How Pearson’s Internal Online Community Connects 36,000 Employees in 70+ Countries

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00:04: You’re listening to Community Signal, the podcast for online community professionals. Tweet as you listen using #communitysignal. Here’s your host, Patrick O’Keefe.

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00:21 Patrick O’Keefe: Hello, and welcome to Community Signal. Recently, I put a call out looking for great community professionals that I hadn’t yet heard of, because while I love having well-known names on this show, I equally enjoy shedding light on smart voices who don’t have as big of an audience. Specifically, I ask for people who maybe didn’t write all the time about their work, they’re not like me, they don’t have a blog about community management. They aren’t regular public speakers, they probably don’t offer consulting services, they might have less than 1,000 Twitter followers, but most of important of all is they actually do the work of community and have been doing it for a while. And hey, if you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them, send me an email through communitysignal.com or message on Twitter @patrickokeefe.

01:01 Patrick O’Keefe: But when I put this call out I received a response from Oliver Beirne of Social Edge Consulting, recommending Dina Vekaria. She’s our guest on this week’s episode, which will focus on internal communities and how multinational publishing and education company Pearson uses them to encourage employees to communicate, collaborate and just get things done. Dina has been at Pearson for just under 10 years, starting in the assessment team before moving into customer service. For the last three-plus years she has been a community manager for Pearson’s internal community, Neo, and their external community, Neo Connect. Dina is also an advocate for Jive, the software that powers Neo. She helps other community managers who are Jive customers with their questions and requests. Dina, welcome to the program.

01:39 Dina Vekaria: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

01:41 Patrick O’Keefe: So tell me about Neo. How would you describe it to a community professional who is unfamiliar with it?

01:46 Dina Vekaria: So, Neo is a place for our internal colleagues at Pearson, so somewhere that they can come together, talk to one another, find out information about the teams, around the business, find out about their business units around Pearson, and equally as important to hear from our senior leadership team and our CEO with current updates that are going on around the world. So it’s a place for people to kind of network and find out a little bit more about Pearson and where they work.

02:14 Patrick O’Keefe: In an interview with Jive earlier this year, you mentioned that Neo enables 40,000 colleagues to work together around the world from more than 70 countries. So that’s a lot of people, that’s a lot of internal employees. We talk a lot about bringing people together in community, but in this case I have to believe that how you divide people is really important, too, whether that’s by language, by country, by business unit, by department, by something. How do people break off into productive groups on Neo?

02:41 Dina Vekaria: We have various amounts of endorsed groups on Neo. So where we have our hierarchy, so in terms of our spaces, we have one for each area of our business. So if you are in the North America business you will have a space on Neo which you can talk to one another, and that’s by region, of course, and business unit. And then we also have things around our growth market, so we’ll have a space for China and Brazil and Australia and things like that, so those people that work together in those teams can talk to one another. The other thing around languages, language is a barrier. We have more than 70 countries speaking different languages, and we are in the middle of going through a pilot where we will be adding a translation, kind of integration into our Jive platform, Neo.

03:25 Dina Vekaria: So if our CEO is writing a blog in English, our colleagues in China can simply click on a button to translate that content to simplified Chinese, so they can also continue the conversation with us, ’cause right now we don’t have those amazing colleagues in those different countries who don’t speak English interacting with us because they don’t understand much of the content that’s being posted because it’s in English. So we’re hoping by doing this we’re bringing together all of us, rather than those who’s just English-speaking.

03:52 Patrick O’Keefe: And when people join Neo, are they automatically added to the groups that they need to be a part of? So if they sign up, they’re from this country, they speak this language, they’re in this department, they do this work, they need to talk to specific people on a day-to-day basis. Are they automatically added to those groups and shown those groups?

