For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Jacob Morgan, co-founder of collaboration consultancy Chess Media Group, recently posted his answer to this question on his blog. His perspective: we’re still waiting for a breakout collaboration product, and it should look like “WordPress for the enterprise.” Of course, there is an enterprise version of WordPress, but assumedly that’s not what Morgan means. He explains how the collaboration solution he’d most like to see is instead like WordPress in key ways:

What we need is a “WordPress for the enterprise” and before its acquisition I thought Podio was the closest to moving down that road.  When you think of WordPress you think of a content management and delivery platform but it’s more than that.  Take a look at how many millions of sites all run on WordPress, each with a unique look and feel and each with it’s own set of features and plugins that can be customized and added to make every site unique and individual.  Currently we don’t have anything like this for the enterprise.  Sure, some vendors have their own app stores where you can buy and download application specific additions but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Atlassian is probably the closest vendor out there to building a complete enterprise ecosystem with apps but even those are focused on the single platform.

He calls this vision of DIY collaboration suites supported by an extremely flexible platform “the widgetized enterprise” and says there are several roadblocks keeping us from this version of the future. One, “we don’t have collaboration standards for all the vendors out there to get them to speak the same language,” and two the market lacks a true platform vendor. But Morgan has hopes that we’ll see something like what he’s after soon. “Eventually we will get to a more widgetized collaboration platform that allows us to take the bits and pieces we want from every vendor and combine them together to make something that works for us,” he concludes.

What do you make of Morgan’s vision of the future of collaboration tools – have you already found a platform that’s flexible and customizable enough to meet your business’s needs, or are does WordPress for the enterprise sound like the solution you’ve been searching for?

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Recent research that MIT Sloan Management Review conducted in collaboration with Deloitte reveals a striking pattern, according to an intriguing post in MIT Sloan’s Improvisations blog. When asked whether they believed social business was important, those at the biggest and smallest firms showed the greatest interest, with a steep fall off in interest among those at mid-sized organizations. Here are the percentage of respondents who agreed with the importance of social business by company size:

• Less than 1,000 employees: 21.2 percent
• 1,000-5,000 employees: 13.6 percent
• 5,000 – 10,000: 13.6 percent
• 10,00-100,000: 12.1 percent
• More than 100,000: 21.2 percent

Why might this be? The post speculates that, “social tools enable smaller organizations to appear bigger, and larger companies to appear ‘smaller’ — more accessible, responsive, and nimble,” noting that 31 percent of the smallest firms thought these tools were important to growing revenue, a much higher percentage than at larger companies. Gerald Kane, a professor at Boston College, suggests this may be because smaller firms can use social tools “as a way of increasing their voice, as a way of connecting with customers.” The analysis of the findings in ongoing, according to the post, and the final results will be published sometime this spring, so those who are interested should keep their eyes open for the full report.

In the meantime, what’s your reaction to these initial results – are mid-sized firms underestimating the potential benefits of social or are these tools really of less value to businesses of this size?

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These are questions that John Wookey, Salesforce’s new executive vice president and a former exec at SAP and Oracle, must ponder often, as he is heading up the team behind recently acquired social performance management solution Rypple. The answer, Wookey recently told us in a wide-ranging discussion of tools for the future of work, is more social, less hierarchical systems.

More global, more agile

Likening the skeptical reaction among some execs to enterprise social solutions to the reluctance of higher ups in the early days of email, Wookey sees the adoption of tools that share information in a transparent and social way as inevitable. “I think they’ll look back and laugh. Why did it take so long to get there?” he says. Social tools, he argues, are simply better suited to the realities facing businesses today – namely, a need to be both global and agile. He explains:

More and more companies, even companies of fairly modest size, are almost immediately global. You don’t have people all sitting in the same room or the same building walking around. You have all these people spread all over the world, and customers and partners and so on that don’t always operate in your time zone, don’t operate in your geography. So you have to think about building this sort of virtual company and tools that support your ability to act seamlessly.

What excites me about these social networking tools is they provide a tremendous amount of freedom of movement of ideas and information. People know about different projects going on in the company. They have an ability to participate in those in some way if they’re of interest to them.

And it’s not just the geographic reach of the workforce that’s driving the need for easier information sharing and fewer bureaucratic hurdles between members of organizations. The increased mobility of workers within companies is also pushing organizations to find ways to knit together teams without relying on shared spaces or lengthy tenure:

The workforce itself is more dynamic, meaning it moves across projects more quickly, so you may be part of a work group for a period of time, but when a project comes to some logical breaking point, you may move on to another project. The ability to quickly align around goals and what you want to get done is important. These kind of tools not only support the more remote workforce, but also the more mobile workforce.

