Company Message board for Employees?

Zascar

Hey guys,

I've been working for a large multi-national for 7 months, it was my first proper job, before that i had only worked for SME's. It's great to work for such a big successfull company, but one thing I notice is that the bigger it is, the bigger the communication problems that there can be internally.

In my job (IT Sales) you are constantly asking your collegues questions, opinions, trying to solve little problems and find oit info, that everyone shold know, as they will most liekly ask tyhe questoion some time in their day/carreer.

I use many message boards like this one and I find them an invaluable source of information and communication. The abilily to pose questions/opinions to people who have a certain expertise and knowledge is invaluable. I think that something similar implemented into my company would work very effectivly and be an excellent tool to share knowledge, increase productivity, and make out job easier by addressing the communication problem.

I was just wondering if anyone here works for, or knows of any other companies that have such things, and if they are affective. I have been talking briefly to a manager about it, and he said he would put it to his boss. If he liked it I would have to put forward a proposal, so I'm just doing some research first...

Any comments appreciated.

Seth Brundle

I have used a few on some intranets that I have completed but have noticed that after a while the level of posting drops to almost nothing.
However, these clients do not have the staff levels of a 'large multinational'.

tomED

A lot of the bigger companies - for example KPMG - have this sort of system in place.

It is usually on an intranet within the organisations offices.

The main benefits are that you don't have to rely on people when they leave or are not in the office. Its a big problem with smaller companies, when someone leaves.... no one else knows how to carry out his/her job.

It wont help communications in the company - but it will certainly allow everyone in the company to information only a click away.

To improve communication between staff you would want to build a bigger intranet site - include information of up coming birthdays, outings at the weeked... and then there is the old fashioned and successful way of inmporoving communications... team building!

plenty of companies out there providing team building activities...
www.delphitraining.ie

seamus

I'm not sure a message board is useful for the of communications you're talking about, i.e. problem solving, team discussions - unless the company is thousands of employees distributed across a large area, then it will take more time to post a message and receive a reply then to ring a colleague on the phone.

Vodafone have a noticeboard on their intranet, where basically anyone can post anything from classified ads to requests to join charity gigs, etc, and it seems to work well.

IMO, a bulletin board system such as boards, would do nothing more than serve as a distraction for bored IT sales people .

A Bit like boards.ie is now

Seth Brundle

If you do go the bulletin board route be sure that when you are setting it up (I assume you would download it) then you should ensure that if possible peoples usernames are set for them and that they cannot create new usernames.
This is to avoid John in accounts who hates Mary in sales (because she refuses to go out with him) from putting up a post claiming that she is on the game in town every evening and resulting in some kind of potential lawsuit on your employers.
If the board is going to be within a login intranet then when they sign up to the board it uses their intranet username as the board username.
Just my €0.02
Killian

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Also, if you're going the route of a message board, it'd probably be alot easier, not to mention cheaper, to simply set up a local NNTP server on an old machine and just get people to connect to it using outlook(which the no doubt will be in use in a large multinational) There'd be less overhead.

Course, a lot of these Intranet ideas work fine in theory but fail quite a lot in theory. Shame.

RicardoSmith

My old company put a lot of time and effort into similar idea, and was very comprehensive, functionality wise. But at the end of the day it was a waste of time. People used it for the first 6 months, then just got bored and stopped posting to it. As soon as something like that gets out of date, no one uses it. The reason people are intially keen is that they see it as a way of keeping up to date with everything and improving their job/work etc.

But all this kind of skills transfer and training should be done in a methodical and deliberate way, and the company should have offical (funded) training programs in place to do this. If they don't, well then they don't give a toss about skills transfer. The people generally realise this after 6 months of basically letting the company of the hook, and staff training themselves. So they go well sod that for a game of soldiers and go back to hoarding what they know. Since thats what makes you more valuable than the next guy.

Training cost money. So does building up experience and skills. Just make sure you know who's actually paying for it, and that you are not funding your companies profits out of your own pocket.

buddy

It seems that a database site should be put in place, with Q & A's and categorised by the type of query.

In our section, we have a site which gives us solutions to common problems and updated when new ones occur.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by buddy
It seems that a database site should be put in place, with Q & A's and categorised by the type of query.

In our section, we have a site which gives us solutions to common problems and updated when new ones occur.

How long has it been in place?