04:10 Dina Vekaria: No, unfortunately not. So when an employee joins Pearson, as soon as they have a pearson.com email address they are added into Neo. It takes place within about 24 hours, up to 24 hours. And then once they’re in, what we have is a space on Neo called the “One Pearson Map,” and the One Pearson Map is basically a replica of our organization. And when you click on a specific area of the business, so for example, if the new employee was somebody in our UK business, they will click on their leader’s name and that will take them to a template on Neo, which will be a document that has all the information about what they should follow, or the groups or spaces within Neo that is gonna be important to them to follow or the people within that UK business who are important to follow. So we don’t automatically add them, we do give them the materials that they need for them to be able to go and do that for themselves.

05:04 Dina Vekaria: The other thing that we also have is where colleagues are in business units, so when they join Neo there’s information about what business unit they’re in is fed into Neo. So for example, I’m in corporate affairs, so my business unit on my Neo profile says corporate affairs. We have custom streams on our Jive community, so whenever something in corporate affairs space is posted, that’s added to my custom stream, because I belong to that business unit. So we also have something like that as well, but we don’t actively invite people to those separate groups. And I was talking about with the One Pearson Map, that is a manual process.

05:38 Patrick O’Keefe: And even when people are part of those groups, are they also free to look at, maybe not everything, but other parts of Neo? I assume there are some parts that are private for specific groups, maybe I’m wrong, but how wide is the average employee’s access to all of Neo?

05:51 Dina Vekaria: Pretty wide. We have, obviously, team areas that may have private groups because they obviously want to talk within their teams and not outside, but in terms of our hierarchy and in terms of the spaces that we have for our business units, they are all open. So if somebody in the UK business was interested in North America, they have free rein to go in, check those things out as well. So we don’t stop any of that kind of in terms of privacy. And like I said, the only privacy is when somebody is doing a project or if it’s a team-based group and they wanna keep it private for whatever reason. Other than that, Neo is pretty much open for everyone to view what’s on there.

06:27 Patrick O’Keefe: Is using Neo required for a vast majority of Pearson employees? We’re talking about sort of an intranet for the company, how people collaborate, how people share information, or is this a required thing, like you join Pearson, you join Neo? What’s the level of adoption for the employees, is everyone on it?

06:44 Dina Vekaria: Yes. So everyone who has a pearson.com email or equivalent for this company will have access to Neo. And in terms of required to use it, so everyone has access within Pearson, but whether they use it or not, that’s something that we don’t force, because we don’t want this to be something that we have to enforce on people. It’s there if they need it and it’s there if they wanna know more about the company, and if they don’t know how to use it, that’s what we’re there for. So we’re there as their community managers to help them understand what it is, how it works and we try to influence them as much as possible to be able to make use of this fantastic tool that we have. Before Neo, which was about six years ago, just under six years ago, we had over 127 different intranets across the business. So most of our areas within Pearson were working in silos in the UK business back in six years ago. I had no idea how massive Pearson was until Neo came into my life.

07:37 Dina Vekaria: I didn’t know all these different businesses that we had across the world. And then Neo came in and I’ve actually found out that wow, we are massive, and we have this X amount of 36,000 approximate colleagues across the world, and I can tap into that knowledge and I can tap into those people using our Neo community. So those 127 approx intranets were shut down, and all that information and that content, that rich content was migrated into Neo so it could be a one-stop shop. So when you join Pearson, this is your intranet, this is the place, this is your community, this is where you ask the questions, this is where you have those conversations, this is where you learn from each other, and this is where you speak to your leadership team, your managers, if you so wish to use it in that way.

08:22 Patrick O’Keefe: You use Bunchball, a company that does gamification for enterprise to add those types of elements to your communities on Neo. Since we’re talking about employees, we’re talking about people who want to work hard, do a good job and go home. [chuckle] They’re very task-based, they’re getting through it. So was there any concern in adding gamification elements, about adding noise to their experience and getting in the way of that work?

