Internal employee blogs can be a fantastic catalyst within your company. Internal employee blogs help forge connections inside the company. External employee blogs are also great because they allow employees to connect with like-minded individuals outside the company. It doesn’t matter whether you have a dozen employees or 2000, having your staff members connect creates fantastic new opportunities especially if you’re using idea blogs, as these pairings and groupings can often come up with great new ideas. One of the keys to successful employee blogs, beyond encouraging and getting employees to blog in the first place, is to provide them a way to connect to one another. I’ve said this time and time again, but blogs are equalizing forces. If a janitor has a blog, there is nothing to stop an executive from connecting with the janitor on a subject they’re both passionate about something that would be nearly impossible in the non-blogging world.

Getting successful employee blogs going requires that you provide a variety of ways for bloggers to find each other. At the least, a search engine for posts, subjects, categories, and blogger names is essential. But some companies go so far as to provide a single website that lists new posts, features individual bloggers, and links comments made by a blogger to that blogger’s internal blog. The more ways you provide for your employees to connect, the more connections they will make.

The challenge is that implementing these features is more expensive than simply allowing employees to set up blogs. Although free products like Community Server (www.communityserver.org ), WordPress (www.wordpress.org ), and Drupal (www.drupal.org ), can help, it’s likely they won’t provide the whole solution to the puzzle. Starting employee blogs must be considered strategically: it isn’t just about whether you value connections, but about how much you value those connections and what you’re willing to do to facilitate them. The best employee blogs keep people informed, allow for open brainstorming and problem-solving, and improve efficiency across the organization; for these reasons, IBM turned to blogs for its more than 150,000 employees in early 2005. IBM realized that if employees from around the world could connect on problems and subjects they were passionate about, they could begin leveraging those connections by creating dynamic teams, which we’ll talk about more in a bit.

Whether you choose to leverage the connections that employee blogs allow, or you simply realize that having employees making more connections makes them smarter, more informed, and more productive, employee blogs are a great way to increase the value that your employees bring to the table.

BECAUSE THE TEAM SAYS

Official team blogs are a pretty new breed of blog. For companies with more than 20 employees, teams can basically run the company. Whether product teams or task teams such as IT and marketing, the teams in the majority of today’s companies are selfsustaining, which is why it should come as no surprise that they are increasingly writing their own official blogs. An official team blog is to teams what an official company blog is to the company: a clear and concise way to describe what is happening in the industry, to post new jobs, talk about team matters, post memos, and discuss other important work-related issues. Team window blogs provide information to other teams, individual employees in the company, and corporate leaders. Several companies I know actually require that all teams publish official team blogs, because it enables executives to find out what is happening in all the teams simply by subscribing to various feeds.

Official team blogs also allow anyone to comment on news and to provide new ideas for the team, thus increasing the team members’ ability to do their jobs and remain productive. Smart teams can also make use of other internal blogging tools available, such as administrative blogs, idea blogs, and project management blogs, within their team to make them more effective, whether or not the rest of the company is blogging. They also make use of exclusive internal team and project blogs.

INTERNAL TEAM COMMUNICATION

Sometimes teams want to toss around idea among themselves perhaps for confidentiality reasons or because small groups can be more effective than large ones. As a result, internal blogs designed to be read only by team members are becoming increasingly popular. These blogs allow for document sharing, brainstorming, and archiving thoughts and discussions. The goal is to reduce team-wide e-mail by putting most of the official correspondence on the blog so that it can be archived and searched, but the blog also allows responses to occur in a cohesive manner. One of the problems with e-mail is that as e-mail is sent to multiple people, it often results in multiple threads of conversation, with ideas crossing and confusion reigning.

