Before we even think about results or what tools we should use, we should start with the core of collaboration: the group itself. What challenges prevent the group and its members from performing optimally?

One of the problems with collaboration is that when it’s done without much planning, it leads to what’s called “social loafing,” where members of a group working together exert less effort than they would if they worked alone. This phenomenon is especially apparent in  face-to-face brainstorming sessions. To avoid this tendency, here are some aspects of the group that we should work on before embarking on a collaborative project:

• Identifiability. In one study, one of the suggested causes of slacking off during group work is that individuals can hide in a crowd. To avoid this tendency, make each member of the team stand out. You can divide the tasks so that each person has his or her own individual deliverables that are easy to measure and evaluate.
• Diversity. When we form groups or committees that will work on important projects, we tend to pick the “star players” or “big thinkers.” This is especially true in large organizations that have a lot of talent and manpower to draw from. But having intelligent individuals in a group doesn’t really seem to influence its performance. Also, according to several experiments, people tend to work harder if they expect some of their colleagues to perform poorly. So it’s important to create a group with members that have varying  skills and performance abilities.
• Group size. Apart from supporting the points mentioned above, this paper from the Journal of Management shows that increased group size was related to increased social loafing. Keep group size to a minimum so that it’s easier to account for everyone’s work. The larger the group, the more each individual can hide behind its size. 37Signals suggests that a group of three is enough to start with for a software development project. Amazon is known for having two-pizza teams, which means that if two pizzas aren’t enough to feed the team, then the team is too large.
• Group cohesiveness. Several sources also indicate that increasing the group’s cohesiveness helps to avoiding social loafing. This means that the members of your group should like each other and want to work together to pursue the same goals. They don’t have to be close friends, but they should experience a feeling of unity that makes them feel that slacking off would let down the rest of the group.

In your experience, what qualities should a team have to ensure that each member performs well?

Interested in learning more about how to get teams to collaborate effectively? Check out our Net:Work conference in San Francisco in December.

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One of the advantages of teleworking is that there’s less opportunities for workplace gossip and personality clashes.  Most teams approach their communications very matter-of-factly.  But I find that this isn’t always the case, especially when members each have very different working styles.

When managing a team of very different people all over the globe, what can you do to keep the team, and the work, from imploding?

All expectations should be out on the table. Most conflict comes from someone’s expectations not being met.  When someone new joins the team, the project manager or the person in charge should ask them what their expectations are.  The new members should also be told what’s expected of them.  Doing this may seem corny, but it’s the only way to assure that everyone is signing up to be on the same team, working through the same processes.

Documented accountability. If the team is unclear about the deliverables that are due  and who is responsible for them, that’s a recipe for disaster.  Each person on the team should have a very defined role from the beginning – and this should be written down, along with due dates, for everyone to see.

It’s relatively easy to document everything if you’re using collaboration software or a wiki to work with your team. Basecamp from 37signals is such an example, as it allows users to schedule project milestones and see who’s responsible for them.

Communication training. Communication is the most essential factor to the success of an online team.  It’s not the quantity of the communication that matters, more like the quality.  Communication would go more smoothly and more efficiently if there’s a “communication guidelines” slide show or document that your team can refer to.

Even minor suggestions will prove to be valuable, such as suggestions on how to use Twitter effectively, or how to send fewer emails.

Give praise and criticism privately. If you’re supervising other teleworkers, it’s important to send your comments about their work in private. This is true whether you’re working with them online or offline.

Another alternative is to send a message of praise or criticism for everyone to read.  For example, you could send a message to your entire team saying “You’re all doing great!” or “You’re all sending in good work, but here are a few suggestions for everyone…”.  Doing things this way means you’re not singling anyone out.

Be careful about the seemingly unrelated messages you send on a public venue as well.  A random Tweet such as “I’m surrounded by stupid people!” can be taken as a personal insult by your team, even if you were talking about the clerks at your local grocery store.

Supervising a team doesn’t have to be difficult, especially if you make ample preparations.  If you trust the people you work with, and everyone understands the work guidelines, then there’s fewer chances for conflicts to arise.

Have you ever supervised an online team before?  What issues or problems did you encounter?  How did you work through them?

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JOBLOGS is what I would call a collaboration and communication manager, but one specifically designed for service oriented businesses. Encompassing CRM functionality with a private workspace for collaboration, JOBLOGS is a central place for all information related to a specific client, process, or project.

Use JOBLOGS to capture events, actions, files, and notes and then quickly tie this information to clients, people or projects. They use the concept of Blogs which was a bit confusing at first, but they don’t mean Blogs in the traditional sense. In JOBLOGS, a blog is essentially a container for a project or transaction. It can be affiliated with a client or company and has its own set of actions and events. Publish it externally and it becomes a collaboration hub. The permission system dictates the level of interaction available.

