Catherine Shinners – Merced Group

Right tools + right contexts + right support = effective workflows

Catherine Shinners — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 22:14:23 +0000

Two recent Harvard Business Review articles highlight the ongoing challenges with using collaboration and digital tools. According to the authors, leaders and knowledge workers are left scrambling through an array of tools often with little guidance and support on how best to incorporate them in their daily work life.

I’ve worked on digital transformation initiatives in a variety of high tech and financial services companies since 2012, and it’s dismaying to see the continuing conundrums workers experience in utilizing the many digital options for collaboration and knowledge work.

That sense of confusion is often the result short-term guidance and support and unclear best use cases. Thus, we’ve had articles discussing “tech overload” and interrupt-driven workflows going years back with Rob Cross et al., and now these recent HBR pieces, Are Collaboration Tools Overwhelming your Team? and Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous.

In the first article, Hinds et al., recaps a study in which a set of knowledge workers were asked to modulate their own collaboration tool use by eliminating a selection of tools from their own workflows for a period of two weeks. Called a “collaboration cleanse” participants were able to gain some clarity on just how many tools they were using, but also experienced anxiety – while they were “subtracting” the use of certain tools from their own practice, others they might have to interact with were not.

The authors also call out management to be more engaged, even prescriptive, with guidance and tool selection for their teams and organizations, and to provide more ongoing support.

In the second article, Steve Glaveski notes that the way in which digital tools have often been introduced has not led to ways to “improve how we work” [emphasis mine]. He outlines several tools, like task boards, that can allow people to provide information about project activities without using real-time communication interrupts like message boards or emails. While the article’s focus is about improving remote working, its suggestions are relevant for in-office or hybrid teams as well.

Two elephants – same room

Both articles cite two issues that predate the digital transformation era.

Email – Both articles cite an alarming statistic that “the typical worker receives 121 emails each day.” Glaveski also notes a worker spends 23% of their time on unnecessary emails and checks email once every six minutes. Email has been a core communication tool for decades, but its misuse adds to the complexity that workers must deal with.

Meetings & Calendaring – It’s difficult to do meaningful knowledge work when one’s calendar is jammed with meetings. Meetings are often the default for project team interactions, sometimes including individuals who don’t necessarily need to be.

Both these challenges have little to do with collaboration and digital tool overload. Excessive email communication, for instance, can be mitigated by a rethinking of internal communications, using more transparent and two-way digital options.

Ask what’s the context? Then select the tools and work practice

Thoughtful consideration of tools and practice in knowledge and leadership workflows can address the fundamental opportunities of digital transformation.

Teams should be able to use a set of tools appropriate to their workstreams. Many workers participate in projects, or business process workflows within and across organizations. Not all tools are applicable to every work process. As a team forms, it’s important to norm first before diving into a default set of tools and practice.

-Which tools, and which features of tools to use and in which context? i.e.,

Light communications
Project task management
Project artifact management (documents, reports, presentations, dashboards

-Do we need to have project meeting (s)? What will be their purpose? How will the outcomes be filtered across the team members?

-Check-ins on tool use – how is it working for team members, does anyone need a tool buddy for a period?

Tool norm setting can not only help with “tech overload” but help diminish the amount of context switchingbetween tools and types of interaction.

Hinds et al. provides some helpful guidance for managers that includes identifying preferred tool selection for their organizations and ensuring ongoing support. I have found that too often digital transformation efforts focus on the initial change, but ongoing enablement and guidance diminishes after early rollout.

Leaders need to engage with the tools themselves, gaining a sense of their applicability and usefulness. And rather than defaulting to email communications (especially cascading emails), leaders can adapt their communications strategies and practice to more digital and interactive modalities. [Topics on Digital Leadership – Social Now, Lisbon, 2019]

Digital tools in knowledge work can bring positive benefits to the way teams work together.

Not all tools are useful in all contexts, projects, or business processes. Choosing a common tool set and setting norms around meetings can help knowledge workers get the most out of digital tools and the collaboration they support.

