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 knowledge economy demands…
…that companies accept and enable a much higher level of on-the-job learning and development. There is a growing need for the workplace to become a place for learning in its own right, where asking questions and sharing knowledge is as much a part of the job description as clocking in. The companies that will succeed in the new knowledge economy and reorient themselves as learning institutions — as well as product-makers and revenue generators — will provide employees opportunities to actively collaborate and learn from each other. Read Why Companies That Teach Will Win by Jeff Weber for CLOMedia.
There’s something magical about…
…collaboration and the energy unleashed by a group of people working on something together. It’s a little bit like the energy you feel when in a packed stadium when your favourite band plays – everyone knows the lyrics, everyone knows the songs and there’s just that buzz. When we try to create this collaboration buzz in our organizations, we often focus on building the stadium (ie we buy a piece of collaboration technology) and hope that the buzz somehow follows. We’re so focused on the stadium, we forget to consider what the band was doing that was so right that got people aligned around it. Worse yet, we forget the fans. The result? Empty collaboration stadiums. Read Ethan McCarty’s Four Collaboration Mistakes You Can Stop Making Today to learn how you can improve
There is a major difference between…
…engaged employees and those simply going through the motions. It all comes down to the relationship and communication between managers and their employees. Tim Eisenhauer’s point is that if there’s a lack of communication and motivation, engagement levels suffer. If engagement levels suffer, so will your business. Also according to him, there are at least 15 fundamental problems linked to employee disengagement. Some of these are: Poor Collaboration (disengaged employees withdraw and avoid working with each other), Employees Stop Trying (learning new skills requires motivation … motivation that comes from high engagement levels. It’s not that disengaged employees can’t get better; they just don’t want to). Read Noreen Seebacher’s post Why You Should Care About Your Worst Employees for CMSWire to get more on the subject.
In today’s fast-paced marketplace,…
…teams that need to wait for a leader to weigh in have lost the game before they start. Leaders instead need to paint a vivid horizon that inspires self-propelling teams to forge ahead with real-time collaboration — then step out of their way. Two of the four fundamentals is That shift implies something really important about the changing nature of leadership. Kevin Martin, chief research officer of i4cp, says “Organizations must look at leaders through a different lens. Business skills and acumen…are now table stakes. It’s the ability to influence and drive collaboration across cultures, boundaries, and borders that has the greater variability on global leadership effectiveness.”. Read about that and the fundamentals of this shift in leadership competence in Vineet Nayar’s post Don’t Let Outdated Management Structures Kill Your Company for Harvard Business Review.
Collaboration is not just a buzzword…
…– it is a natural, productive way of getting things done better, smarter and faster. The power of brainswarming translates into growth, as long as you care enough to make it work. There’s a series of steps that organizations need to take prior to implementing an enterprise social software for its deployment to be successful. They are: Understand what you’re trying to achieve, Know your audience, Determine the type of tool you need and Evaluate at least two vendors. Investing in social software means more than just paying for it – time, personal involvement and strategy are crucial for a successful deployment. Read our latest blog post 4 Steps To Take Before Choosing A Collaboration Tool if you’d like some more details on the subject.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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