One of the traditional problems in IT departments, she explained, is that engineers view themselves as the end-users instead of the real employees who use the products. And like real-world consumers, emotion often trumps cost-effectiveness or what has the most features. Often, they just want stuff that looks nice and that works.

In order to help application developers get it right, she brought in designers to help them see things from a different perspective, what she calls “cognitive diversity.” Her partner on stage, Bernd Christiansen, CTO of Citrix’s Online Services Division, also said that designers are critical. He said companies should make multiple designs to figure out the best products to actually develop.

And if you can’t figure out a way to implement an entire design, just quit, he said. Getting it half right probably won’t cut it, and just ends up being more of the same. It’s worth getting it right. Christiansen explained that he watches employees get work done on their phones walking from the car to the office, only to watch their productivity drop as soon as they get inside.

That’s because companies often force employees to use different technology inside. If IT gives them as close to the consumer experience as possible, they’ll be more productive, he said, because this generation of workers doesn’t care about how technology works. It just wants to put technology to work.

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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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And it follows that the programs employees prefer incorporate the social and collaborative aspects that define the apps they use in their personal lives, according to an on-stage conversation between Flextronics CIO David Smoley and Workday Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri at the GigaOM Net:Work Conference held in San Francisco Thursday.

For business leaders, this new environment requires a willingness to improvise and being very open to change. “You have to be willing to continuously grab things if they’re interesting, try them, and throw them out if they don’t work,” Smoley said. “In a way, you have to be a ‘yes’ guy, you can’t tell people no.”

This flexible attitude is needed to get the most out of today’s workforce, which is comprised of people who are used to having control over the technology they use. “We’re much more intently aware at the highest level that every employee is first a consumer,” Bhusri said. “There’s this massive revolution happening in consumer Internet, social media, that is training people to use systems in a certain way. So when they get to work they also expect their systems to work in a certain way.”

The à la carte nature of collaborative software is not all rosy, though. There are often generational gaps that come to play, as well as integration pains. “Tools are very individually specific and team specific. One customer may want to use Cisco WebEx, while the next customer may say they want to use Skype. Often even within companies you’re constantly pinging between different tools,” Smoley said. “The hope for a guy like me is that all this will actually converge, and that unified communications will be unified some day.”

But the panel’s moderator Stowe Boyd, who monitors these trends as an independent analyst and as an analyst for GigaOM Pro, did not think that day would come any time soon. “I think continued chaos is more likely.” At least we will all continue to live in interesting times, both at home and at work.

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Interestingly, that goes for both service providers and their users. On the provider side, Yahoo’s Luke Beatty, it’s VP and GM of community, thinks that users understand that the way sites operate and rank them will change. However, he said, “I don’t think anyone has a problem with the change as much as they have a problem with the transparency.”

Matt Thompson, VP of platform at Klout, echoed. “The desire to be transparent and the execution to be transparent are two different things,” he said, “and we stink at the execution right now.”

Transparency is so critcal, Beatty said, because how sites rate users will change over time. Behavior or skills that used to be important might change, and users looking to establish reputations need to know.

There might be a limit, though. Trada CEO Niel Robertson said he believes in half-transparency, kind of like the way Google only gives a guideline as to how its AdWords algorithm works. Users — in Trada’s case freelance, crowdsourced workers — need to know the criteria, he said, but if you’re completely open they might look to start gaming the system.

When it comes to users, transparency (aka the opposite of anonymity) is important for taking reputation with them across sites. Being chattygirl32 in the New York Times comments section, for example, isn’t so helpful when you try to leverage online reputation elsewhere. A real name, however, might stick.

Of course, using real names is also helpful in letting platform providers know who they’re dealing with. Robertson said Trada requires workers to use their real names, and Beatty said Yahoo does the same for people it pays for content. On Klout, Thompson said, tying together multiple anonymous accounts wouldn’t be too helpful — a real name, at least, is what what ties your influence to your reputation.

