The New Workplace Weekly Digest 10/02

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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:

The give-and-take of asking questions…

…and providing answers establishes two-way communication between the leader and team members. And if a leader regularly solicits input, acting as a student rather than an expert with hidden knowledge, he empowers others on the team, leading them to participate more willingly and effectively. Managers who lead global teams are up against stiff challenges and creating successful work groups is hard enough when everyone is local and people share the same office space. But Tsedal Neeley article for Harvard Business Review has some interesting tips around managing distributed teams – read Global Teams That Work to get more on this.

“Encourage employees to ask questions…

…and take ownership of specific pieces of a project. Cultivate an atmosphere where employees’ questions come from a desire to grow and learn—not from an instinct to criticize. Your company should offer the resources for them not only to ask the right question, but to answer them, which can benefit not only your employees’ careers but the way you do business.” Kathryn Minshew, CEO & cofounder of The Muse.com believes. Companies waste money on recruiting and still lose talent because they haven’t really kept up with employees’ needs, so she prepared a list of best practices to help with that. Read “Four Employee Retention Strategies For The Modern Workplace” for Fast Company to learn a few key changes to your work culture.

Reducing competition is a good way…

…of enhancing employees’ leadership skills. “Although we often see competition as a source of motivation, it easily distorts the social relations that increase collaboration, productivity and profitability. Margaret Heffernan, an entrepreneur, former CEO of five companies and author, said in a TED Talk that a culture of helpfulness routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Instead of encouraging competition between employees, leaders should create environments that build social capital — a sense of reliance and interdependency that increases trust. To do this, leaders should model a team mindset, reward teamwork more than individual performance and frame challenges as something in need of diverse perspectives and skills.” Tamara Rosin says. Check her post The 11 essentials of leading a team — and yourself to get more on the subject.

As workforces are becoming increasingly…

…distributed, it becomes even more essential for organizations to ensure that their collaborators, experts, knowledge workers and others can work, communicate and collaborate regardless of location, network or device. This offers a neat segue to enabling collaboration with technology. A team that has the capacity to share ideas and work together, no matter where they are physically located, is a team that holds value. Technology is the great enabler in this constant shift – it empowers businesses to build a culture that’s suited for all working styles of the future. The good news is that today’s collaboration tools make it easy for anyone to remain connected with team members, customers and suppliers, amongst others. The range of tools and solutions are varied and continue to evolve. Read Mei Lin Low’s post The rise of the relationship-driven workplace for Dynamic Business.

“Our ability to understand processes and…

…inter-workings between departments is the most underutilized IT capability in businesses today.”, The Naked CIO, an anonymous technology executive argues. He continues that “Changing this would improve efficiency, value and any businesses competitive advantage. How to change it, without alienating business leaders who still think of us as ‘techies’ without any functional business knowledge, is a challenge we must rise to – and a battle we must win.”. He stands by his opinion that IT should participate in driving business innovation through knowledge sharing and a seat on the executive board , as “our knowledge and experience offers a different perspective on how things operate – and more importantly on how they can potentially operate better and more innovatively”. Read his post The most important skill of the IT department is also the most ignored for TechRepublic to get his full POV on the subject.

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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