You see it at fast-moving companies like Facebook or LinkedIn. If you’re talking about, ‘what are you working on at Facebook?’ they’re, like, ‘well, I’m working at this now’ and six months before they were working on something different. One of the reasons Facebook liked Rypple so much is because, even though [employees] are moving around a lot in the company, they have a better sense of how what they do contributes. With more short-term roles, more project-focused roles, they still feel better connected to the mission of the company. Whereas you can go to more traditional companies where people have been in the same group for ten years, and they have no idea how what they do really helps the company at all.

New tools meet old realities

Wookey argues that a more agile and global business environment is demanding more social tools to help teams gel together quickly, but he concedes that traditionally structured companies sometimes struggle on a cultural level to adapt to these tools. “Implied in the idea of a social networking tools is this level of transparency and trust that has to be there across the company,” says Wookey. “In a lot of ways that becomes the biggest challenge for more established companies because it’s not their normal operating model.”

To illustrate the point he contrasts Salesforce’s transparent goal-setting process, where everyone from the CEO on down publishes drafts of their objectives for public comment, with traditional top-down goal setting, in which the board dictates the course for everybody, “and nobody in one big division knows what the heck anybody in another division is doing.” Those older operational models “have become increasingly stressed as companies get bigger, as they get more global and as the market moves faster,” says Wookey.

John Wookey

Social tools can collide with these entrenched ways of doing business, limiting their impact, but Wookey feels that changes in corporate culture and communication tools can create a virtuous feedback loop, with the tools nudging the culture to evolve and the evolving culture encouraging the uptake of the tools. Meanwhile, the need to attract the best talent may speed the process further, as the most talented workers demand certain tools from their employers.

“Social networking tools are not just about technology. I think they are also a bit of a litmus test,” says Wookey, noting the difficulty of recruiting engineering talent at the moment. “Employees are pretty smart today about asking what technology do you use. Are you a Microsoft shop? What kind of a shop are you? People ask that now. I think they’re going to start asking what kind of social networking tools do you use because, to them, it sort of describes the type of company that it is that they’re talking to, and they have a clear idea about what kind of company they’d like to work for.”

Breaking out the crystal ball

So, what future does Wookey predict for social tools? Unsurprisingly, considering where he’s chosen to work, he has an extremely bullish outlook:

I think over the next five years this will start sweeping through companies. In the same ways that Rypple has taken this model of social networking and how people work together as a fundamental design point and applied it to performance management systems, you’re going to see it apply to a lot of systems around companies, whether it’s the recruiting process or compensation or learning systems. I think it will eventually hit things like financial budgeting and planning systems, anything where the work is inherently social. Those systems will come under pretty rigorous review and everyone will say we really need a rethink on how these systems work because this is not how people work together. The systems are not reflecting the reality of what happens in our business, and I think clever companies will come forward with new solutions there that simply are better than the systems that exist in the marketplace today.

Does Wookey’s vision of the expansion and uptake of social tools convince you?

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Everyone’s talking about the importance of engaging employees, and the Facebook generation and collaboration tools. All of that is garbage … collaboration is a culture. It’s not a set of tools.

Despite all the hype, “you can’t buy your way to collaboration. If employees are not already working that way, tools become nothing more than a high-tech version of the never-used suggestion box,” writes BI’s Julie Bort, explaining Whitehurst’s point of view.

The idea that offline culture might hinder enterprise social adoption has been raised here on WebWorkerDaily before, but when speaking to the executives of companies selling these products, it’s hard to get anyone to admit that a less than open corporate ethos might undermine these tools, nor that they may lack the power to transform a organization’s troublesome tendencies to horde information or sugar coat information for the higher ups. These executives have no trouble knocking the competition’s adoptability or user friendliness, but few seem willing to admit the problem might not be product design or flawed roll outs but human nature and corporate culture.

While enterprise social seems like a great lubricant for information exchange and collaboration at companies that already value these things, can these tools really work if a firm doesn’t already have a culture of sharing?

Update: Asana was described in the Business Insider story as an enterprise social network, but it is actually a productivity and task management tool.

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While the addictive properties of social media are totally obvious, so is the truth that introducing social tools in an enterprise context is a tricky business, and driving adoption is sometimes a painfully slow process. As David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, recently pointed out here on WebWorkerDaily, recent Forrester research found widespread under-utilization of the social tools that organizations have invested in, with 64 percent of companies reporting they realized few, if any, benefits from the investment.