A digital workplace connects people and work – no matter the location

Catherine Shinners — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 22:09:23 +0000

There is currently a tsunami of business articles about the post-pandemic work location of employees – full return-to-office mandates, hybrid models with in-office days each week, and some remaining fully remote. Equally there is a swirl of rationales – suggesting employees benefit most from in-person coaching and mentoring, experience better collaboration in office, and that innovation may be undermined by extended working-from-home models.

Before the pandemic, I frequently worked with global companies whose employees were situated across regions, countries, and time zones. Teams were often assembled from various locations, requiring mostly online meeting and digital tool interactions to work together.

During that time, companies implemented digital transformation initiatives to help employees take advantage of the digital dynamics commonly experienced on the external web – to connect more easily, interact more transparently, and share their work and knowledge products more easily.

The promise of digital transformation partially realized

The digital tools were unleashed within organizations often with an underlying assumption that they would take hold with the ease and viral impact of public social tools. These tools, however, were meant to optimize (knowledge) work experience and workflows – to foster a digital workplace. Here were some of the experiences I have seen workers face –

Many tools, fragmented guidance, and governance
Missing articulation of clear contexts of value for digital tools – when to use which tool for which context in personal and teamwork use cases
Short term delivery of training, adoption support – dissipates after core rollout
Management missing from the adoption equation – remaining unfamiliar with the tools, unsure of how to engage, and unsupported in their own communications and leadership workflows
Online meeting tools that exacerbated unproductive aspects of default meeting culture

These challenges are not necessarily mediated by hybrid or return-to-office modalities – they were a problem before the pandemic, obscured during the emergency “work-from-home” measures, and often remain despite hybrid or other workplace structures.

The promise of the digital workplace is possible and can support effective work as people are shifting to hybrid, or other operational structures. Over the next few weeks, I’ll bring some ideas and perspectives that will help individuals, teams and leaders in their work and communications.

Business Value Models in the Digital Workplace

Catherine Shinners — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 16:16:26 +0000

Digital workplace projects like enterprise social network (ESN) implementations or large scale social collaboration tools often move ahead, understandably, as an IT-lead project, with perhaps HR or internal communications partnership to help improve employee engagement. Upfront planning and alignment on broader strategic business objectives are often missing, however. As projects roll out organizations and digital transformation teams often struggle to clarify and articulate business value and impact.

Large sale enterprise social network platforms or social collaboration tools often come with dashboards and instrumentation that provides a view on platform operations and gives a community management or digital transformation change team some basic information about users and activity.

Too often, however, a view on progress and impact starts and stops with these metrics and you’ll find conversations between a community manager and their management go something like this. Such dialogue suggests that the community manager doesn’t have the aligned framework to articulate business value, and the executive is not sure what questions to ask.

In these cases there’s often an over-reliance on the operational metrics of the platform to tell the story.

Platform analytics are helpful as indicators but don’t provide an abundance of business insight. These analytics can help a digital workplace team begin to ask questions about their program. How’s our rollout doing? Is more training indicated? Are more campaigns needed for baseline engagement? Are there pockets of the overall organization that are not showing up on the platform?

But one’s digital transformation or ESN program design needs to be driven and shaped by your organizations business imperatives. What kind of employee engagement do you need to drive? What are the key business processes or work practices that you want to change? What are the impact metrics and KPIs that will substantiate success or at least validate meaningful improvement? How are you going to design your program to impact those business imperatives?

Here is a set of tools I designed to use in planning a digital workplace program that helps your team facilitate and engage stakeholders and leadership.

Program and operational metrics helps you tune your engagement, adoption and change program.
Business value assessments give you the insight on where the program is making a difference to the business.

Using this framework to plan your program helps set the stage for a common understanding of what your digital workplace program is driving towards to help the business. It’s shaped to align with company priorities. You can identify where in the organization the change could take place or be most impactful or prioritize based on your available resources to manage a change program.

You can then use use the framework to set priorities specific use cases within business imperatives.

And, you can begin to establish some common language with your stakeholders around what is meant mean by success for your organization, to organize a program of change, to validate results and identify how to amplify it.

Here’s some additional business imperatives to start the conversation in your organization.

