GigaOM » Collaboration

One collaboration-killing mistake you’re probably making

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:47:29 +0000

Poets sometimes claim that writing within strict formal structures spurs creativity, and parents are told that firm boundaries actually help kids flourish. Freedom may be awesome, but in some areas there clearly is such a thing as too much of it. Now author and HBR Blog Network pundit Tammy Erickson is adding another domain to the list of areas where less freedom and more structure is actually a good thing – collaboration.

Bosses, she writes, often make the sensible sounding decision to focus on clarifying their team’s goals and approach to reaching them then leave the task of defining exactly who does what to make progress toward that goal for the team to work out themselves. This sounds empowering, but according to Erickson, it’s actually energy sapping:

Our research has shown that… collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.

We’ve also found that team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest more time and energy in collaboration.

Citing well functioning teams at emergency rooms, the BBC and Reuters, Erickson goes on to explain that when expert collaborators are very clear on their area of responsibility and feel empowered to work in their own way within it, teams work together smoothly and individuals within them channel their energy towards productive work rather than politics, turf wars or coordination.

Is your team being hamstrung by ambiguous roles?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dru Bloomfield – At Home in Scottsdale.

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The lessons of Virgin Media’s flexible working initiative

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:00:05 +0000

This morning UK digital communication provider Virgin Media announced it’s rolling out a clutch of Cisco social and remote business tools to 5,000 employees following a successful pilot of the tools, including WebEx, Quad and Unified Communications. That’s good news for both Cisco and Virgin Media and illustrates that enterprise social is continuing to gather steam, but what does it have to do with your team?

Last week we called up Colin Miles, head of technical services at Virgin Media, and Keith Griffin, technical leader in engineering at Cisco to ask for the behind-the-scenes story of the pilot and what lessons it might hold for other companies or teams looking to roll out similar solutions. Not every switch over to new-fangled social or collaboration tools goes smoothly, but according to Miles Virgin’s pilot was relatively bump free.

The benefits

“We wanted the opportunity to really test how a full transformation of communication and collaboration could affect our organization,” Miles said of the pilot, “and the results have been absolutely fantastic.” How do they know things work so well? Participants in the pilot showed a six percent higher engagement-index in the firm’s annual engagement survey. The pilot also aimed to increase productivity and agility, while decreasing email overload a well as duplicated and inconsistent materials. Miles says Virgin Media has seen improvement in all these areas.

Particularly, the new tools have made life easier for teams whose work touches a variety of divisions within the organization. The company’s B2B provisioning group, for instance, has found that forming a Quad community (somewhat akin to a Facebook group) has eliminated organizational hassles. “This is a community that deals with a core, single business process, i.e. start something from a customer order through to customer delivery,” explains Miles. “However, it touches many divisions within that process, so trying to collaborate effectively can be hard work sometimes. By creating a community to share the information more effectively in one place – one version of the truth – that lends itself to breaking down those divisional silos.”

Griffin reports that social tools have had similar benefits within Cisco. “Back when we were starting with Quad we’d post something in created communities around topics like ‘the technology behind 2.0′ and we found that multiple people from other groups in other areas of Cisco were coming in joining that community rather than setting up their own,” explains Griffin. “That served two purposes. One, it became, as Colin said, a single source of truth for that topic, but secondly, it avoided duplication. We could see that teams were working on similar items and collaborating to get things done all at one place.”

The tips

These benefits aren’t instant, not are they automatic. Careful planning and consideration of how the tools are introduced is key, according to both Miles and Griffin.

One size doesn’t fit all. “We have a very wide spectrum of employee in terms of age range and technical capability, so they’re naturally those that are very technically adept and will leap at the opportunity to try a new tool, and there are others that are slightly more hesitant around how they work towards it,” says Miles. One type of training wasn’t enough to get everyone up to speed and willing to make changes, especially when it came to a social tool like Quad that fundamentally alters how information gets shared. Miles explains what did work:

We couldn’t just deliver a simple technical training course and people would naturally adopt the technology all at the same rate. We had to create a unique and individual set of adoption processes that included everything from one-to-one training to self-help with videos through how-to communities. One of the big successes during the pilot, which I was hoping for but surprised me nonetheless, was the amount of people who started to self-help and help others. Naturally like every organization, we have a structured help desk department where people phone for technical queries, but what we wanted to introduce was trained people helping each other out on how to make a process more efficient or how to do something. And due to the community nature of Quad we started to see that really hit home.

Persuasion beats pummeling. “Our view of social software is it’s something you don’t want to force people to use. It’s something that they have to see a huge benefit in using themselves and want to use,” says Griffin. This is a view Virgin Media took to heart, so while they ensured executive level buy-in in the person of the company’s chief people officer Elisa Nardi, they also relied on persuasion rather than mandates to drive adoption.

