Internal blogging empowers employees, increases communication, reduces e-mail, simplifies document management, and provides a solid framework for employees to stay informed, learn about new opportunities, and be involved in the company. But what does all this really mean for your business?

AVOID EVIL E-MAIL

Reducing e-mail is a huge job. On average, it takes someone 7 to 15 seconds to read, process, and do something about a single e-mail message (even if that something is to leave it there to deal with it later). If you can reduce the amount of e-mail your employees receive by even 100 messages per day, you will save them roughly half an hour of time per day. Blogging doesn’t simply eliminate e-mail, though, because the communication that is in the e-mail still needs to happen. What it does increase is the effectiveness of e-mail. E-mail becomes about “now” items: a meeting reminder, an urgent request, or a quick note. The blogs are the place where official, lasting communication happens and where feedback is made.

For many companies, this is a paradigm shift. And while it isn’t necessary to enjoy the other benefits of blogs, the arguments for saving your employees’ time, never losing a document, and getting employees involved in the company and empowered for change are difficult to dismiss. Simply implementing blogs won’t do all these things, though. You need to be prepared to raise up champions for the cause by training people to use the blogs, supporting new ideas, and responding to what is happening on the blogs. One of the challenges for companies that begin making their communication more blogcentric is that everything is out in the open: all initial posts and all follow-up comments can be read by anyone. For some companies, when discussions are then taken off of the blogs (as will happen), employees can feel left out of the loop.

This is how a blog communication loop works:

1. Initial idea is created.

2. Employees, managers, and executives post comments (anonymously or otherwise, depending on your company). Some companies let this process last for a set period of time.

3. The idea is reviewed. For some companies, this will mean an individual vetting each idea and then passing it up the chain.

For others, executives will meet at the beginning of the week to go through new ideas. Some companies actually form a team of employees who are tasked with passing new ideas to executives, thus empowering employees not only to create ideas but also to review them.

4. For ideas that are rejected at this stage, whoever is reviewing them leaves a comment or sends an e-mail briefly explaining why an idea was not used. Sometimes an idea can be a catalyst for an even better idea, but if nothing else it lets everyone who submits ideas know that they were actually heard, which is incredibly important, especially at the early stages of building an ideas blog.

5. A decision is made. The ramifications of that decision may not be made public right away; however, posting to the blog or letting the originator know is common courtesy. The goal of all of this is to provide a complete feedback loop so that nobody ever questions what happens to ideas. If an idea is turned down, the originator knows about it and knows why; similarly, if an idea is accepted, the originator is informed. Smart companies will let the individual be involved, where appropriate, so that each person can see an idea come to life. Just as positive experiences with customers can create customer evangelists, so, too, can positive experiences for employees create employee evangelists. An excited employee is contagious.

LESS NOISE, MORE EARS

Internal communication can be a challenge. In some companies, too much noise exists people send jokes and all kinds of other unproductive e-mail and that can wear down a company’s communication channels. The ratio of valuable communication to noise (or useless communication) is fairly high at most companies. For companies that don’t take control of their e-mail culture, the culture is often driven more by quantity than quality. Blogs provide a type of solution for e-mail noise and clutter in two areas. First, the culture around blogging is one where you decide whether what you’re posting has value first, because anyone in the company can read it, and posting useless drivel doesn’t go very far very fast (if nothing else, nobody will comment on the drivel, so people eventually stop posting it).

Second, the concept of the useless message is far more hidden in a blog post. In e-mail, the final “wow!” or “thanks!” message appears just as visible and important as the original thought, meaning that most of the time, the original thought is lost in a sea of extraneous e-mail. But on internal blogs, the original thought is all that is visible, unless someone chooses to take a look at the comments. And while there will likely be “thanks!” and “cool idea!” messages in the comments, they don’t share the same level of intrusiveness that they do in e-mail, because you can skim past a dozen of them in just a few seconds; you don’t have to click open each response.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Blogs empower people. In the public world, this is debatable, but in the world of internal blogging, it’s an essential truth. The more blogs are properly used, the more valuable they are. I’ve talked about idea blogs a fair amount in this article, because they are all about empowerment letting employees get involved in the health and future of the company. But every type of internal blog is about empowerment. If it reduces e-mail, it allows people to take control of their inbox. If it makes document management easier, it means your employees don’t need to go looking around for the right file. If it helps everyone stay informed about mundane (yet important) administrative and company information, then nobody is left guessing.