Communities to accelerate change

Catherine Shinners — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 17:44:29 +0000

Companies continue to use traditional change management approaches to move important initiatives across their organizations – initiatives such as Agile development, data science or overarching digital transformation efforts. Such initiatives not only involve getting stakeholder support and orientation and baseline executive buy-in, but means moving major cohorts of the workforce, if not the entire workforce to be educated in new skills and practices. Last year, in article Changing Change Management, McKinsey Quarterly noted that 70 percent of change programs fail, but noted it was time to integrate digital strategies to address the pace and breadth of change that needs to flow through organizations.

New skills and practices often require fundamental mindset shifts in the way to approach business problems and models of interaction and managing work and information flows. An organizational memo and slide deck briefing will not suffice to transition the workforce, but instead requires leveraging new network-based social structures and digital tools to broadly increase the uptake of new skills and embed new practice into organizational culture.

Companies or organizations who have made the investment in enterprise social networks or widely available collaboration platforms have the technology to integrate Communities for Change as a powerful component of change programs. Communities provide important value for change initiatives. Organizations can expand the reach of the change program by activating horizontal knowledge flows and decision-making. Community interactions provide more two-way processes to engage stakeholders and broaden social learning in the context of work and socializes knowledge management. A community becomes a venue for sustained peer-to-peer exchanges, surfacing expertise. A community for change also gives leaders and executives a view into breadth and depth of the change program’s effectiveness.

Here are some models of Communities for Change

Business integration champions -Coalescing a community of business-side champions can be a vital element in an overall change initiative. A business integration champion community brings together identified leaders who become advocates for the change across their organizations. An online community program can be structured to engage its members to provide input into change strategies and guidance, suggest and help design adoption campaigns and participate in discussion forums and virtual roundtables on initiative topics and challenges. Importantly through the online community experience, champions can gain a sense of connection with one another.

The community becomes an important resource for guidance and governance material, communications tools, and shared success stories, showcasing case examples of business process integration. The community also becomes an opportunity for both expanded professional networking and recognition. As with all successful communities, this kind of champion community entails a program design that includes curated and original content, a blend of online and live events, active facilitation of member interactions by a community manager, and an opportunity for leadership to participate and bring their voices to the mix in focused ways.

Education and applied practice –Communities of practice have proven to be effective for advancing the expertise or practice within a domain, and members have some form of pre-articulated or validated reputation or credential. The formal experience of practice is a learning resource in an of itself.

Communities for Change include dimensions of a community of practice augmented with additional program features that are well-suited to initiatives that seek to introduce new disciplines and practice such as Agile or applied data science into an organization. Often in these kind of initiatives, there is a strong element of initial education, training and credentialing of a cohort of members who will be directly integrating these new practices into their work and business processes.

Key resources in these types of communities includes not only access to training, but access to sets of approved methodologies and tools. As individuals move through training and initial practice, they also find the community a place for ongoing advancement of their expertise via interaction and knowledge exchange with their peers and senior mentors. Another key element is to design the community to include a curated portfolio of applied projects to the business so that practitioners can learn from relevant projects and executives can gain insight into how to sponsor or bring projects into their own lines of business. Other key community-based resources can include thought leadership or innovation examples from sources external to the organization. The community can also be the launch point for crowdsourced responses to challenges or missions for members of the community to tackle.

Accelerating strategic initiatives – Communites for Change models can be used to coalesce and accelerate strategic initiatives. A fine example of this is a case study highlighted in the book “The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees” by Mark P. McDonald and Anthony J. Bradley.

In this instance, CEMEX, a global cement and building materials manufacturer wanted to increased the use of alternate fuels in their plants. CEMEX used community collaboration to gather their plant staff and drove three cycles of engagement in the community. The first was to engage 500 plant managers and engineers in the initial call to assess each plant’s practices. The second cycle was a collaborative and transparent review of practices across all plants, identifying best or innovative practices. The third cycle was transitioning the community to an ongoing knowledge sharing group, that not only brought improved practice, but helped even the best performing plants move towards continuous improvement. This kind of initiative would have taken two years with more traditional approaches, according to McDonald and Bradley, but in this instance took six weeks.

