Every Friday, we prepare for you a short digest with news covering subjects related to employee engagement, collaboration, organizational culture, knowledge sharing, leadership and the future of work.
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Here’s this week’s brief:
Knowing that collaboration is necessary…
…isn’t the same as putting into practice. It takes more than informing and updating other business leaders on our change-initiative developments. According to Rebecca Newton, in order to drive collaborative change, one of the steps to take is focusing on reducing uncertainty and building trust. Certainty is one of the key components of David Rock’s social neuroscience SCARF model for collaborating with others. We are often reluctant to collaborate in practice because we are uncertain about the reality of others’ work. Seek to better understand colleagues’ work; in doing so, you increase your trust in their expertise, and their trust in yours. Read Rebecca’s post Change Efforts Can Fail Unless They’re Coordinated for Harvard Business Review to get other tips.
The real value in enterprise social tools…
…comes when we use them to be interested not interesting. However, that value comes with a shift in corporate culture. A team motivated by a shared purpose has the most people working towards achieving its goals. This doesn’t mean people aren’t still accountable and responsible for their own commitments. It means we can do even more amazing things when we leverage our passion and strengths together. As you position the value of an enterprise social platform with your teams, here are a few simple tips we’ve found successful for our team: do actual work out loud; if there was time to email, there was time to post on social instead; lead by example; invite others to participate, by making your group public; avoid just sharing “interesting” articles – effect an outcome by driving a conversation. For the full analysis, read Eric Kraus’ article in Medium Social Intent: Interested vs. Interesting.
Oscar Berg read a few reports and articles…
…presenting findings from recent research on collaboration and he picked up a number of facts about collaboration that he, and us too, finds interesting or useful. All of these findings pretty much speak for themselves when it comes to the status of collaboration and what employees need in order to become more productive and satisfied with their jobs. We’ll list some of our favorites: 88% agree that a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration correlates to high employee morale and job satisfaction; 73% believe their organization would be more successful if employees were able to work in more flexible and collaborative ways; Matrixed organizations perform better at collaboration than less matrixed. Read the rest of these findings and conclusions that could be drawn from the research in Oscar’s blog post 27 Facts and 11 Conclusions About Collaboration.
“Harnessing social collaboration through…
…your socially enabled cloud infrastructure is a great way to engage with and get rapid response from/to both your internal and external customer base,” says Christian McMahon, CIO at business consultancy three25. He believes that in future many interactions with customers could be improved by the use of social tools.. CIOs and other IT decision makers face plenty of challenges in their pursuit of social enterprise collaboration. Business must understand what they’re trying to achieve before they set off on the journey, and be committed to making cultural changes to the way they work. But the message is clear – collaboration tools are likely to take over your enterprise whether you like it or not, and it’s better to be the leader rather than the follower. Read Paul Trotter’s article for CIO How Collaboration Tools Can Turn Your Business Into A Social Enterprise.
When organizations initially set out to…
…find an enterprise collaboration system, they look for a tool that can improve productivity, streamline processes, eliminate unnecessary meetings, reduce workarounds, and make collaboration across departments easier. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy job to choose the right tool. You could have the most powerful collaboration features, but employees may still not use the tool or you still might not be able to prove its value. To help with this, Smartsheet Blog interviewed top collaboration experts and compiled the top 7 indications that you chose the wrong enterprise collaboration system. Some of these signs are: a lack of c-suite participation hinders employee adoption; the lack of a collaborative culture framework (if employees usually work independently, they’ll use the tool independently, defeating the purpose of a collaboration tool). Read Emily Esposito’s post 7 Warning Signs You Chose the Wrong Enterprise Collaboration Tool to get more on the story.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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