JOBLOGS looks and feels a lot like a desktop application. Different components of the application appear in their own resizable windows. You even have the ability to choose a wallpaper and retrieve items from a trash bin.

I particularly appreciated how customizable the data forms are. I was able to easily create new data fields to capture the specific information I might need for my business. Fields can be dragged and dropped to change the order.

The interface is comfortable and incredibly responsive. There are no page refreshes and no save buttons. Queries run quickly and it is terribly easy to customize the display of information. Data import and export options are plentiful.

The folks at JOBLOGS really seem to have thought of everything a small group would need to communicate and collaborate. By combining disparate services into one package, it really does become a central hub for everything one might need to keep day to day operations as well as specific projects running smoothly. A demo video runs through things and should give you a good idea of how things look and feel.

JOBLOGS plans start at Free for a basic single user option up to a $149 Pro option. A 30 day trial is available for all plans.

Is there a place for JOBLOGS in your business?

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While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers?

From the demo I saw of GroupSwim, the first thing that came to mind was a “smart” tool. GroupSwim uses “semantic technology” to create relevance and linkages between information and people on teams for any given project. Some aspects of this technology include:

1. Autotags – While the app will present possible tags for messages and other content submitted to each group site, you can also train the app to key in on important terms. This improves labeling and searching for relevant content down the road.

2. Focus – By providing greater relevance, search results within the group’s correspondence and work is more focused. The system even extrapolates the most popular content based on what has been read, replied to, and monitored.

3. Inferred Expertise - The system identifies individuals on a team who may have an expertise on particular topics based on their communications and responses to their communications from other team members. If you need to know who on the tream really understands social media, the system could point the way.

4. Related Information - Based on content entered including tags, the system recommends other content within a group’s interactions that may be relevant or related. At this time, related content is not pulled from the Web but this may be a future feature.

5. Instant Discovery – This is the “smart” search engine that evolves as the grup evolves and uses more tags. Tags appear in a tag cloud to also point out “hot” topics.

Web workers may prefer to set up a single GroupSwim site with multiple groups under it that can cover different projects or clients as well as different areas of a project utilizing different teams or parts of a team. A Web worker can set some of the groups to be common content for all team members while only giving certain team members access to other groups based on their involvement in a project.

GroupSwim offers role-based permissions for team members and your group types can be public, private, auto-join or custom. The company is rolling out a wiki feature in September that will be WYSIWIG and add another collaborative dimension to the application. All forum discussions, file feedback, and eventually wiki content can be received by team members either through an RSS feed or via email notification.

The tool offers various views and ways to access or break down content and discussions to zero in on exactly the information you need. You can sort by topic popularity or at a glance determine what topics are more popular based on a green bubble demonstrating the greatest activity.

You can also add a document for group collaboration by attaching it to a discussion, emailing the file into the system or uploading it directly. The system uses Scribd’s iPaper application for previewing uploaded documents in an elegant way.

Another upcoming feature will be integrated tasks although the company says they still are not looking to compete with the Basecamps of the world.

While all of the features of GroupSwim could potentially help a Web worker collaborate on multiple projects with far-flung teams, the pricing of the application leaves individual Web workers in the dust. At  minimum monthly fee of $150, I personally won’t even consider a tool like this, no matter how smartly it operates. Right now, I spend $24 for Freshbooks to manage my invoicing and $24 for Basecamp where I get a sufficient amount of organization and collaboration for my needs.

But if you really like the features of GroupSwim and think you might want to use it as a Web worker with a distributed team, contact the company and give them your feedback. Their pricing model is still new, and they seem willing to consider an alternate pricing plan for those of us who are non-enterprise level.

How can you see an application like GroupSwim fitting into your work process or can you? What other tools are you using for collaboration with your virtual team versus project management?

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Through Bookgoo, you can upload a document (pdf, html, doc, xls, jpg, gif) or URL and opt to make it either private or public. At first, I was envisioning another Scribd. Then I thought it sounded a bit like Backboard, a feedback site I recently reviewed here. But that is where the functionality diverges from both of those sites into a nifty annotating tool for marking up documents in a way that makes Google Docs look a little plain vanilla and some of the online whiteboard apps available seem a bit old school.

Bookgoo actually makes marking up a document fun. Upload your document, invite others to view it and provide their input, and then watch the annotating begin.

On Bookgoo, you get your dashboard view of your document activity on you “Goo Gate” where you can: 1) Add notes to the document by highlighting particular text and typing in related notes; 2) Draw on the document; or 3) Change the pen color when you draw.

The annotations you make lay over the document, but do not change it. Even when you highlight text by clicking and holding your cursor then dragging it over text, the text is not actually modified but the highlighted words contain the related comments.

Because Bookgoo doesn’t change the document, the tool works well for commenting on and pointing to changes that should be made. Then someone can download the original document from the site – without the annotations – and implement the modifications from viewing the modifications online.

