With all this being said, have you ever taken the time to analyze and identify the internal culture of your organization? Here are just a few simple steps that you can take to begin to view and potentially strengthen the culture within your organization:

1. Identify and Evaluate
If you had to describe your current culture in three words, what would they be? If you are not sure how to answer this question, take a walk around your office. Observe how your employees react to you, each other, and their tasks. What does your gut tell you about the overall atmosphere? How are people communicating with each other? Is it vibrant or sterile? Is the technology they use providing efficiencies or bottlenecks? Is what you just observed leading your business to success? If your gut is telling you that it is not, maybe now is the time to review and maybe even restructure some of your internal operations and structure. Just as a reminder, it is important to remember that most people are afraid of change. Often organizations do not fully consider and appreciate the culture, environment and technology when making changes and very rarely involve key members of the team until they are ready to “unveil” change. However, if you recognize their natural fear of change, and the people being affected understand the reason for change and have had a chance to have their voices heard, then most people will often embrace the change. Often the change will be embraced and will create some immediate productivity gains if approached properly.

2. Envision the Ideal Environment
As the famous author Steven Covey stated in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”; Begin with the end in mind! Take a moment to reflect on your current business model. What are the missions, visions, and promises that the organization has made to the world? Those promises and guarantees should reflect and be reflected by the internal attitudes. If your mission is to be a leader in innovation but your internals rely on outdated ideas and systems, then you may be in need of some change.

Before going to the next step, take a minute to decide upon three words that would describe your ideal workplace. Is it fearless, creative, productive, marginal, ruthless, innovative, collaborative, independent etc…? Remember to include balance in your structure; for example, a laid back environment can be balanced with productive attitudes, and ruthlessness environments can also have balance with clearly set ethical guidelines. Either way, if the environment has the right technologies and systems to communicate both internally and externally, the is a greater promise for success.

Once again, don’t forget to include your team! Listen to their description of what an ideal working environment looks like for them. You need everyone and yourself to believe and participate in this vision!

3. Be sure to look out the windows and not just in the mirror…
When considering what you need to build the proper culture internally, be sure to also include and consider your external stakeholders including your customers, partners, suppliers, etc. Think about what a client would see if they were to walk into your office today. Will they see a team of serious hard workers who know how to work hard AND play hard, or will they see people who cannot wait until the 5:00pm bell so that they can go home? The way your team reacts and communicates with your external stakeholders will often reflect the attitudes and values that they have associated with your company. Getting insights and feedback from your external stakeholders does not have to be an intensive or formal process. Simply call one of your customers and ask them to describe the culture that they believe you have within your organization today. Then ask them if this is the culture that they would want to see from you – can you improve your systems that are used for engagement. If the answers to these two simple questions are positive…then great job. If they are not as positive as you would like them to be…take this into consideration when looking at ways to change your culture.

4.  What Needs to Change?
Now that you have an idea of the culture that you believe is needed to be successful, decide what changes need to be made. Do it require a technology upgrade in software, mobile access, or infrastructure? Are there better improvements that can be made to make the organization more efficient? Could it be the physical layout of the workspace? Moving furniture, changing shapes, reorganizing, changing of colours, etc… whatever it takes to get your desired results. Could it be that you need to host internal events and celebrations? If so, plan a holiday dinner, celebrate birthdays, or even implement a monthly non-work related lunch. Maybe, your attitudes towards the environment or by being more socially responsible can have a huge impact on internal attitudes and culture. If this is the case, evaluate your use of paper or participate in local charitable events that mean something to you and your team. Lastly, do you need to develop motivators and incentives to help drive your employees to successful outcomes on their goals – embrace new systems of work and communication? If so, just remember that often a simple “Thank You” can go a long way, and it does not always have to involve giving away free cars!

5. Implement
So, now that you know what needs to be done…the journey begins with the first step… so take it today.

Keep in mind that any type of change is not a singular action. The world is constantly changing, and your business needs to adapt to it. Focus on building a business culture that operates in the same way; let it be fluid and adaptable to the constant change taking place every day.

The biggest thing to remember is that any type of culture change does not have to be a huge undertaking or distraction for your team, and can be implemented iteratively. Make a small change today….watch the impact that it makes, and then make another small change again. All of the small changes add up over time to equal some big changes in attitude, productivity, profitability, and overall success.

Additional Reading

To read more about how you can improve your culture, take a look at these two articles from Inc. Magazine: Make Your Company Culture Go the Distance and Great Company Culture Isn’t Pricey

One of the key metrics that keeps coming up, and people cannot seem to agree upon is how many of these users are actually using SharePoint. Some are predicting that 80-90% of of the licenses are being used, and some are quoting that only 40% of the quoted number of users are actually using it. Does not matter which you camp you belong to, there is no debating the numbers of some of the largest SharePoint deployments, including Tyson Foods (104,000+ users), Kraft Foods (98,000+ users) and Coca-Cola Enterprises (72,000+ users), as well as some unnamed oil and pharmaceutical companies with 50,000 to 100,000+ SharePoint users.

What many people do agree upon is that one of the biggest challenges that organizations face when deploying SharePoint is user adoption. The time and effort required to build and implement applications, along with user training requirements seem to be the biggest factors that affect the user adoption rates.

Now…this is where I am drawing a bit of a blank…Someone on the team spoke up and compared the experiences that we have had in deploying and successfully getting users to adopt SharePoint as part of our IMS solution with a saying that their mother used to always say to them when growing up. Once the chuckles stopped, we decided that this would be a great topic for a webinar.  We have learned a great deal about user adoption and building solutions that help users to accomplish their day to day activities…so, we wanted to share some of what we have learned and experienced….

Mark your calendar for Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 1:00pm EST and join us for a free webinar “Increased SharePoint User Adoption:6 Things Mom Always Said…”. Be sure to RSVP for this fun and interactive session here: Register Now. We have also put together a downloadable paper which we will be offering to everyone who joins us for the webinar…so be sure to mark your calendars and join us for this free event.

It was interesting that 92% of respondents understood that taking data out of SharePoint made it less secure, 30% were willing to take the risk stating they were “Not bothered if it helps me get the job done”. Thirty four percent confessed they never really thought about the security implications of SharePoint, while incredibly 13% believe protecting company data is not their responsibility. The post went on to state that being able to access the information from home, and being able to share documents and information with external parties were the main reasons why people were copying the information and documents out of the secure SharePoint implementation.

It has been our experience during the implementations of our IMS solution that this is less about “security” as it is about having a true understanding of how users use the system, and implementing it in a way that allows them to do their jobs no matter where they are. During the requirements gathering phase, the need for users to be able to share documents with external parties and to be able to securely access them from home should become one of the key requirements for the system. By understanding the these requirements early, and building it into the systems and processes, many of these concerns can be addressed.

What are your thoughts? How have you addressed security within your SharePoint implementation?

We have formed the SharePoint Ottawa Meetup Group. The focus of the group is simply to bring together local people who are utilizing or interested in learning more about SharePoints’ capabilities and implementations. Our goal is simply to help connect, network, and share experiences on the various implementations of SharePoint.

We have scheduled our first event to be on January 26th. Be sure to check out the Meetup page, RSVP, and come out to join us and others who are interested in SharePoint and everything that it has to offer.

SharePoint Ottawa Meetup Group

As a company we have been heads down focused completely ensuring that our clients are successful with their current IT investments as well as their investments into our solutions. However, we fully recognized that our website needed a refresh, so we decided to start the new year out with a new look and feel.

Please take a look around to learn more about the various solutions that we offer, and contact us if you have any questions, concerns, or if we may be of assistance in any way.