08:47 Dina Vekaria: No, actually, it amplifies it. We introduced gamification I think maybe about two or three years after we had launched our Neo community. And it was embraced really well, I think people really like gaming things, they love getting points and badges for things that they’re doing. So when we first started with gamification, I wasn’t in the team when we first started, I joined soon after, but when it was first kind of introduced it was this shiny, new thing that people were like, “Oh, what’s this?” It kind of piqued people’s interest. And we were able to have a lot more engagement with some of the things that we were doing because it was badged and because people were thinking, “Ooh! That’s interesting, what’s that about?” and they were doing it. And then it got into a bit of a competition, people started wanting to do these things because they needed to get more points. And it did end up spiraling into something where people only did it because they were getting the points and the badges, which is why we have Maren Beckman, who works alongside me in Columbus, Ohio. And she has been working extremely hard to make sure that the gamification that we have within Pearson is actually used to amplify our company’s objectives and our values.

09:53 Dina Vekaria: So the gamification that we’re introducing into Neo now is a lot more strategic, and that’s really largely in part to do with Maren’s expertise around how she wants it to work and how successful she wants it to be. And now, so of course with that, when we have things like code of conduct and our ABC policy and things like that and we want people to read these important information, we gamify that because we know that that’s gonna increase people’s reading. And I know they’re probably doing it because they wanna get the badge and the points, but the point is they’re reading it, and that’s the most important thing for us is they’re reading it, they’re consuming it, and then they’re being awarded a badge and 500 points or whatever it is they’re gonna get. So we find that is successful but we are looking at the gamification narrative and what we wanna do, and how we’re gonna use it going forward.

10:35 Patrick O’Keefe: So I wanna talk about that a little more ’cause that’s interesting to me, using gamification to focus on things that move the company’s objectives forward. Give me a couple of examples of that.

10:43 Dina Vekaria: So for example, we’ve used a different number of things, so I mentioned code of conduct, ABC and our strategic kind of policies that we have within Pearson that we need to make sure that everyone is doing. We also have things like our global diversity and inclusion initiatives, which we’ve got actually this week. We’ve gamified that, too, because we want as much participation as possible, because global diversity and inclusion is extremely important for a company, any company, and we wanna make sure that we’ve got as much participation in the events that’s we’ve got going on this week for that. So we’ve gamified that as well, so what that means is people write a status update and they use a hashtag for it, they’ll get a number of points. And if they attend a session where they talk about a certain topic within diversity and inclusion, because it’s important to Pearson, they will get 500 points or whatever it is, because they attended, they listened, they took part.

11:35 Dina Vekaria: That’s one situation where we would use it. Another is our learning and development. So recently we launched something called Pearson You, which is an online service that we have for our colleagues to be able to kind of learn from each other, take courses and we try and push learning. ‘Cause we are a learning company and we wanna be able to empower our colleagues to be able to take charge of their own learning, take charge of upskilling themselves and having those transferable skills. So Pearson You is a great example of how we could gamify it. Something that we haven’t looked at yet, but we’re gonna be looking at it, so we can ensure, again, maximum exposure to our company around things that are important to Pearson and things that we want you to be doing at Pearson to kind of better yourself in terms of your skills.

12:17 Patrick O’Keefe: With internal community metrics, where you have employees participating in a private community, what are you looking at to judge success of that effort? Is it really about community health and activity, or is it something else?

12:27 Dina Vekaria: I can speak for myself here, in terms of what I see as success in Neo, is that people are talking to one another and they’re sharing information and they’re sharing the knowledge, so the organizational memory. I think that when I see groups being used for projects to get things done, I see that as a success in terms of they’ve used Neo to ensure that everything’s transparent, they are commenting, they’re uploading their information on there so that means that anyone who is joining the team or joining the business after the fact or during the project can catch up really easily. That is a real success to me, because that’s how we want people to use our community. We want them to be able to put it on Neo and to share that knowledge with everyone else. And even if it’s a private group, that’s what it is, because they’re sharing it within their own team. And if they can do that in an open space for something completely different, again, that’s success.

