Can online collaboration help with employee retention?

The Small Business Link section of the Wall Street Journal on Monday, November 19, devoted the entire page to the topic of employee retention.  Jim Kochanski, senior vice president at human resources consulting firm Sibson Consulting is quoted as saying that creating loyalty is often about “making sure everyone’s connected with the mission of the business.”  My experience has shown that this is true, but it’s also important that employees are connected with each other – and that’s where online collaboration spaces and an interactive intranet portal can help.

One of the very earliest initiatives credited to the knowledge management movement is the concept of communities of practice.  Though there are probably as many definitions of a community of practice as there are communities, the one I favor comes from a book by the guys I refer to as the “three tenors” of communities: Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and Bill Snyder.  Their book, Cultivating Communities of Practice was published in 2002 and in the spirit of full disclosure, I was interviewed for the book several times and I think they are all really brilliant guys.  They define communities of practice as “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion abut a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.  The internet has opened up unlimited opportunities for communities to come together and collaborate on a variety of topics, but inside the organization, my experience is that communities of practice supported by online collaboration spaces can not only expand and enhance enterprise knowledge in a particular discipline, they can also help with employee retention.

Several years ago, I helped establish and then ran a knowledge-based communities of practice initiative at American Management Systems, a global consulting firm of about 9,000 employees.  We had 6 or 7 well established formal communities that were tied to the key knowledge disciplines that were important to the firm.  Some, like Project Management, were ongoing core competencies.  Others, like Organization Development and Change Management, reflected (in the late 1990’s) an increasing awareness that new strategic competencies were critical to the success of IT initiatives and presented an opportunity for people who were hired with this new skill or were participating in formal learning programs established to grow this competency internally to connect and share knowledge.  Still other communities were based upon core and emerging technical competencies.

Each community was offered an opportunity to meet face to face on an annual basis, provided that the business units could fund travel and time away from work for their employees.  In addition, however, each community also had an online collaboration environment in which both public and private collaboration could take place and through which members (and often, non-members) could reach out to other experts for advice and help.  It’s not fair to say that the face-to-face meetings were not important – because they were – but following each face to face meeting, online activity increased significantly and, as we had an opportunity to look at the data over time, we started to notice that the retention rates for members of a community were higher than the retention rates for consultants who had the same time on the job and level of experience as community members but for whatever reason, chose not to participate in a community of practice or online forum.

While we were never able to completely able to document the significance of what appeared to be the case, there is some really good anecdotal evidence, as represented in the following true story:

At one of our face-to-face conferences, I was approached by a community member who came up to me to share that she was still at the company for one and only one reason: because of the connections she’d made with people she would otherwise never have met in the community of practice of which she was a member.  Some of her connections were made at face to face events, but far more were made in the online community forum.  She worked in a regional office and had a competency in a unique skill area that made her feel a bit isolated among her local colleagues.  As a result, she began a job search to find an environment in which she would feel less isolated and more connected.  When she became involved in the community of practice, she found a group of like-minded people with similar skills who could help discuss and resolve thorny problems and share emerging ideas, and at one point, get her assigned to a project that turned out to be a turning point in her career development.  It was that project experience that caused her to seek me out – to tell me that being part of the community is what kept her connected to something bigger than her local office, part of an extended network of people all over the company.

Given the cost of bringing in a new employee and getting them up to speed, it seems to me that it would be hard not to justify the cost of creating communities and providing an online collaboration space in which they can share ideas and information.  We all strive to have employees connect to the mission of the organization, but I think it’s almost more important to connect with the people with whom you work, and even more important if your “community” doesn’t necessarily work in your specific geographic office.  As a friend of mine who works for a mission-based organization shared just last week, “I believe in the mission of this organization and I’m glad we’re doing good things, but what I really love about this job is the people with whom I work.”