In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article entitled Accelerate! , John Kotter proposed a new concept of using network models of interaction to coalesce “informal networks of change agents” whereby “the network and accelerators can serve as continuous and holistic change function.” As companies embrace these more network-based models, Kotter proposed that companies would begin operating in what he calls a ‘dual operating system’ of both hierarchy and networks.

Fundamental underpinnings of successful communities are careful design and strong facilitation and stewardship through community management practice. Communities for Change are highly leveragable network-based social structures to mobilize, accelerate and enlarge change initiatives and can be incorporated as a powerful addition to change management practice.

The Future of Work is Now

Catherine Shinners — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 04:54:51 +0000

In the last two weeks of June 2016, four major technology companies entered into watershed relationships that harken the arrival of the Future of Work. On June 13 Microsoft announced it’s intent to acquire LinkedIn.This acquisition signals the driving of the value of the network into organizations. The fundamental message – the network of people is now the membrane of the organization and will give the enterprise the flexibility it needs to identify and orient talent to where it’s needed.

Some of the value points of the merger include the universal profile – an individual’s profile is now a strategic asset for the company as well as the individual, within as well as across organizations. An intelligent newsfeed will bring consolidated access and awareness to information. A personal network digital assistant connected to the enterprise and the broader professional network will bring professionals high degrees of contextual coordination and relationship insight. Via it’s own acquisition of Lynda.com last year, there’s an opportunity for LinkedIn to become a component of ‘just-in-time’ skills building for an enterprise workforce.

The second announcement on June 30, brought forward a strategic Cisco and IBM partnership that will nominally bring more coherency to broad-based knowledge work and collaboration modalities through the integration of Cisco’s Spark, WebEx and IBM’s Verse and Connections. A key differentiator in this announcement is the intent to bring the capabilities of Watson into the mix – applying its analytical power to deliver what Jens Meggers, SVP of Cisco’s Cloud Collaboration Technology Group calls ‘intelligent collaboration’ to deliver insight and augmented context to individuals as they work. These significant technology movements and others like them will begin to enable tectonic shifts in organizational design, leadership models, and the social contract with a global workforce that is more multi-generational, diverse and multi-cultural than ever

The Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016 report’s orientation this year was “Different by Design” calling out the need to reshape leadership, rethink workforce engagement fundamentals, move learning to an ongoing and integrated experience, analytics tied to talent management, and weaving the resources of a growing gig economy into workforce management and operating models. These and others trends touch every facet of organizational life and structure in companies.

Looming on the horizon are high impact technology advances such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Internet of (Nano) Things, that the World Economic Forum notes will continue to shape, if not profoundly disrupt, our current understanding of the way people work in the knowledge economy. For whether it’s the gig, sharing or digital economy, it’s still the knowledge economy and organizations orient resources – human and machine – toward knowledge work that is the major source of value in the world today.

Future of Work Disconnect

Despite the momentum of technological advances and these important new technology partnerships, there’s often a significant disconnect between current models of organizational design, leadership approaches, operational models and human talent assessment that would lead to real Future of Work organizations

Skills

Both workers and leadership in organizations seem to have a level of disconnect in the area of skills. In June 2016, the City and Guilds Group published a Skills Confidence report based on surveying 8,000 workers in the United Kingdom, United States, South Africa and India. Alarmingly, those surveyed felt both their skills and their jobs would be relevant over the next ten years, belying an awareness of the magnitude of disruption likely from the aforementioned technology advances

In a 2013 report by the Conference Executive Board,Breakthrough Performance in the New Work Environment: Identifying and Enabling the New High Performance noted that profitable growth was expected out of increases in worker efficiency and productivity, a technique that had been successful over the previous two decades. Workers, however, were feeling tapped out and at a loss to adapt to increasingly complex work environments. The report advised executives to proactively identify and support new skills building, including teamwork, organizational awareness, problem solving, proactivity, influence, decision-making, learning agility and more.

