This report identifies the percentage of posts that have received a written reply and/or a reaction for the selected time period. It will also identify the % of posts that have received no response; a measure that community managers need to monitor closely. The timeliness of the response is also reported.

The Response Rate report is available across the Personal, Segments, Threads, Topics, Segments and Enterprise dashboards. The Response Rate reflects how responsive an organisation is overall. A response is a tangible signal of value received. In the absence of specific value stories, it is the most direct measure of value being facilitated on Viva Engage.

For the individual, a poor Response Rate can indicate that your posts are not framed appropriately for attracting a response. For a community, a poor response rate may indicate a lack of a critical mass of members or inadequate community management.

It sounds obvious, but before problems can be solved, they need to be shared. Sharing a problem can be construed as a weakness. When senior management openly shares a problem, it runs the risk of ‘losing face’. Isn’t solving difficult problems what management is being paid to do? Yet it is the senior management that needs to lead the way in generating a culture for collaborative problem-solving. As David Thodey, the former CEO of Telstra told us, ‘Management don’t know everything...we have been guilty of releasing poor policies that have taken us years to recover from’. Thodey used Viva Engage to share problems for which new policies were required and then get feedback, before finally releasing a new policy.

The first challenge, therefore, is to develop a culture that respects that sharing a problem is not a weakness but a strength of character. Think about using hashtags to monitor problems posted, and their journey to a hopeful resolution. Once problems are freely on Viva Engage, the Response Rate measure can be used to measure problems solved. Many of the online technical forms are established specifically for tracking problem resolutions. There is no reason that Viva Engage cannot be used in a similar way.

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