Blogs solve this dilemma, since all comments are chronological, so that people who respond to the original post are also responding to previous comments. This means that, generally speaking, internal communication is linear from original thought to final thought instead of jumbled among different conversational threads that then need to be recapped so that everyone is included in the loop. Document sharing is important among teams. Blogs ensure that everyone has the same version of every document, that everyone can see when new documents are posted, and generally that it’s impossible for someone to lose a document. E-mail can be deleted, but blog posts are much harder to lose.

Blog posts can also be exported in fact, creating regular backups of the posts and files on a blog is just as important as the blog itself. In a blog-enabled team environment, every thought is a conversation waiting to happen and every idea has potential for expansion. Obviously, this requires a healthy team environment and, much as with e-mail, unhealthy teams simply won’t be able to maximize the potential that blogs bring to the table. But even unhealthy teams can appreciate never losing a document, always being in the loop, and never having someone steal your idea (because your blogged ideas are credited to you). An internal team blog, much like an internal company blog, is an archived record of a team’s thoughts and actions. For smaller companies, one blog may fulfill this purpose for the whole company. Whether you’re a small company or a large company using internal team blogs for individual teams, the strengths remain: less e-mail, clearer information that is archived and searchable, strong document sharing, and the ability to brainstorm openly. These are valuable assets to any team.

ADMINISTRIVIA DISTRIBUTION

Your company’s ability to communicate clearly is inversely proportionate to how large it is. The larger your company, the more difficult it can be to get the message to people in an understandable way. Memos are a standard means of communication, but unless you plan to e-mail everyone in your company every memo, it’s unlikely that the right people will always have the right information at the right time. This is where blogs come in. Today’s administrative world is littered with status reports, meeting notes, sales reports, and all kinds of trivial information that is completely essential to running the company. The challenge is that the people who need that information often don’t have it when they need it.

One reason that blogs are so strong at document management is that information is never lost. Not only are blogs categorized, but they are also searchable. Having these documents available on an administrative blog (with permissions set so that the right people can see the right documents) is a great way not only to decrease e-mail and get the information out quickly, but also to ensure that documents are never lost and that people can comment on new documents as they are posted.

In addition, a successful company administrative blog can report on changes to HR (such as each employee getting an additional three weeks of vacation per year) and important company meetings (such as the one you’re about to schedule about each employee getting an additional three weeks vacation per year). An administrative blog is, in many ways, the lifeblood of a company: without the mundane and the day-to-day, many companies would simply shrivel up. Thankfully, blogs make everything easy to post and easy to subscribe to.

While administrative information can be boring, having a blog on the subject means that when employees actually need to find certain information (such as vacation forms), they know exactly where to go. Blogs can be like a company intranet and document site all rolled up into one package. And you probably don’t need any expensive software to accommodate this, as both WordPress and Movable Type are more than up to the task (though they may need minor customizations if you are going to try and lock out certain people from certain information, such as how much vacation senior executives get).

TEAM CREATION ON THE FLY

Dynamic team creation isn’t technically a kind of blog that can be created, but it is one of the possible and amazing byproducts of a healthy internal blogging culture. The most dynamic and valuable team members are those who work well together to tackle problems creatively. I’ve been a member of such teams, and the single truth is that there is no way to plan them. A great team simply happens. Some teams are great, some teams are just good enough to get the job done, and some are a hassle even to be a part of. Because blogs allow anyone to vent his passions and interests in a real way (instead of in an “interests” column in the employee database), people are able to connect more easily. The more easily people can connect, the more they get to work together. A healthy blog environment will naturally create teams, no matter how small the company. In fact, the greatest challenge to dynamic team creation is breaking down barriers of thought. For example, I worked with a company where the janitor was actually the perfect person to help with a team that was tasked with merging two companies. His perspective and passion for people, which is why he took the job in the first place, was put to great use in the meetings. Strange and wonderful things happen when you create a space for people to get together as equals. As you begin creating a culture of internal blogging, realize that unexpected things are likely to occur. Don’t judge your teams or assets by their covers, as even the rattiest-looking article could be a Pulitzer winner.