The World Economic Forum and the Institute for the Future have also articulated similar ‘new skills for the 21st century’, but in the City and Guilds Group report, workers don’t seem to be expressing an awareness of the skills they need to develop, nor are they finding the leadership guidance they need towards building those skills.

Organizational Design

Enterprise Social Networks and cloud technologies are now commonplace in many organizations. Digital transformation affords the organization the opportunity to transform core operating models and common business process workflows and communication patterns. However, Enterprise Social Networks in particular have often been implemented as a new layer of technology without strategic re-alignment of core communications and business workflows. Workers are therefore doing many of the things the way they did before while trying to adapt to the new technology without a sense of business focus. Leadership is often not directly engaged, nor driving expectations and investments in re-architecting old ways of operating to new efficiencies.

But the technology delivered is expected to bring both new efficiencies and innovation. Microsoft, for instance, explicitly calls out how they expect the combined Microsoft-LinkedIn capabilities to affect the sales process, as well as talent management and skills development.

Leadership

Like knowledge workers, leaders are also experiencing great change and expectations relative to the scope and nature of their roles. The Conference Executive Board in 2014 published the results of a survey of 23,000 business executives in their report The Rise of the Network Leader: Reframing Leadership in the New Work Environment. These executives, according to the report, by large measure indicated the scope of their responsibilities and objectives had grown, as well as the to deliver business results fasterhey also, in many cases, have a more global role with frequent shifts in responsibilities. As the report notes, leaders need to cultivate new skills themselves beyond the core leadership arenas of transformation and transactional leadership (core areas of management performance today) to add network-based leadership. It is worth quoting specifically from the paper the characteristics of network leadership.
“Network Leadership—This role involves establishing strong network performance by building, aligning, and enabling broad networks both internal and external to the organization. Network leadership is more about influence than control; it is also a more indirect than direct form of leadership, requiring leaders to create a work environment based on autonomy, empowerment, trust, sharing, and collaboration.”

The Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016 report noted that traditional models of leadership development are not keeping pace with business demands and the rate of change that companies are facing. Both the Deloitte report and the City and Guilds report indicate a need for leaders to be more actively involved in organizational re-design and to proactively guide their workforce towards skills building and expectations for continuous learning.

Culture and Ethos

As the articulation of network leadership by the CEB notes, leaders need to create a work environment based on autonomy, empowerment, trust, sharing and collaboration The technology shifts indicated by these most recent business acquisitions and partnerships do much to enable the empowerment and collaboration of a workforce, to help them be able to shift rapidly to new work teams, projects and contexts and to be more responsive and adaptable to changing business needs. In an environment when network leaders support this kind of culture and ethos, then knowledge workers feel empowered to take up the tools and interactive and learning modalities to become proficient ‘future of workers.”

Along with new models of leadership, new approaches for worker performance and recognition will evolve to include not only individual performance, but network contribution. Like network leaders, individuals will be active agents on the network, both internally and externally to an organization. A network performer will be able to make their knowledge and skills visible, use their network acumen to move rapidly and productively into new teams, and weave learning into their everyday experience.

A Good Place to Start

The Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn and the Cisco and IBM strategic partnership are powerful indicators of where the Future of Work is soon headed.

However, many companies and organizations already have digital and social collaboration tools will let them move more actively in that direction right now. Leaders can begin to adopt network leadership behaviors and skills, driving strategies to actively move critical workflows and business processes to these platforms and identifying key Future of Work skills that workers are expected to master. Knowledge workers can begin to cultivate their own network agency and adaptability by proactively adopting the tools and technology and incorporate skills building as a steady part of their work.

Original concept art by Joachim Stroh

Something’s on overload – but it’s not collaboration

Catherine Shinners — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 22:37:16 +0000

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant just published an intriguing article in the Harvard Business Review, decrying Collaborative Overload in the workplace. It seemed to me that much of the challenges and issues they called out did not have much to do with collaboration, per se, but with poor interaction and knowledge management practices, irregular or vague governance and guidance, and haphazard project and team management processes. In my work with organizations and companies, it’s often these kinds of issues that impact productive collaboration.

