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:
“If sharing as enabled by social technology…
…has become a standard component of everyday life, why can’t organizations take advantage of these behaviors and scale knowledge sharing in the workplace?” For JD Dillon it comes down to a simple answer: it’s not the same. “The technology may look familiar, and the desired behaviors may be similar. But, there are a few key considerations that most organizations ignore when attempting to generate shared organizational knowledge.” One of the practical tips that JD gives in order to help employees share their knowledge is to move knowledge sharing closer to the workflow. “Help employees talk about the work ON the work. Select technology and enable processes that merge sharing with on-the-job information reference in a single seamless experience.”. Read JD’s post 5 reasons your employees aren’t sharing their knowledge to get more tips.
“One essential skill is pivotal when building…
…tomorrow’s workforce. That workforce is multi-generational, cross-functional and collaborative, regardless of the size of your organization. Tomorrow’s workforce is structured around the power of your teams to ask effective questions. This one essential skill re-calibrates the capability of technical, engineering and manufacturing teams to engage productively, profitably and creatively with non-technical teams within the workplace. This one essential skill captures the business value your teams create so customer success stories become understandable, powerful and compelling. Take your corporate culture’s pulse. How engaged and collaborative is your current multigenerational workforce? When your current and future workforce develops this one essential skill, everyone becomes smarter, more collaborative and more valuable.” Read Effective Questions: An Essential Skill when Building Workforce Teams by Babette Ten Haken.
The way in which Millennials, “these highly…
…enterprising and engaging individuals will look to communicate, interact and hope to engage with tomorrow’s businesses is very different than the ways in which other generations have chosen to do so in the past. So how can organizations and non-profits hoping to engage these growing legions of young professionals hope to best engage them?” Award-winning professional speaker Scott Steinberg, a bestselling expert on leadership and innovation offers some tips for that, telling us that tomorrow’s leaders will “want clear goals, an engaging variety of assignments to tackle and to work for organizations with a go-getting attitude that encourages people to collaborate, share their ideas and be more innovative” or “find soft skills such as the ability to effectively communicate, learn and practice improvisational thinking equally important as technical knowledge, which is increasingly easy to come by.”. Read Scott’s post “Working with Millennials: How to Inspire Tomorrow’s Leaders” for more tips.
A research that was done by Gallup which…
…shows that many employees are disengaged. When asked what are the main reasons that they are disengaged, Peter Simon, a Transformation and Enterprise Coach who has been involved in IT project management, business analysis and software development for over 15 years, said that “Employees are disengaged today for many reasons. I feel that the primary undertones that drive disengagement among employees is the lack of ownership bestowed upon them by leadership. Today’s working environment has become the most volatile and insecure in generations, making it difficult for those in power to enable others, because of the perception they may lose their job if they empower their direct reports and relinquish too much power. Many in leadership roles today play their cards close to their chests too; not being open and collaborative with other employees, this too drives disengagement for those looking to collaborate with their direct report.”. Read this interesting interview Q&A on Achieving Impact through Engagement with Peters Simon and Si Alhir (Sinan Si Alhir), an Enterprise Transformation Coach, Trainer, Consultant, and Practitioner coordinated by Ben Linders for InfoQ.
“Building an innovative and collaborative culture…
…is common practice for most HR professionals. However, a recent study authored by two university researchers demonstrates that, despite the best of intentions, some HR practices can produce the opposite effect.” For internal innovation to flourish, a condition needs to exist, referred to as “psychological safety”. “To determine if a workplace is psychologically safe, HR needs to ask a series of questions about the company’s culture. Do employees feel comfortable sharing ideas with each other or do some fear that co-workers may steal their ideas and later pitch them as their own? Are there pockets within the organization where collaboration is not common practice, perhaps indirectly discouraged? Which leaders, managers or supervisors tend to be egocentric when presenting their ideas to individuals or teams? Which ones are more team-focused? Can the latter serve as ambassadors to promote a teamwork-based culture”? Read From Me to We by Carol Patton for Human Resources Executive Online.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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