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:
The arrival of wave after wave of new communications…
…and collaboration tools has overwhelmed many IT organizations. “Far from blocking them, smart organizations are finding ways to bring order to the chaos. Shadow IT is not new of course, but in the collaboration space, the sheer amount of proliferation has reached a high water mark recently. For most of the history of IT, organizations offered the workforce a few well-defined tools through which employees and other stakeholders were supposed to communicate and collaborate. “ Dion Hinchcliffe writes. But not anymore – now employees and departments are helping themselves to the tools they believe they really need. One of the solutions? A multilayered collaboration strategy. Read about it in Dion’s post Enterprises confront the reality of ‘multilayered’ collaboration for ZDNet.
Sometimes you can make significant progress…
…building an enterprise of the future by looking to the past. Dusting off old, discarded concepts and repurposing them to fit today’s business climate might give you a much needed boost. One such concept worth looking at is the age-old practice of curation. “We’re talking about knowledge curation, the care and feeding of an organization’s critical knowledge. No matter how good the automation, knowledge doesn’t take care of itself. Keeping organizational knowledge relevant and up-to-date requires adult supervision. Unfortunately, in many organizations, such behavior is rare. A knowledge curator may be just what the doctor ordered.”. In order to make Curation 2.0 a reality in your organization, there are a few fundamental changes in mindset you’ll need to adopt, Art Murray, D.Sc. and Ken Wheaton believe. Like the responsibility for capturing, organizing, making accessible and keeping the critical knowledge in each subject area relevant and up-to-date. Read more on the subject by reading their post for KMWorld, Welcome to Curation 2.0.
At a time when teamwork is becoming the norm…
…and teams are more often than not made up of contractors or consultants from outside the organization, collaborative skill improvement can be a unique and effective way to dramatically increase team performance. The atomic unit of collaboration is an interaction between two people. But knowing how to interact and what to do in each situation requires judgment and skills which need to be taught and experienced. And as with any other skill, collaboration takes practice. “It is unfortunate, but we often get more training in football in our developing years than collaborative skills. We’re taught to share toys in kindergarten, and further lessons if we played a team sport or participated in a team activity in high school, but that was it. Even business schools, where collaboration is critical, don’t offer much (if any) instruction in collaboration.”. The best way to learn new collaborative skills is a hands-on approach, where each “play” helps teams learn or perfect a new collaborative skill. Read David Coleman’s post The Collaboration Problem No One’s Discussing for CMSWire.
The importance of social is one of the key areas…
…for the biggest business challenges in the coming years, Gys Kappers, CEO of Wyzetalk, believes. “Increasingly, thereis also the need for more functional and relevant business apps that incorporate a social layer. To enable collaboration, ideation, and knowledge sharing amongst users. More groups of people are taking to apps that provide functionality relevant to their style, content, and context of work. Company policies will need to accommodate these in their technology and security stacks. Despite the potential, the biggest challenge facing any organisation is to align its technology approach and content services to meet the needs of both the company and the end user. Companies should look beyond broadcast mode when defining their comms strategies.” Read article Deal with disruption in workplace of tomorrow for Gadget.co.za to get more on the subject.
Employees are far more loyal to companies…
…when there is mutual respect between management and staff. Astute employers know that empathizing with employees and encouraging interaction among all strata of staff establishes high levels of trust, which leads to a greater sense of empowerment. Combined with good training and a culture of collaboration and teamwork, this all leads to superior workplace performance—greater than any material perk can do. And keep in mind that happier employees also directly link to improved customer care. Finding ways to promote social connections among the workforce can drastically improve well-being and engagement. Establishing a culture in which management goes out of its way to help and support employees has also shown to improve workplace well-being, and it serves to inspire confidence in performance as well as promote engagement. Read Resolve to Reset: Making a Better Workplace Environment by Stephen M. Pfeiffer, Ph.D. to learn more about promoting workplace well-being.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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