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.
Here’s this week’s brief:
“Learn to ask questions” is…
…one of the 10 commandments of Fischli/Weiss’s “How to work smart” from 1991. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were an artist duo that had been collaborating since 1979. They were among the most renowned contemporary artists of Switzerland. A concise and excellent reminder of working smart, perfectly in-line with the present workforce and today’s business environment. The artists’ text-based monument to labor is presented by Public Art Fund as a wall mural in Lower Manhattan, showing it for the first time outside its original installation in Zurich. Public Art Fund’s mural is on view from Ferbaury 5 – May 1 at Houston and Mott Streets in Lower Manhattan. Here’s a snapshot of it that we found on Chris Guillebeau’s Facebook profile:
Every organization — be it large or small — has…
…experts who know better than anyone else how things work. Some of them are hidden, preferring to help out only when it won’t disrupt their daily work. Others are paid and encouraged to be the expert. In either case, their importance is growing, and will only increase in the next 10 years. For many companies, losing these workers’ knowledge and expertise would have the same results as losing trade secrets: unanswered customer requests, stalled manufacturing and assembly lines, delayed shipments, and new products never being released. Steve Hamrick asks himself what factors affect experts, how can knowledge workers connect with them more efficiently, and where can companies invest to grow and retain their experts? See how he answers to these questions by reading his post Avoiding Brain Drain Is Harder Than It Sounds for CMSWire.
Corporate culture can’t be fixed simply by…
…posting a mission statement on the wall, or moving in some bean bags and table football. There’s a level of sincerity and authenticity that can’t be faked, and whether you’ve had specific cultural challenges or seen your organization’s ethos gradually erode, 2016 is HR’s chance to drive cultural change and play a strategic part in the success of the wider business. With that in mind, Ashley Goldsmith suggests three common cultural scenarios and strategies for what to do about them. They are “Empower your employees, establish trust and give them a voice”, “Know your cultural values and stay true to them to avoid an identity crisis”, “Improve employee retention by building meaningful relationships”. As she points out, any workplace that stifles communication cannot expect to drive innovation or creativity. Read her article 3 steps that will enliven a struggling corporate culture for Diginomica to get more on the subject.
“Which countries are the strongest in digital…
…workplace maturity?” is one of the most common questions that Jane McConnell, Analyst, Speaker, Advisor on Digital Inside gets. Her view is that the larger the workforce, the more mature the digital workplace. The bigger you are, the more you need digital to reach and connect everyone. It is business critical. The more countries the organization operates in, the more advanced the internal digital workplace is. This applies as well to smaller organizations with people located in many different countries. According to her studies, she also found out that private beats public. The private corporate sector has higher digital maturity than the non-private such as government and educational institutions. Unfortunately, education and government are least mature sectors in digital workplace matters. Check out her analysis in her LinkedIn post Demographics and Digital Workplace Maturity.
Collaboration itself is now appearing everywhere,…
…as a digital capability embedded in many of our technology products. This fundamentally human group activity — which is absolutely vital to produce results in today’s knowledge-driven organizations — has either been added as a secondary ‘feature’ in many of our existing applications, or is literally raining down upon us from the cloud as hundreds of startups continually try to improve what’s possible and get into our organizations to better meet our users’ needs than we are today, often as I pointed out yesterday, by appealing to them directly. One of the most pernicious of collaboration challenges is the traditional view that collaboration is a monolithic thing we must all do the same way. It’s not. It’s a highly varied, innately human process that has unique needs and requires unique capabilities to optimally support different kinds of work, and it’s time we recognized this. Read the rest on this subject in Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog post How Organizations Can Address the Challenges of Modern Digital Collaboration.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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