A tiny, unknown team at ADP had a mission: to get ADP associates working together across organizational silos to better serve their clients. To achieve this goal, the team had to face a legacy collaboration platform, severe resource limitations, and an environment where none of the usual rules about how to start a community were working. So how did they get from 10,000 to 44,000 users in a company of 55,000 employees in just one year? Laura Lerner, vice president, knowledge management, talked to us about how they did it.

Laura Lerner will be presenting “Keep Calm and Ignore the Rules: ADP’s Path to Community Awesomeness” at APQC’s 2016 KM Conference April 28-29. You can also connect with Laura on LinkedIn.

What is the hardest part of building a community using a legacy collaborative platform?

According to feedback from our stakeholders, the platform was not flexible enough to meet their needs and the user experience was really behind the times, making communities more difficult to navigate and use. For instance, business users wanted more control of the user experience of their specific community—in other words, better ways to differentiate their communities and make them part of the identity of the community. Business users also expressed a lot of difficulty learning how to use community features and where to go for which components of the collaborative experience. They also had trouble finding indicators that would keep them up to date on their community’s activities. These challenges critically influenced adoption and engagement enough that we ended up replacing the legacy solution.

How do you break down silos when building an employee community?

Through governance, community structure, and continuous coaching. Our overall strategy targeted the reduction of silos and the creation of a more collaborative culture that builds and taps into collective knowledge. This foundation guides everything we do from guidelines and decision-making processes to user experience to measuring success. One of the big changes from a governance perspective was to empower our associates to define the types of collaboration they need, rather than a few folks at the top deciding on their behalf. So we began with enough coaching and guidance to help associates think through the purpose of and participants for their collaboration—and just enough navigation and structure to get people started—and off they went.  

When launching your campaign for community awareness at ADP, what was the biggest challenge—and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge is that there never has been a campaign. We sent three emails company-wide. That’s it. Instead, we focused on working closely with the business to deliver success and enabled, encouraged, and amplified their success stories with a balance of meaningful data shared word of mouth.

How do you measure success?

We look at adoption (new and returning members), engagement (levels and types of participation), and value returned on key use cases. We monitor metrics in each of these areas monthly, and we compare ourselves against our own benchmark and industry benchmarks annually.

Looking back, what was the most important lesson learned from making your employee community a success?

It’s possible to be successful with an employee community even if it didn’t work the first time around, if you’re willing to make some significant changes in your approach. In cases like ours, that means challenging long-held mindsets that create barriers or contribute to root causes of the initial failure. For example, solutions like this were designed from the perspective that leadership understood and accurately represented associates’ collaboration needs. Knowing that approach was unsuccessful, we had many conversations about the need to shift to an associate-driven experience to go directly to the source and give everyone the opportunity to define and drive the information, work relationships, and collaboration purposes that would be most valuable to them. We had to overcome many concerns related to negative effects on productivity, information overload, and inappropriate use. We still work through concerns like that, even today. It can be painful—and sometimes, you just have to ignore the pain. In the end, it’s worth it.