And that’s a paradox. Why do we love social tools in our personal lives but often shun them in a professional context? Author and prominent business thinker Tammy Erickson recently pondered this question on the HBR Blog Network, outlining the key differences between the consumer social experience and the enterprise one. In our personal lives, she argues, social media have these characteristics:

• We’re usually invited to participate by people we know and trust.
• There are specific things we want to do with the other people involved, such as share photos, stay up-to-date on a club’s activities, or develop a personal reputation.
• We get something back from participation: advice, practical information we need, a network to tap when times are rough, or the emotional pleasure of seeing others’ photos or hearing their news.
• We have control over who sees our information.
• The applications are intuitive — there’s no training required.
• The applications are well-tuned to support the specific tasks we want to perform, and their features are regularly rated and refined.

Meanwhile, social at work is very different:

• Often we’re instructed to use it by someone in authority, rather than invited by friends.
• Little of what we actually get paid to do (or believe we get paid to do) requires information or input from the vast majority of other people on the network.
• Participation feels like dropping pearls into a black hole — there’s often no sense of getting something in return for sharing an idea or suggestion.
• We have no control over who sees our information and little idea what “they” are doing with it.
• The site is unattractive and requires a manual to get started.
• The software is generic and requires a work-around to do the specific things we would really like to do.

In the thoroughly interesting post she goes on to make suggestions on how organizations can make enterprise social more appealing to speed uptake of the tools, including offering a clear purpose for the initiative and tailoring offerings to existing user behavior. Have a read for her complete recommendations.

Do you think Erickson has nailed the essential differences between personal and professional social tools?

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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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So what usually goes wrong? At Net:Work 2011 Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers suggested  companies often make things too complicated, complaining about “Swiss army knives” that try to solve every problem and end up failing users. When I spoke with Yammer CEO David Sacks a few weeks ago, he suggested that companies often go wrong by “trying to bolt that on to some existing tool, because if the tool isn’t built from the ground up to be social, it’s not going to have the level of usability that’s required.”

Now David Lavenda, VP of marketing at social email company harmon.ie, has gotten into the act, offering up common ways that well intentioned companies muck up the roll out of social tools and suggesting better ways to bring these tools to your team. “Simply throwing out social tools isn’t going to work,” he says, pointing to recent Forrester research that found widespread under-utilization of social tools. The study shows that even though companies have invested in an average of five or more tools, 64 percent realized few, if any, benefits from that investment. Only 8 percent actually use social collaboration software once a week.

So what should you do if you want your company or team’s move to social to go as poorly as some of the roll-outs documented by Forrester?

Imagine your team loves change. Some people like nothing better than to shake things up and try something new, but you can be pretty sure that’s not everyone on your team. So when you’re thinking about rolling out a tool to make your organization more social, keep in mind the howls of complaint that greet even the smallest changes to social networks in the consumer space.

“People are naturally reluctant to change,” says Lavenda. “Enterprise 2.0 author Andrew McAfee warns organizations to, ‘never underestimate the fondness of people and organizations for the status quo.’ When transitioning to a social model, it’s imperative to understand exactly how users work. Then, build a strategy and toolset that integrates with these practices in a way that makes sense with their current workflow, rather than asking users to make a dramatic change in their behavior.”

Rip and replace. If the wheel is turning along with just a bit of a creak or wobble, it’s not a good idea to try and entirely reinvent it. “People are often lured into thinking they need something entirely new to solve a problem. Instead of a D-Day approach that flips the switch on relatively unproven technologies like blogs, wikis and allied next-gen tools—essentially asking employees to immediately abandon existing tools like email and documents—plan for a gradual introduction that allows users to get up to speed with new functionality and capabilities at a comfortable pace,” recommends Lavenda, adding, “the idea is to improve productivity, not hinder it.”

The more the merrier. More may be better when it comes to chocolate cake or vacation days, but not when it comes to tools for the social enterprise. Rather than asking your team to log in to six different things, try to find solutions that allow them one go-to place for many needs. “An effective social strategy must start in a familiar environment and then aggregate all other pieces into the users’ base of operations. The goal is to eliminate steps, not add more. Bundling collaboration tools together in a common context and shared window drives faster, more widespread adoption and delivers the promised benefits of social enterprise integration much quicker,” says Lavenda.

Have you experienced any serious screw ups in the real of enterprise social that you’d like to warn others to avoid?

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