ESN – Merced Group

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.