The big squeeze – knowledge worker contribution amidst changes in nature of work

The knowledge worker of the 21st century is indeed experiencing overload – expectations of continued workforce productivity gains often outpaces the ability of workers to maximize the potential of the use of new technologies while increasing their output. A 2013 Conference Executive Board Report noted unambiguously the high impact of workforce productivity on the bottom line.

“Since 1993, revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) had grown at a 3.23% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) compared to no growth in revenue per cost of goods sold (COGS; CAGR= 0.16%) and a -0.61% in revenue per invested capital.”

The climate of knowledge work has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years – people are often working on varied. globally dispersed, teams rolling up to multiple reporting structures. They’re collaborating and interacting with customers, prospects and partners online. Workers often must interact with 10-20 people per day to get their job done – a job that is increasingly dependent on information. Add to this day-to-day team, information and interaction complexity are increases in the number and more rapid cadence of organizational shifts and restructuring that knowledge workers must adapt to.

As the CEB report notes even with these new work challenges growing, there is also the expectation of a 20% workforce performance improvement among global executives.

Interaction doesn’t equate to collaboration, and some aspects of this article imply as much by focusing the modalities (emails, phone calls, etc) rather than the contexts for collaboration. It’s true that using the wrong tool or modality for the job can be grossly inefficient (email to manage complex workflows, for instance) but some of the overload may be about other issues rather than too much collaboration.

Common work practices gone haywire

Inquiry overload

Aspects of the collaborative overload the article focuses on areas that don’t appear to be collaboration issues (or ad hoc collaboration requests as Cross et al. refer to) but knowledge management work practice gone awry. Many organizations have that ‘go-to’ person who seems to know how to find things quickly or has expertise at their fingertips to share, or seem to be ‘in-the-know’ about what’s going on with organizational shifts and changes. That ‘go-to’ person becomes a human knowledge repository; it’s easier to ‘ask Joe’ rather than seek the information in other ways. Often that person can provide background, insight and context around the information that’s being sought.

There are often three facets to this problem. The first is that people don’t want to bother with searching for the information they need, or the information seems difficult to find, and therefore often turn to that ‘go-to’ person first. Why might information be difficult to locate? The organization’s search technology may not be up to date or well implemented so that search results are incomplete or bring in too much extraneous, irrelevant results Often much information is buried in email chains that’s simply not broadly accessible.

The second challenge is that guidance and governance to the workforce on how to appropriately utilize content management systems is undeveloped or not well-understood. Workplace norms around labeling, tagging, distribution and storing practice are missing. Work practices remain locked into 1990s modalities of using email to coordinate and communicate around complex work processes and as ways to distribute vital business content.

Finally, the worker who’s being continually tapped, may be in demand, yet disengaged because they’re not able to leverage what they know. They may be getting similar questions from multiple sources. They’re barraged by one-offs – their inputs or responses not visible or scalable. As Cross et al. notes, those workers would value mentoring, coaching or training others.

Meeting overload

One of the most intractable challenges in companies today is real-time meeting overload. The ease of access and usability of real-time web meeting tools has helped teams come together easily and quickly to aid in their project work. Unfortunately workers are often in meetings, back to back for 6-10 hours day. Just because people are in meetings, doesn’t mean they’re collaborating. Often they’re multi-tasking since there’s little time to do other work or the meeting content is not applicable to their participation thereby diminishing their productivity elsewhere.

Here are some of the challenges I frequently observe that are not collaboration issues per se

Meeting norms are weak or lacking – A meeting topic might be established, but no agenda is published in advance to allow people to prepare, evaluate materials, ahead of time. Since people are in back-to-back meetings, there’s no time for people to prepare or publish status or project updates in other, asynchronous formats, so additional meeting time is needed for status updates (for which half the attendees may not find relevant to their portion of the project).
Collaboration or project norms are weak or lacking – Got a project? Set up a recurring meeting. New projects or new matrix teams often don’t spend a little time at the beginning of joint work to set up simple collaboration norms. Here are some questions that project teams might ask in order to streamline or eliminate meetings.
- What tools should we use to communicate and capture project activities?
- How should we tag and distribute content so it is consistently find-able and people receive timely alerts for new content?
- Who should be in project meetings?
- Do we need to meeting regularly? If so, do we all need to be at every meeting?
- Can we structure the meetings in a way that we use that meeting time to address things that we cannot accomplish as well using other collaboration tools?

