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:
By looking at the various signs of collaboration…
…from electronic communication records, managers can get a unique view into the nervous system of their organization — allowing them to optimize communication for superior collaboration and innovation. By studying data from various sources (such as email archives, tweets, and blog links), Peter A. Gloor and his research team have identified several indicators of how effective collaborative communication works. The indicators can guide managers in decisions about how groups should be organized and led, recommended levels of participation for group members, how quickly members should be expected to respond, the tone of the language that team members should use, and how technical the language should be. Read What Email Reveals About Your Organization for MIT Sloan to learn more about the study.
Innovation involves input from diverse people…
…diverse minds, and the diverse experience and knowledge they bring and organizations need to make sure everyone is brought along on the journey. “When your workplace is a place where everyone embraces, even enjoys, working out loud, magic happens.” Andrew Pope concludes his article. But some research shows that often, enterprise social collaboration tools produce disappointment and frustration instead of helping with productivity. “The warning signs your collaboration efforts are going south include a proliferation of groups formed with no management, initial posts being made with no further participation, and conversations with little or no participation from management.” He believes there are five sequential steps to revitalize and reinvigorate your social platform. Learn what these steps are by reading his post Breathe New Life Into Your Collaboration Tools for CMSWire.
Google coddles its employees with free food…
…massages and other lavish perks, yet some of its best engineers still grouse about their jobs and bosses as they struggle to get assignments done. The Internet company tackled the puzzling problem with a study that concluded how teams work together is more important than who is on a team. It’s an example of how companies are spending more time trying to understand how to build the most productive and cohesive teams. The priority is high because the best products and ideas increasingly are springing from people working together. Google’s study, based on data analysis, found that teams work best when their members feel like they can take risks, can count on each other, have clear goals and believe their work matters. Retaining and motivating the workforce is critical to business, so read some insights by Martha Mendoza & Michael Liedtke in their article Google study of teamwork finds ‘how’ is more important than ‘who’.
Telecommuting and remote work is…
…increasingly becoming a reality in 21st century workplaces. Following an interview with 61 remote companies meant to help us learn more about how they operate, Sara Sutton Fell identified five key lessons that traditional companies can learn from these cloud and technology-savvy businesses. One of these keys is related to internal communications: Proactive communication is the key to productive teams. “Every remote company we’ve talked with says the same thing: communication is king. But they don’t necessarily mean lots of scheduled, but often unnecessary, meetings or forced interactions. Instead, communication is an ongoing, daily, organic thing that helps remote workers to be more efficient, productive and engaged, both individually and as a group.”. Read her post 5 Lessons Traditional Companies Can Learn From Remote Companies for Entrepreneur to get their best practices.
17% of a survey respondents said they are…
…confident their organizations have the right leadership in place to deliver on their strategic priorities. In addition, executives say if they could completely start over with leadership development at their organization, they’d only keep about half of their current approach. Clearly, change is needed. Noah Rabinowitz and Pushp Deep Gupta believe there are tangible tips to create leadership programs that will have a positive affect on people and on the bottom line. One of these tips is to make leadership development relevant. There is tremendous value in embedding leadership development programs within organizations, bringing people together to work on the same issues, and centering programs on what the organization is attempting to accomplish. Read How to Fuse Leadership Development With Purpose and Strategy for CLO Media to learn more on the subject.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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