“A lot of our success was involved in the preparations to start with. We completed lots of analysis around who our key collaborators were. We started to look at email stats on who sends lots of emails. We looked externally at who has a lot of followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, so we could start to see who our collaboration experts are, our super connectors,” says Miles. “We then engaged those first and started to bring them on to the pilot to become evangelists that would shout from the rooftops on how it’s going to change the world, which was really positive. It was a groundswell from bottom up.”

Measure success. “Make sure you have some clear and understood metrics that you can measure from start through the pilot and to the end as well, including surveys, etc.,” Miles stresses. It’s a point Griffin is keen on as well. He recommends, “having a set of goals and measuring how you get towards them. I know it’s a very obvious statement but if you have that, you’re going to be able to measure your success or otherwise and if it’s otherwise, readjust and figure out what needs to change.”

Are there any other keys to a successful roll out of social enterprise tools?

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Why do some teams gel while others fail at collaboration?

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:03:28 +0000

Healthy collaboration is a target many aim for but many miss. Why? It’s far easier to say you want your team to work smoothly together without too much stress than it is to actually accomplish the open sharing and feeling of unity, trust and purpose that demands.

Just knowing that collaboration is easy to screw up isn’t of much use though. What would be truly helpful would be a specific taxonomy of the mistakes that frequently hobble teams, including the emotional and irrational complexities that can bedevil collaboration, as well as a benchmark survey of how the best teams manage to get everyone working together well. Handily, that’s just what a new study by Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies aims to find out.

Through two small pilot studies the partners have developed a survey that digs down into what separates mere team members from true team players by asking participants to detail the differences between their ideal team and their actual experiences working in supposedly collaborative groups. Participants also signal their emotional impressions of teamwork by choosing from an array of sketched facial expressions. “These facial expressions are true in all cultures,” explains Yosh Beier, co-founder of Collaborative Coaching. The word disgust, say, may carry different resonance n India and Indiana, so using pictures takes away the danger that differences in culture or language could skew the results.

And even after examining a small sample of just over a hundred responses, Beier explains, he and his research partners are starting to see intriguing patterns emerge, including generational differences, common complaints about the current reality of teams (lack of recognition and excessive workload prominent among them) and similar notions of what moves a team from bearable to exciting.

What we find is there is a certain amount of results that people want to accomplish, so if a team doesn’t even manage to achieve its goals then that is very frustrating and dominates the experience. But it’s a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The moment teams reach a critical amount of ability to really produce results then results aren’t that important any more and other factors dominate such as connection and cohesion. People wonder: Do I see purpose? Is this meaningful for me? How much of a challenge is this?

There is also a generational theme. So far, the younger the respondents, the less happy they are with the current state of affairs on their teams.

It’s too early yet to determine if the youngest team members are the most frustrated simply because they have the highest expectations, Beier says, and an insufficient number of remote workers have so far taken the survey to conclusively determine if being virtual changes teams’ interactions or expectations. So the researchers are rolling out the survey to a number of firms, including consultancy W.L. Gore, and are also making it available online to anyone interested in participating. The only criterion for eligibility is experience working collaboratively. So if you feel like aiding an investigation of how to make teams truly gel and explore your own feelings about collaboration, 15 minutes is all you need to complete it. We’ll keep you posted on the results.

In your experience, what are the key factors that make a team really click so they can be effective collaborators?

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Groupthink: Not an argument against coworking

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:03:01 +0000

“Solitude is out of fashion,” declared Susan Cain, the author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, in last week’s New York Times Sunday Review. “Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place,” she continues, arguing that this fetishization of collaboration and the resultant space design and work style it produces is often bad for introverts and bad for innovation.

So how does the fact that “no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” these days affect the coworking movement, which is predicated on the notion that getting together in social spaces improves work? Are coworking spaces the enemy of the “more nuanced approach to creativity,” Cain advocates for, an approach that encourages “casual, cafe-style interactions” but allows people “to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone”? Or can spaces accommodate both needs? We asked a number of coworking space owners for their thoughts.

Don Ball, the co-founder of CoCo coworking in St. Paul, Minn., was unruffled by Cain’s piece, seeing it as directed more toward “ham-fisted” corporate collaboration efforts than the environment at coworking spaces like his. Like several members of the coworking movement who emailed in, Ball felt coworking was actually well positioned to allow the balance of solitude and sociability Cain is championing:

Some of the writer’s assertions actually jibe with our experience at CoCo. Our most popular membership option is what we call a part-time membership, in which members work in our space one day per week to get their social group time. And then stay at home (or who knows where else) to get their heads-down time. So, it’s a sanity insurance policy, if you will.

