respective role in the organization. Now more and more users will begin to organically adopt the platform as they see value in participating for themselves. The whole company culture shifts & begins to embrace increased openness and information sharing.
Tips & Tricks for Success
Kyso is now your central knowledge hub for all data-based information sharing and collaboration around the business. It encourages multi-channel communication flows, bringing everyone into the conversation, creating empowerment loops. There is a network within your organisation and such a tool becomes more valuable the more it is used.
Here are 4 things to consider when starting out:
1. How to create value up front?
It is much easier for people to understand the value of the tool & to get involved when they sign up if there is already a clear starting point. Remember that Kyso is so much more than just a reporting tool. Knowledge doesn't come from analysis & reporting alone - but also from the collaboration that these resources inspire.
Have a #welcome or #general channel that introduces new users to the platform. You can pin reports with demo videos, tutorials and documentation.
Use one of these reports to show the user how they are expected to use Kyso. For example, depending on what team they are from, where should they post their work?
Publish existing and ongoing projects to demo upfront the type of content users can expect to discover of Kyso moving forward. Make Kyso core to the publishing process for ongoing & future projects.
You can tag users on report comments to kick off discussions. This will help different teams connect and avoid any duplication of work. These users can migrate ongoing discussions currently siloed in private Slack or email channels, with all accompanying files and graphics.
2. What is the engagement pyramid?
Remember that not everyone will contribute and that is okay and expected. Typically, "participation" for larger organisations follows an engagement pyramid pattern:
1-10% will be very active, not only posting reports but also interacting with other contributors on the platform.
10-30% will be moderately active, sporadically creating reports, but engaging more on content created by others, asking & answering questions, up-voting, sharing, etc.
The rest are your knowledge consumers - readers only. These are the users that use Kyso as their daily source of information relevant to their respective roles around the business.
Remember that the number of active contributors is not the ultimate success criteria, it is the learning, collaboration and application of insights that happens on an ongoing basis.
3. How to organise your content?
The core benefit to leveraging a tool like Kyso is the consolidation of all data-based content, which is otherwise siloed in individual conversation channels.
Effect a canonical publishing structure, leveraging the entirety of Kyso's hierarchical structure and content metadata to organise content:
Segment your user groups and research into Organisations and Channels. How you do this will vary business to business. See our current recommended options on how to do this, based on research to date:
Construct a guideline taxonomy for metadata creation:
Ensure your content creators publish their research into the appropriate Organization and Channel.
Make sure they are applying relevant tags only (you can even control how/what tags are created if you like).
This will ensure all content is relevant, current, and verifiable. Any available information within a project report will be easy to search and discover quickly.
Reports can become comprehensive resources by consolidating information into one topic, which links out to other important sources.
It is in this way that Kyso will become the default "open tab" in browsers across the entire organisation. If users are visiting the platform every week, it means they see it as a persistent, trustworthy and valuable source of information.
4. How to recognise and promote quality contributions?
Appreciate all good content and active contributors.
Reward and incentivise contributions through recognition. For example:
Up-voting/pinning valuable reports and and discussions.
Weekly or monthly shout-outs.
Make participation as important as publishing content. Responding to reports and comments immediately provides value back to multiples of other users. Every action is a feedback mechanism that creates added value to the rest of your user-base, such as voting or commenting on content.
You will know Kyso is valuable to the organization as a resource when the up-vote, view and comment counters are ticking up over time.
Employing these strategies will allow you to build trust in the platform and content, create more value for users over time, and spark organic growth so that the knowledge-base becomes self-sustaining.
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