Given the over-scheduling of meetings, it’s often difficult to start in a timely manner. If one knowledge worker is in eight 1-hour meetings/day and each meeting started 5-7 minutes late, at the end of the day they would have lost 40-45 minutes of time and perhaps as much as 160-200 minutes/week. Little of this time would be engaged in effective collaboration.

The challenges that Cross et al. call out are less issues with over-collaboration and more about reliance on unproductive default behaviors.

Digital work practice for humans working in networks

Here are some 21st century digital work practices that companies and knowledge workers need to consider to ameliorate overload and support more effective collaboration.

Part of a work product includes connecting it to and making it findable on a network (link-ability, tagging, connecting to social profiles)
Part of collaboration means consciously adapting to more transparent ways of working (Working Out Loud)
Part of team work includes establishing collaborative norms (which tools and modalities for which contexts)
Part of knowledge worker productivity includes proactively managing flows of information, bringing elements like activity streams and tagged content into their realm of access and awareness.

New digital and social tools can help individuals create conversational spaces where common questions get answered, or discussion around key topics can take place online, and others can see, learn from and repurpose without interrupting the knowledge expert. The conversational aspect of the tools also affords the expert the opportunity to provide context, and there’s a dynamic, sustained thread of their shared expertise. Social collaboration tools also afford the opportunity to create collaborative communities of practice or knowledge networks where expertise can be more broadly and transparently shared and more centrally discovered by seekers.

Many companies are bringing social collaboration environments (enterprise social networks) into the collaborative mix. An important, but frequently underutilized component of enterprise social networks is the rich profile. Similar in concept to a LinkedIn profile, these rich profiles allow a worker to provide information about their background, expertise, interests, their network across the organization, and current work activities or products or blog about their work. Yet this aspect of enterprise social networks are often not uniformly employed to good collaboration effect. Knowledge seekers can use the social profiles in enterprise social networks to identify a variety of individuals with expertise or connections around a topic or information need. An important 21st century work skill is to effectively use and develop networks. Knowledge workers need to develop the practice of searching social profiles for experts as a element of that network skill. Leaders need to put in place work practice change programs to help workers effectively develop and use this skill.

Contexts for collaboration – all collaboration is not equal

In discussing challenges to collaboration or identifying ways to help individuals and organizations to engage in collaboration more productively, it’s important to be clear about the contexts for collaboration.

Knowledge workers (and this includes leadership) inside organizations must be able to span these contexts to:

be competent in being able to productively contribute to complex business processes and team projects employing digital and social tools and skills
be able to develop relationships and participate effectively in knowledge networks to advance their continual learning and skills development and to advance the knowledge capital of the broader organization.
deftly cultivate, navigate and participate in wider networks for broader insight to emergent and related knowledge fields and access to expertise beyond organizational boundaries.

Equally, in evaluating collaboration effectiveness it’s important for knowledge workers, leaders and others to understand that different kinds of collaboration and the inherent value of the collaboration are influenced by the nature of the collaboration context as outlined in the table below.

The purpose and depth of sustained interactions or relationships in team and community collaboration brings specific kinds of value, learning and outcomes. To attain those kinds of value and outcomes requires leadership understanding and support for the right infrastructure, tools, guidance and governance.

Organizational culture and practice can also enable good network collaboration (cooperation really) where knowledge workers and leadership can easily traverse the company as a network, and through less formal or sustained interactions seek the resources of the network to quickly solve problems, share ideas, seek expertise or make connections for future use.

Leaders also need to understand the new social structures of collaboration that include communities and crowdsourcing. I’ve seen internal crowdsourcing used effectively to gain proposals from senior leadership in the organization for new business opportunities against a set of strategic objectives

Engaging in productive collaboration towards business purpose and outcomes is just one of many 21st century skills that knowledge workers and leadership need to master and be able to assess. Knowledge workers are developing these skills as they work more and more in a web-workplace – using digital, cloud and mobile tools to engage and connect and work with global colleagues. Leaders are developing new skills to convene networks and set in motion communities towards business purpose. I co-teach a Social Organization course at Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy master’s program that focuses on how leaders launch, manage, measure and take in the learnings from communities. These are vital practices and processes for 21st century management practice.