13:22 Dina Vekaria: Another part of success, to me, is when I see things like our CEO, who is posting blogs about the company, about our business, about what’s happening in the next six months or whatever it is. And there are people commenting and they’re asking him questions or they’re saying, “This is great, thank you for keeping us in the loop.” Or they have a question and then he answers them back, which is what happens. Which is what happens sometimes is that he will see something and he’ll answer them back, and that to me is a huge success, because it means that we’re breaking down those barriers. We do measure in terms of metrics in our community, but we also have emails. And emails are never gonna go away and we know that not everyone logs into Neo on a daily basis. We have approximately 36,000 employees, but we know approximately only 27,000 log-ins per day.

14:10 Dina Vekaria: So whether that’s them consuming the information or whether that’s them coming in and creating content, 27,000 log-ins per day. So we know that we’re hitting a large number, but we also know that there’s a large number that we’re not hitting and so we have emails. So we have these different channels that we use to be able to communicate. What we haven’t done yet, and which we’re in the middle of doing, is trying to get some metrics around all those different channels and then put in that information to some kind of dashboard to say this communication or this area of the business has done really well in terms of engagement, in terms of collaboration because we’ve measured these different channels that we are pushing this information out into.

14:48 Patrick O’Keefe: You believe it’s important for companies to retain the knowledge of employees who are leaving and that the historical purposes of knowledge sharing can serve new employees. How do internal communities help you retain the knowledge?

15:02 Dina Vekaria: So, it’s as simple as capturing the information that we have, so we encourage colleagues to talk more on Neo in terms of what they’re doing, in terms of their projects, in terms of things that they’re doing in their daily jobs. We have people who’ve been here for more than 20 years, 30 years and all of that amazing knowledge that they have in their heads, once they leave or they retire, whatever it is, that goes with them. And that’s a real shame, because all of that amazing knowledge that they have in their head about those little, little things that you don’t even think about, we actively encourage everyone to share. Not everyone does it, because not everyone uses Neo in that way, but we try as much as possible to encourage the knowledge of our past and present colleagues, so then our future colleagues will have that information and they can start their work. If they’ve been replaced, that replacement can start their job having all the information that they need to be able to do their jobs more effectively. In terms of historic purposes, an example of historic knowledge management or organization of memory for historic purposes is our blogs.

16:04 Dina Vekaria: So when our CEO is posting a blog, and he’s been doing so for a number of years, all that information is on Neo. So if I was to start at Pearson tomorrow, I’m not gonna be thinking, “Oh, I don’t know what the history of this company is, I don’t know what’s been happening,” because if that was just in my email inbox, so if that was in someone’s email inbox, that information will just get filed away into a folder, never to be seen again. But the fact that it’s on Neo, it means that I can, as a new employee, go to John Fallon’s blog and I could actually see the history of what’s happened to the company, I can read it as far back as I want to, should I so wish to, to see what the information is. And I think that’s super important, because it makes an employee well-informed, they understand the business because they have seen the communications that have been sent out, and it also allows collaboration. And that’s, again, super important, because you’re not sending an email where you push out an email to 36,000 people and then never to be seen again. You’re pushing out a communication through a blog post where you’re inviting people to say, “Come and talk to me, what do you think? Like it, share it, bookmark it, add a comment and give me your thoughts, give me your questions.”

17:11 Dina Vekaria: And nine times out of 10 what happens is when all the questions start pouring in, everyone kind of jumps on and starts asking more and being, “Oh, yeah, I agree with that,” or, “That’s a great question, I look forward to seeing what the answer is.” And then we have our leadership team chime in and answer those questions. That to me is wonderful and that’s what this community is all about, is those conversations. We’re being brave, we’re using our Pearson values in being brave, imaginative, decent, accountable and we’re using all of those values in our community. So historic purposes, I love that we can do that with Neo. And then, obviously, leveraging colleagues’ expertise and experience, which is what I touched upon before, is that it’s super important because with any company, the turnover of staff is increasing, people are getting more contactors and things like that into their business, to have that knowledge at Pearson within our Neo community is super important for me and for the company.

