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 group 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 Workplace.

For the individual, a poor Response Rate can indicate that your posts are not framed appropriately for attracting a response. For a group, a poor response rate may indicate a lack of a critical mass of members or inadequate group 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. A great example of how open, honest sharing can foster a stronger connection across the organisation and solve problems both big and small is with Australian Catholic University's (ACU) network. When an ACU employee posed a question about the possibility of having stingless bees on one of their campuses, it took only 24 hours for ACU’s Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Dr Stephen Weller, to respond with interest. He @ mentioned staff from Properties and Facilities in his comment and in just one month ACU now proudly houses stingless bees.

“Before we had Workplace, it would have taken months for something like this to happen,” said ACU’s Director of Marketing and External Relations, Kathy Vozella. Check out the Australian Catholic University case study.

The first challenge, therefore, is to develop a culture that respects and promotes open and honest sharing on all matters that the community feel strongly about. Think about using hashtags to monitor the posts, and their response journey to a hopeful resolution. Once problems are freely on Workplace, 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 Workplace cannot be used in a similar way.

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