Solutions For More Community At Work? 205
CrunkCreeper writes "I work at a tier-2 hosting company (SAP, web servers, Citrix, databases, etc.). I started working at this location two years ago in January. The company had anywhere from 20-30 other employees, and now we are just over 100. People with all different IT experience are employed. At one end of the spectrum, you have accounting, billing, and sales. At the other end you have the help desk, analysts, and engineers. In the past we were hiring mainly people in their 20s, and now we're hiring more senior people in their 30s and 40s. Incidentally with our expanded demographic and recently aggressive hiring, people are not as familiar with each other as they used to be. This happens to some extent and will continue to happen more the larger our company grows, but I would like to curb the corporate feel a bit. I'm trying to bring family or community feel back to the company. The reason for this need is that great ideas are normally discussed in non-formal environments. Beside this fact, I want people to genuinely have more fun and decrease the sometimes uncomfortable discussions with 'that guy' from 'that department.' Being an IT company, I find it more natural for collaboration via computer, but welcome more traditional methods too. How does your company keep or build a community environment using technology?" Read on for some more on how it works at CrunkCreeper's workplace, and give suggestions for how to make things better.
" Here is what we currently use for collaboration, both formal and non-formal:
IRC — We have used a dedicated IRC server from the start, and it helps out tremendously when people use it (the Linux folks use it heavily), but it doesn't entice a vast majority of the employees. It's used mainly for BS'ing, but also becomes a very important tool when things are awry.
Facebook — Most people are on Facebook, but obviously there are details about the company that cannot be discussed, which is an issue since most of these profiles are public and it is a somewhat common practice to be friends with some clients.
Exchange 2007 — E-mail is the main source of communication, but can't it be painful sometimes? Everyone on the IT side receives alerts about tickets and other automated checks of systems. On any given day I generally receive 100+ alert messages. When we're not reading our filtered alerts into specified folders, general discussion about projects and fixing issues usually is anywhere from 20-60 messages a day. Quite honestly, I'm sick of e-mail and don't wish to get any more of it. I know a lot of you feel the same way.
Phone — Just using the ol' phone is the other primary way of communicating with the customer, but not ideal for communicating ideas with others at the same time. We have bridges, but they're only used for conferences with customers.
Company Meetings — We have these a few times a year. They're fully catered and consist of introducing the new people, talking about new contracts, and congratulating others on successful implementations . These generally last about an hour or so at the end of the workday. Unfortunately dedicating to these meetings is not the easiest on people's schedules, especially the help desk, and is not an open forum.
There are forms of collaboration that I have been thinking of. To list some, there is phpBB, Elgg, Jabber (discussed a few times before), and Google Wave (hard to push currently). Personally I think that a closed social networking platform would be ideal, where ideas can be posted and read at any time. Tell me what you think of these ideas, if there are more suitable solutions, or what you use at work."
MediaWiki (Score:5, Interesting)
I found internal wikis to be a huge boost at my old job. At my current job everyone seems to do similar things using word files passed around over email which are like islands in the sea of information, easy to lose, easy to become outdated, etc.
I've never been a fan of it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it's just me, but I don't go to work for "community". Don't get me wrong; I like what I do and we are all cordial at work and everything, but at the end of the day I don't really want to be your friend. Maybe this makes me "that guy", but that's fine with me; I just prefer to keep the professional and personal aspects of my life as separate as possible.
Re:MediaWiki (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a large company and mediawiki horrified senior management. They want information to be controlled. Everything on on the internal network is there because they want it there. I was in middle management when I put it in. It pleased a lot of my peers but pissed off management to no end.
Internal "rotations" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ideas: (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there's a huge variance in culture of foreign-born folks, even if culturally-American is your main goal. I see a ton of foreign (mostly Asian) students in CS grad school, and they vary from barely able to communicate in English and no interest in American culture, to pretty comfortable and well-connected with their peers of all backgrounds. Time makes some difference: someone who came to the U.S. at 18 and went to an American university for 4 years is much more likely to be comfortable with the local culture than someone who moved to the U.S. after all their schooling was completed. What kind of family they came from matters also--- someone who grew up in a generally liberal, cosmopolitan environment will probably adapt better than someone from a more isolated, conservative background.