18:07 Patrick O’Keefe: So really when it comes to retaining knowledge, there is this space in Neo where people can post, they can share their thoughts, they can share their work, they can share the documents and those inquiries, that content, that lives on after they leave the company, similar to how community content often lives on after a member leaves a community. So that content is still there and it can still be utilized by the company in any number of ways, including training, on-boarding, educating new employees.

18:36 Dina Vekaria: Exactly. And with that, when somebody leaves Pearson, their account is deactivated so they can no longer access, for security reasons, of course, but their content still lives on. And it’s really about creating this knowledge-sharing culture and encouraging our people to work together more effectively, in a way, so they can, like you say, even after they leave, we’re still kind of having those conversations and we’re still thinking about those things because we’re in a culture of sharing that information. And that’s what I want to try and do a lot more in the coming year or so.

19:12 Patrick O’Keefe: But while you want to retain great knowledge, you’re also actively auditing and putting content in communities from Neo to get rid of outdated and irrelevant information?

19:21 Dina Vekaria: [chuckle] Yes.

19:22 Patrick O’Keefe: From what you told me, you’re getting rid of quite a lot, actually. What’s the process for that? How are you determining what is currently relevant?

19:29 Dina Vekaria: So, it’s a really long tedious process, unfortunately, and every time I get asked this question. It is a very manual thing. So I’ll talk about the number of communities within our wider Neo community that we’ve audited. So around three years ago, we were at about 2,500 spaces in Neo, and that’s purely because we had no kind of governance around why they should have a space. We didn’t really put any rules in place for them, so it kind of spiraled. People ended up creating subspaces after subspaces after subspaces to create this kind of website or this kind of navigational field. And what Neo, our community, isn’t, is a website. It’s a community, it’s where you have conversations. It’s not where you signpost information and then you just broadcast it. We want to invite collaboration.

20:16 Dina Vekaria: So we had 2,500 spaces and for the last three years, it’s been painful. There was a spreadsheet with 2,500 rows of subspaces. We go through each subspace, we look at content to see how much content there is, we look at activity to see when the last activity is, and then we look to see whether it’s obviously being used in terms of not just activity but conversation. And if it’s not, they would have gotten an email from me to say, “You have the space, it’s not being used, it’s causing a lot of problems in terms of navigation for our users. Can we please remove it if is not being used? Or if it is being used and you wanna retain the content, can we archive it or move it to a different area in Neo that is being used, so we can make sure that we’re utilizing in the best way?”

20:58 Dina Vekaria: So we’re down to about 190 spaces, so we’ve reduced about 2,355 spaces altogether. And it’s taken me three years and I’m still not done. I still wanna reduce it down to about 150 total, because I want to be able to put some governance around spaces, because spaces are for core parts of the business now. And for everything else, we have groups, which there is no governance for, you can create as many groups as you like. But with spaces, it was super important, just because, Neo if you have that much content, A, it’s out of date mostly and people are not gonna trust the content that’s in Neo and that’s super unhelpful. If people come to Neo and can’t trust the content that they’re looking at, they’re not gonna wanna use it because they’re not gonna think it’s up to date and they’re not gonna trust the information.

21:45 Dina Vekaria: So cleaning all of that out and making sure that we are actively asking our content creators to curate their content in terms of making sure that they’re marking things out of date and if it’s out of date and it doesn’t need to be in Neo, get it out. Put the newest policy up if it’s an older one. So we’ve got a lot of work to do in that because it is an individual content creator’s responsibility to be able to do those things, but that’s something that we actively do when we’re managing our community.