David Moffitt, the founder of Coworking Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., was equally unruffled, agreeing that coworking allows an ideal situation for workers to regulate their own need for human contact (or lack thereof):

From observing our members in the context of coworking, the thing that strikes me is that people here are able to self-regulate their level of intro/extrovert or community involvement. Some members will pull others into discussion and spend half an hour on tangents ranging from database architecture to preferred coffee or beer brewing methods, while others are perfectly content to make their desks their own bubble or personal island.

But he does stress that it is incumbent on coworking spaces to help members get away by providing private spaces. Cain may feel that the current fad for open-plan offices and collaboration may be bad news for introverts, but Liz Elam of Link Coworking in Austin, Texas, feels that while quiet-craving personalities may be common, those that desire to work in complete isolation aren’t.

“Steve King and I discussed yesterday ‘Hermitpreneurs’ — people who like working from home because it allows them to avoid other people. We guesstimate this is less than 5 percent of the population,” she says. “Most people are not Hermitpreneurs.” Like Ball and Moffitt, Elam thinks coworking provides a good balance for the remaining 95 percent of the population. “Many of my Link Members are introverts but they work from a Coworking space because it allows them to be amongst people and they can interact when they want/need to,” she says.

Like Ball, Moffitt underlines the point that while corporate mania for collaboration obligates introverts to attend more meetings and listen to more office chatter than they would naturally want to, coworking allows complete control over your level of interaction.

At least as long as you have a good pair of headphones. “I think noise cancelling headsets are wonderful,” says Elam. “Why do you need walls to isolate? You can choose to isolate in the workplace.”

Do you think coworking is a symptom of our mania for collaboration or a solution to it?

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You can’t dictate which tools your employees use

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:35:31 +0000

Which applications are best for scaling a business from a tiny startup to an enterprise powerhouse? And how do you get your employees to use them? For most companies, success will come from adopting the easiest tools to use, and those which employees are already used to.

At GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Thursday, executives from HIGEAR and Spiceworks discussed why startups tend to collaborate better than their enterprise brethren. The short answer is that they’re smaller, which means they’re more likely to know each other. “I don’t think humans are wired to deal with large groups of people,” HIGEAR President Murtaza Hussain said at the conference. HIGEAR currently numbers about 10 employees.

As for the tools they use — when it comes time to pick an application, the best advice is to adopt those which are easiest to use. Hussain said that HIGEAR leans heavily on Skype for chat and messaging, and employees tend to use Google docs. Why? Because they fit the lowest common denominator for access and usage.

Few organizations have success when a senior-level executive decides which tools or applications are best. Hussain said the industry is full of examples where a C-level executive feels that one particular piece software is great and pushes it down to the rest of the company to use. “The last thing people want to want to do is learn a new piece of software,” he said.

But one potential drawback to that strategy is that letting employees pick their own tools can relate in data silos across an organization, according to Spiceworks VP of Products Tabrez Syed.

At the end of the day, the best type of collaborative efforts are those that happen face to face, which is one reason why Hussain is a big believer in employee happy hours. “When a new employee comes in, we take them out for beers,” he said. “I don’t think there are any tools or technology to make that kind of collaboration happen.”

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How to improve collaboration through performance measurement

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:45:52 +0000

How do you get the most out of collaborative teams? It helps if you can quantify their performance and provide feedback to workers. At GigaOM’s Net:Work 2011 conference Thursday, executives from LiveOps and Rypple said that measurement was key to improving collaboration between teams of contract workers and experts.

LiveOps and Rypple both make tools to help connect enterprises with workers. Both also provide analytics tools to measure the performance of the workers and the teams that are using those products. Providing feedback, more than anything else, is the best way to incentivize collaborative workers and enterprises to improve performance.

“Our focus is on performance,” said Sanjay Mathur, VP of Product Management at LiveOps. The goal is to determine if its agents know what they need to do, and to provide metrics to show how agents are doing against the team, how the team is doing and even how LiveOps and its agents are doing relative to those who are hired through other collaborative tools.

Maksim Ovsyannikov, VP of Product Management for Rypple, agreed. Rypple seeks to pass along feedback so workers can find out how they did and perform better the next time they’re used. Of course, he said later, it helps if you have clearly defined goals and expectations, as well as metrics in mind to measure performance.

The key to what makes these systems work is that potential collaborators are incentivized to respond positively and improve performance. “An agent’s reputation is very important,” Mathur said. “They can only get more work if they’ve proven they can get the job done.”

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InterContinental uses hotels as incubators and relies on the cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:05:37 +0000

InterContinental Hotels Group, the luxury hotel chain, has spent the last five and half years creating a technology platform for its business that helps it span multiple brands, cultures and continents, according to Tom Conophy, EVP and CIO of the hotel company. Speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work conference Thursday, Conophy explained that the team of developers built the platform themselves and it now acts as the back-end for everything from reservations to buying liquor from the minibar.