In future blog posts, I’ll explore more about these skills and practices.

Social collaboration – the dynamics of ‘working-out-loud’

Catherine Shinners — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 17:34:38 +0000

A significant benefit for users and organizations who employ social collaboration solutions such as enterprise social networking (ESN) is that it supports a more transparent, conversational way of working, enables more visible communication flows, and asynchronous yet interactive problem solving.

Organizations and workers struggle to address burgeoning workloads, to be able to create group cohesion and awareness for joint project work among globally dispersed teams, and often use static document production and email to collaborate on work and content production. Important comments or inputs are often buried in fractured email alleys and dead ends.

One of the major goals of more social ways of working is to enlist and open up the tacit know-how and experience that people possess. Workers have often been trained that they must do their work and bring back finished products to a group as ‘deliverables’. They can be concerned about being evaluated on generated their own completed work product before they expose the work to colleagues.

Bryce Williams, a colleague at Change Agents Worldwide came up with a brilliant shorthand description for this social modality, in 2010 – he called it ‘working out loud’. Social collaboration allows knowledge workers to ‘narrate’ their work and helps them provide co-workers and team members a better sense of the immediacy and context of activities.

There’s an important set of dynamics that is encompassed by ‘working out loud’ that also engenders a new set of behaviors and interactions. Here’s a view to the flow of these dynamics and key engagement activities and results

Transparent, conversational flow of work – social collaboration brings a more natural human, narrative flow to asynchronous group interactions around workflows and business processes and surfaces perspectives of people working together on projects or artifacts. The transparency and persistence of conversation threads in social collaboration tools let’s groups and team more visibly co-create content, and share and receive feedback, not just ‘in the moment’, but most importantly, in the current context of the flow of work. The structure of many social tools let’s groups more directly connect their content to a dialogue around the work with commenting, feedback mechanisms and tags.

Content awareness and accessibility – Social collaboration tools are designed keep people in the flow of work throughout a project. The experience in social collaboration creates an awareness of content changes and current conversational elements. People can get a view to this flow of dialogue and work by using activity streams, tags, or alerts to other mediums (i.e. email). This awareness lets people bring in immediate comments or insights, or references to important resources. They can see where content has moved along a work flow and avoid working on versions of artifacts that are outdated. Connecting content no longer means attaching a document in an email. New habits for working out loud include using the tools to create awareness – tagging, using affirmation signals (like button), creating and using filtering mechanisms in activity streams, linking other content into conversational flows. Developing awareness skills includes actively setting and modifying alerts and filter options.

Network-based group cohesion and connection – most social collaboration tools support ways for people to create rich and robust profiles. Organizational directories often simply features contact information, obscure job titles, and perhaps reporting structure. Rich profiles helps an individual create an awareness of their background, work projects, their social roles in the network (answers questions, subject-matter-expert). Bringing a deeper, richer set of information about an individuals experience and background can be used by teams to quickly orient to one another, as they move from project to project, gives everyone a greater context of the talents and expertise accessible to the team. The variety of interaction options also supports dynamic, open ways of connecting the insight and knowledge that people bring to the work process – sharing updates with microblogs, or comments, creating and contributing to discussion forums.

Knowledge building – as the work and conversations build and remains transparently persistent, access to group knowledge also builds. Important insights, viewpoints and problem-solving dialogue is not just retained, but can be viewed more relevantly in the context in which is was applied. The work flow process becomes a vital social learning process.

I’ve observed and facilitated these dynamics in companies I’ve helped and worked with over the last few years, and I’m using them every day in the with colleauges Change Agents Worldwide communty. I’ve seen individuals, groups and organization take up ‘working out loud’, to truly transformative effect with organizational agility, more relevance and empowerment in daily work experiences, and real business results.