22:14 Patrick O’Keefe: That’s a lot of spaces. So it sounds like it was almost like an experimental stage early on. Here’s a thing, let’s use it to find the way and then people used it and then it was time to kinda refine that use. But even with 40,000 employees, if you take 2,500 spaces, 40,000 divided by 2,500, that’s an average of 16 people per space. I’m guessing you wanted more people per space than that. And of course, community experience would dictate that probably the vast majority of people gravitated toward a couple of hundred spaces tops, and most of them were fairly inactive.

22:46 Dina Vekaria: Exactly. Most of them didn’t have anything in them. There was at least 300 spaces where people created it, they did absolutely nothing, where they forgot about it. So we cleaned all of that kind of data out. So all of those empty spaces that weren’t being used or were created by accident and then nobody deleted them, all of that was cleaned out. So when you’re searching in Neo now you’re not getting a ton of stuff that’s empty, you’re getting information back in your search box with information that is available and it’s something that’s in there. So if they’re looking for spaces, they’re only gonna get pulled out to spaces that actually have content and is actually being used and actively being used. There were a ton of spaces that just were completely empty.

23:27 Patrick O’Keefe: I read a case study on Neo, published by Simply Communicate, where the author had interviewed Karen Gettman, the VP and director of global learning and collaboration at Pearson. And she talked about how Neo had allowed the company to close a lot of intranets, which you touched on earlier. And an intranet, for those who might be unfamiliar with that term, because it’s kind of an old term, it’s just a private network accessible within a company, an organization, where you might collaborate, share documents, track progress, projects, etcetera. And that kind of made me think about how internal communities fit in the business landscape and if internal communities are really the next step in the progression of the intranet, do you think that’s the case?

24:08 Dina Vekaria: Absolutely. When Karen Gettman, who is no longer with Pearson, but she was instrumental in getting us all to talk to one another. I think companies that talk to one another, even if it’s on a global level and it’s online and it’s virtual, it doesn’t matter, as long as everyone’s having this conversation, as long as everyone’s asking those questions to the right people, no matter who you are in the business. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO down to a coordinator, down to whoever you are in the company, to be able to be given access to those people and to be able to tap into their knowledge and tap into their expertise, tap into their skills and have healthy debates and have conversations, that’s where we should be going to. Because I think that makes our company so much more valuable, because we’re all talking to one another, and I think that’s what we weren’t doing. Before Neo, when we had those 127 intranets, all I did was speak to the people next to me in terms of where I was sitting at my desk and then my team that was in the UK with me in my office. I didn’t expand my knowledge, I didn’t expand my horizons in terms of who I could tap into until we had our Neo community.

25:17 Dina Vekaria: It’s extremely important and I think companies that don’t have a community like ours or a community in general, they’re missing a trick. And I think that you can really push the company objectives and the company values and how we want people to treat one another when we have a community, we have something that we can actually use to push that message out to people. Because let’s be honest, like I said, emails are one of those things that will never go away and we’ll always have them, because we always rely on email, but when you get something in your inbox, you don’t do anything with that, sometimes you don’t even have time to read that, you’ll file it away or delete it. But at least when that conversation or that communication is in Neo, you’re encouraging conversation, which to me is it’s the most important thing for a company to have. You can do your job day in, day out, but if you don’t have that knowledge and you can’t tap into that expertise around the world within your company, that’s a real shame.

26:13 Patrick O’Keefe: I think that’s a great way to close out our program. Dina, thank you so much for coming on.

26:17 Dina Vekaria: Thank you for having me.

26:19 Patrick O’Keefe: We have been talking with Dina Vekaria, community manager at Pearson. Follow her on Twitter @dinavekaria, that’s D-I-N-A, V-E-K-A-R-I-A. If you have any questions that you’d like me to answer on the air, please submit them at communitysignal.com/qa. For the transcript from this episode plus highlights and links that we mentioned, please visit communitysignal.com. Community Signal is produced by Karn Broad, we’ll be back next week.

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