“A hotel is a microcosm of a corporation,” he said explaining how the company has a variety of different technology needs. However, he’s sensitive to the fact that InterContinental doesn’t own most of the hotels it manages, which means he doesn’t force technology down the throats of the hotel owners. Instead he lets different hotels act as incubators for ideas, believing that successful ideas will get adopted.

“We have research friendly hotels that want to the latest trick and that gets people’s attention,” Conophy said. From there it can spread like wildfire as one hotel owner talks to another. He went on to explain to any entrepreneurs hoping to get their foot in the door at the hotel chain, that they should be prepared to explain how they are different from their competitor and send someone who isn’t a “junior level salesman.”

He also predicted that the bandwidth in hotels would increase over time, although he didn’t get specific or explain if hotels would keep charging exorbitant rates for that access.

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Machines will help humans harness the power of social

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:41:29 +0000

Social is no guarantee of effectiveness in an organization because it creates unnecessary friction as people try to figure out how to work in new ways, according to David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work event Thursday. Gutelius said that while such software might be intuitive, fast and beautiful to look at, it’s also just another way to push work forward, which essentially boils down to finding the right resource for whatever the employee is trying to do.

That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

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Looking for executive talent in all the wrong places

Barb Darrow — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:24:36 +0000

You might think that tech companies are more flexible and resourceful in seeking out the best talent. But you would be wrong, said Allen Delattre, global managing director for technology for Korn/Ferry International, the executive recruitment firm.

The problem for most businesses — including high-tech firms as well as banks, oil companies, you name it — is they all tend to look for exactly the same attribute set whether they’re recruiting a CFO, a CPA, a creative director, or an application developer. And that’s nuts, Delattre told attendees of the GigaOM Net:Work conference on Thursday. “You always hear it’s all about the people … the question is, do we put as much thinking into that as we do to our devices, code, tech? The answer is no.”

This cookie-cutter approach is not doing anyone any favors. The personality traits and talents needed for a great creative director will not be the same as those for a corporate comptroller, for example.

These pre-existing notions of what is needed for all these jobs leaves a huge gap between what companies think they want and what they actually need to do the best job possible, Delattre said citing Korn/Ferry research which looked at 54,000 executives across industries.

One unexpected finding was that the best high-tech executives tended to be those that did not fit this pre-conceived notion of what a successful exec should be like.

“If a company says it’s looking for small, light, lean, fast executives we found that the best execs were almost the opposite. In tech we have a lot of personalities. People whose rebellion spurred their growth,” Delattre said. Personalities often do not fit into any preconceived vision.

So obviously, when those sorts of people are brought in for their first interview, however, the initial reaction is invariably that they’re not a good fit.

“Of course not. If you’re looking to transform, you need something different.” he said.

The problem with most businesses is that while they talk about the need for great people they spend remarkably little time actually figuring out what people they really need.

The lesson here is obviously that people are not all alike and they’re not computers. “We do not come with a restore CD and are not easily reprogammable.”

It’s high time that hiring committees realize that.

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How tablets can make meetings less painful

Erica Ogg — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:07:21 +0000

Those of you who hate meetings and can’t stand endless PowerPoint-based presentations, there’s hope. Todd Barr, chief marketing officer of Alfresco had some encouraging solutions for how to improve them at GigaOM’s Net:Work 2011 conference on Thursday: use tablets. He says they can help turn meeting presenters and attendees into active, focused participants, and can make meetings themselves more efficient and all around less painful.

Barr wasn’t pitching any of his own Alfresco products, just giving advice for how to change our current office and work culture that tends to revolve around constant meetings and slide deck presentations. Here are his suggestions for why you should consider incorporating tablets into them:

Interact with tablet apps. PowerPoint presentations offer information, but with little way for the audience to engage in what’s being presented. His solution: an iPad app like Idea Flight, which puts presentations on tablets in front of each participant. “It democratizes meetings,” said Barr. “So you’re collaborating and working with peers and not just absorbing someone else’s points.”
Avoid oversimplification. Simple isn’t always better. Some topics are just too complex for a series of bullet points or “don’t fit into 7.5 by 10 PowerPoint dimensions,” noted Barr. He suggested another app called Roambi Flow, which allows presenters to embed data in the slides they’re introducing that can be manipulated by the presenter or meeting attendees. Apps like these, he said, allow meeting participants “not to present data, but to explore the data.”
Force them to focus. Barr noted that it’s hard to compete for attention when everyone you’re presenting to at a meeting has their laptop open, each of their screens likely a mess of browser windows, emails, documents and other files. With the way the iPad works, it forces you to focus because you’re only in one app at a time. So using and iPad app that meeting attendees can use along with ”allows us to get out of the ADD, and allows us to focus instead of multitask,” he said.

As more companies incorporate “bring your own device” policies that allow employees to use iPads or tablets on the corporate network, or even as they start purchasing tablets for their increasingly mobile workers, Barr’s ideas seem like something to take into serious consideration.

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