I do agree xenophobia is the biggest potential flashpoint. In particular, I have heard some... not very tactful... comments from immigrants about American blacks, the kinds of things that even racist rural white Mississippians would, in 2010, know you can't say in public. (This isn't specific to Asian immigrants--- I've also heard white European immigrants, especially from Russia or eastern Europe, say such things.)
employee directory (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Facebook for enterprise (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ideas: (Score:4, Interesting)
You probably haven't been here recently, either (Thank Deity...).
I live in a part of the South where a high proportion of the population is actually 'people from up North', and I can tell you that racial prejudice is not a latitude-defined problem. In fact, of the people I've known in the 40 years I have lived in the small-town South, it is frequently those whose families have been here far longer than most, like since Kings Grant times, who are the quickest to get pissed off at others indiscriminate use of racial slurs. IME, prejudice and bigotry are, sadly, something that you'll find everywhere about equally, regardless of location in relationship to the equator, or the color of the skin of the bigot, or even things like level of education and/or intelligence. No one area - or people - has a corner on that market.
So stuff your overused and under-accurate generalities where the sun don't shine. Right up there next to your head.
StatusNet (Score:2, Interesting)
StatusNet [status.net] is a neat platform that runs Identica [identi.ca], a twitter alternative. It's free as in freedom (GNU AGPL), and it has pretty much every feature twitter has and more. You can view conversations people have instead of searching for hours for who-responded-to-what-and-how-many-people-were-involved. You can customize the theme and upload files, too! There's lots of other optional features you can use as well, and it has a similar API to twitter, so lots of applications already support it. Try it out and see if it works for you; you can even chose where it's hosted!
Re:I know you're trying to be funny, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Right. Just elaborating further.... People generally kinda like other people. Assuming most of the employees are not asshats, friendships just form naturally. I was laid off from my firm of 5+ years last spring, and I still hang out a few times a week with friends from there. This works well across departments, too (I was in finance, my aforementioned friends are programmers and customer service reps). I think the best you can do is create an environment friendly to "banter" (i.e. not having a strict 30 min. rule for lunch, allowing some chit-chat in the cubes). This will go 100x further than a company-sponsored activity (which has a good chance of coming off as "corporate" anyway).
One thing that will alienate employees... management no longer "hanging out" with the peons. My former firm grew in almost the exact same way as yours. When we had 40 people, the partners would invite me and others to baseball games, would stop by my office to say hi, etc. At some point (probably 80-90 employees), they just said "screw it" and stayed in their offices all day and kept to each other. THAT pissed off people more than anything.
Re:Local bar / casual eating establishment (Score:1, Interesting)
With all that said; mixing alcohol with company functions is fucking over in the US due to liability issues, at least for the forseeable future.
Damned right! I worked for a place in Marin County, CA. We had a number of holiday-related tailgaters throughout the year. Every Cinco de Mayo, the margarita machine was started up in the onsite cafe.
Then, one year we were taken over by a bunch of prigs (formerly of Anderson Consulting -- nuff sed). The lawyers decided the company "might be found liable" if someone got in an accident on the way home.
Weird thing -- beer was still OK. Weirder yet, not in regular bottles -- just those little six-ounce "Coronitas". Sheesh, like no one could figure, "Six and six is twelve -- gimme four of them suckers".
Re:Older Guy (Score:1, Interesting)
Ditto that. When I was younger, socializing with my working peers was more important. Now that I'm older (40ish), I have a well established broad spectrum of family, friends and acquaintances, and really don't want to be bothered by capricious "get-togethers" etc. The younger set often ascribes this to curmudgeonliness. So be it. I'm a perfectly fine fellow, I simply have my social life in good order without their help, thank you very much.