Other things you can do with your Bookgoo include:

1. Subscribing to a document RSS feed. Get notified each time someone modifies your document.

2. Emailing documents to a friend. You can allow others to access the modified document directly from the document page. This feature, however, brought up the question of privacy for me. Currently, Bookgoo does not offer different levels of privacy features and even their “private” mode is not very private and definitely not secure. Of course, if you have very sensitive documents, uploading them to the Internet at all is a risk.

3. Adding a document to your MyGoo page. If you upload a document, it is automatically archived on and accessible from your MyGoo page. However, if you are invited to annotate someone else’s document, you can also add that to MyGoo for easy access.

4. Sharing a document with a group. You can create groups and must do this first before adding a document to the group.

5. Adding the document to your social networks and other sites. The presence of an AddThis button brought me back to my questions about privacy. At this time, even if you opt to make your document private, once you share that URL with others, they have the ability to share your document broadly. The company calls their privacy option “pseudo privacy” for this very reason. Therefore you need to trust those to whom you give access or keep really private documents in much more secure environments.

Some of the downsides or limitations of Bookgoo:

1. Lack of more robust privacy features. Bookgoo plans to release role-based permissions soon.

2. Inability to use word documents newer than Microsoft Word 2003. Support for newer docs is pending.

3. Difficulty sifting through larger documents for annotations. Another upcoming feature will be “page inspection” for large, multi-page documents so you can inspect 10 pages at a time to locate annotations deep within a document.

4. Still somewhat buggy. While doing the first demo with the company, I uncovered several bugs that rendered some of the key features inoperable. The Bookgoo tech team rectified those problems so that everything seemed to work well during the second demo. But you may end up finding a few more bugs here and there.

The folks at Bookgoo don’t anticipate ever charging for any level of their application and see their business model as more a software licensing venture as well as experimenting with Ad Sense. They simply want to offer Bookgoo free to the general online community.

Gotta love their spirit!

How do you annotate documents collaboratively online?

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Qwaq, Inc. creates virtual spaces for real work. The company’s product, Qwaq Forums, is the leading secure virtual workspace application for the enterprise, and enables collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Designed for enterprises and groups with distributed teams, Qwaq Forums significantly increases productivity by bringing critical resources together in virtual spaces, and allowing people to work together as if they were in the same physical location.

Can someone say “Second Life?” or any other virtual world or virtual world application already out there?

I have a 30-day trial access to Qwaq, have logged into the Welcome Forum and followed the 3 minute tutorial that explained about:

1. moving around,
2. my avatar, and
3. documents.

I’m thinking – hey, there’s nothing to it. Simple and easy is a good thing, right?

Then as I experimented with building my own office – one with a modern, warm “decor” – I began thinking that…there’s nothing to it. Basically, you can “build” a space such as a campus, a conference room (blue for boys, rose for girls?), a gallery, a modern office (cool or warm colors), a personal office and several other configurations. Breaking it down, this is how Qwaq felt to me:

1. Moving around: I can use either my keyboard or arrows to move my avatar and view around. This is basically the same set of controls for Second Life and other virtual world environments out there, so nothing revolutionary here. Moving around as a new user is just as quirky and clunky and takes time to get used to the flow.

2. My avatar: Ugly. I look like colored boxes stacked on top of each other. It is almost embarrassing how primitive the avatars in Qwaq look. I saw a promo image of a more “custom” avatar and it consists of the photo of a person’s face on the top box that represents the avatar’s head. How can you seriously interact with a business colleague when they look like a box with their photo pasted on it?

3. Documents: This may be where Qwaq has a slight leg up over Second Life and more or less of an advantage over other virtual world environments depending on their document integration tools. On Qwaq, I simply drag a document into my virtual office space, and it appears on the office wall about a minute later, either fully readable or editable, depending on the file type.

Qwaq offers true document integration in a virtual space whereas Second Life users, for example, still struggle to find the right tools to handle a PowerPoint presentation versus a collaborative document or whiteboard. They do include voice capabilities, and although I haven’t tried it, I’m venturing to guess it is much more stable than Second Life’s voice feature.

They also have a useful feature: a 3-D pointer that works similar to a real-life laser pointer so collaborators can draw attention to something.

Despite the cool pointer, I can’t help but think that Qwaq is a watered down version of the more elegant, graphically enhanced and feature rich environments of virtual worlds. Even a cartoonish world like There.com at least has avatars that appear to be people rather than cardboard boxes. And any meeting space in Second Life that is well-designed makes Qwaq’s virtual spaces look like…cardboard boxes.

If I’m going to be doing collaborative work with my clients or team members in a virtual space, I would much prefer that space to have some degree of aesthetics in addition to functionality. Otherwise, I might as well just use 2-D collaborative Web-based tools because they simply…work.

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