The New Workplace Weekly Digest 02/26/2016

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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:

With collaboration there are two basic…

…instincts that are automatically triggered under different circumstances: hoarding and sharing. Some corporate policies unwittingly trigger knowledge hoarding. When an organization’s evaluation, promotion and compensation systems are based on relative numbers and individual achievements, it reinforces the perception is that sharing knowledge reduces the chance of personal success. Some managers undermine collaboration by their own hoarding behavior — withholding information from their team or doling it out on a “needs to know” basis. But there are actions that leadership can take to inspire collaboration, like providing opportunities for team members to interact with one another and with other parts of the organization in order to develop relationships that are the bedrock of collaboration. Read Seven Ways To Inspire Your Team To Collaborate by Carol Kinsey Goman for Forbes to know what the rest are.

The future workplace will require more…

…real-time information, more user-friendly applications and processes, and more varied opportunities for interaction. But businesses have not usually been so quick to share information. It’s common for a business to keep access to company-wide data restricted to executives only, and to keep other information siloed within specific departments. Most companies put little effort into making data quickly and easily accessible, instead relying on arcane systems that require workers to make tedious requests for access rather than presenting it on demand. But in the future workplace, communication between employees, teams and offices will also become more automated: the result will be fewer status meetings and more information-sharing platforms. Read other trends for the future of work by reading Mike Smalls’ post 4 Ways Millennials Will Reshape Your Concept of the Office for Business2Community.

Whether it is creating new, updating existing…

…or removing out-of-date content, knowledge maintenance costs have been rising an average of 8% year-over-year. But overall budgets remain the same. Perhaps more alarming when it comes to updating content, recent analyst estimates suggest that Fortune 500 companies are losing a combined $31.5 billion per year from employees failing to share knowledge effectively. To stand any chance of their content keeping up, brands must therefore make use of every resource available to them, and this means taking a wider look at possible knowledge providers both within their own organizations and outside of them. Knowledge management should be intuitive, innovative, and evolving making information simple to find, use, monitor, and manage. Social collaboration is going to be an increasingly important part of the process over the next five years. Read Michael Aston’s interesting article Social Collaboration: The Battle to Keep Content Fresh for 1to1Media.

Collaboration is a great opportunity for…

…employees to learn from their colleagues and develop their skills so they can better contribute to the organization as a whole. Being exposed to different departments and skill sets during collaborative meetings and sessions that are outside of their areas of expertise will give employees a more holistic view of the business, as well as give them a chance to pick up on knowledge that can help them improve their own departments. Collaboration is a hot topic among managers and business owners alike these days. From the rise of social intranets to an increase in workspaces designed specifically with collaboration in mind, the quest for a more integrated and teamwork-driven workforce is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. To get more on the story, read Camille Szramiak Arneberg’s post Workplace Collaboration: It’s Time to Rethink How We Work Together.

To create a culture of learning…

…there are different actions that you can take. Like creating a robust, ongoing performance management process that fosters collaboration between employees and managers and makes learning from feedback part of everyday life. Give employees the tools to identify skills gaps and strengths and map the findings to learning opportunities – and monitor progress along the way. Another way to deliver learning opportunities to employees is to harness the skills and knowledge of subject matter experts and implement knowledge-sharing programs across the organization. With this approach, you can easily link learning activities with core competencies and measure program impact. Dominique Jones makes some interesting points in her post 5 Tips for Building a Learning Culture in Your Workplace for About.com.

Happy Knowledge Sharing!

Looking for a great way to ask questions and build knowledge with your co-workers? Quandora enables simple, efficient knowledge sharing with your team, way more fun than a mailing list or a forum. Try Quandora

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