Tapping Creativity and Hidden Talent in the Workplace

Customer relationship management (CRM) benefits more than just the customer. One of the additional advantages of implementing it in your organisation is how it enables sales, management and technical staff to share information through the business wiki.

In a way, you could think of the wiki as another form of social media: the wiki allows staff to share ideas and documents and work on them collaboratively in a virtual environment. This is similar in principle to the way friends on Facebook and other social networking sites share videos and messages, and as a concept it is especially useful for larger organisations or businesses with remote employees.

Because these people do not always get to interact with one another, big ideas can go unmentioned and untested. But by introducing the CRM Wiki to your business and giving staff a forum to communicate on the job, you could potentially unearth the next Bill Gates – or perhaps a little more modestly, a new sales technique that increases business revenue.

This idea of introducing wikis and other networks often meets with resistance because managers view them as a challenge to the typical closed & vertical business structure, or a vehicle for ‘time-wasting’. While we don’t encourage you to give your staff ‘carte blanche’ to run amok on social networking sites, we do think it’s unfair to suggest that staff would only ever use a wiki to avoid work.

Try to introduce a culture that incentivises constructive use of wikis rather than punishing procrastination. If staff see what’s in it for them, they’re more likely to have an enthusiastic response to sharing ideas and making the most of your investment trying to find out ways of making their jobs better. After all, you never know: given the chance to shine, there really could be another budding Bill Gates in your organisation.