Robertson made another good point that often goes overlooked, which is that making user transparency might start spreading beyond users’ control, and beyond the web. There are all sorts of sites ranking doctors, for example, but he thinks we’re ripe for a time when doctors start rating patients, landlords rating tenants and the like.

You can hide behind all the screen names in the world, but don’t think those with whom you do business in the real world will be so accomodating.

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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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It’s a simple test, Young said, but it was also one that all employees could easily participate in. The resulting data points could be used to not only rate an individual employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, but also to help promote cohesion between team members and identify if certain groups or employees, such as graphic designers or salespeople, were becoming disenfranchised.

VMWare recently acquired Socialcast, making Young VP of Social Enterprise. Despite the sophistication of its virtualization software implementations, Young said it has kept Socialcast true to its principles of providing simple business solutions can cut through the normally high level of complexity at an enterprise.

“We’re not really building software here,” Young said. “We’re helping people to unleash their power internally, become heroes and become more affective at their jobs. If we can provide really simple tools — not complex tools inside the workplace that they have to spend a lot of time training on and learning, trying to figure out how they drive value for their own jobs — if we give them really simple tools, they can use them to flourish.”

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Seidman talked about how Gigwalk is based on the idea of using a mobile device to match jobs that need doing with people who are well-equipped to do them. The idea is that the apps can be moneymakers for users, instead of just cash draws. He discussed the fact that mobile is also a key inflection point, which will fundamentally change how we work.

Work, at least the kind people seek through mobile means, can be one of two types, says Seidman. It can be casual and meant to cover small gaps or financial needs in a user’s life says Seidman, like helping them pay a specific bill. Or it can be more substantial, looking for a way to fill out the remainder of a part-time schedule, for instance. The spectrum includes jobs that take a few minutes to complete or longer-term contracts that can span days. Mobile can cater to both ends of this spectrum.

Mobile tech also allows companies to fill positions incredibly quickly: Seidman said that Microsoft had a 24-hour turnaround when it used Gigwalk for a recent engagement.

In the interest of opening up opportunities to even more workers, Gigwalk is launching an Android client in private beta on Thursday, which will be available on its site.

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Don Ball, co-founder of the CoCo coworking and collaborative space said that many of the early corporate users of his facilities were “going rogue,” with supervisors not actually knowing that employees were working in a shared office space.

But these days, more and more corporations are leveraging coworking spaces, with motivations ranging all the way from real estate downsizing to perks to increased productivity. “When I worked in an office, I spent an awful lot of time to fool around,” said Emergent Research Partner Steve King. Offices tend to be social spaces with lots of parties and other non-work activities, something that doesn’t happen as much in coworking facilities.

At coworking spaces, people tend to be more focused, agreed Herman Miller Advanced R&D Projects Lead Consultant Jennifer Magnolfi. “These spaces simply feel more appropriate for the way we work today,” she said, simply because they reflect the tools we use to work today. She added than many coworking spaces follow different design paradigms than your plain old office, inviting people to learn as well as work.

So how big is the impact this new wave of corporate coworking is having? King said that nine percent of the people who attend coworking spaces in the U.S. now come from corporations that employ more than 100 people. That may not sound much, but LiquidSpace Founder and CEO Mark Gilbreath reminded the Net:Work audience that coworking is already influencing how big corporations design their offices. It might be that the coworking space of the future doesn’t even look like today’s coworking facility, where people rent desk space by time slot. “Hotels have spent 3 billion dollars to redesign their lobbies to feel like coworking spaces,” he said.

Regardless of what coworking spaces will eventually look like, all of the participants agreed that the trend will play a huge role for big companies in the years to come. “Coworking is a window into the future of work,” said King.

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“The next disruption will come with big advances in UI because that’s all you have,” he said. Behind the scenes, computers and networks are still abstract machines that essentially flip switches, but people don’t think in the abstract. So the user interface is a way to turn the abstract into concrete efforts that humans understand. How does one “de-abstract” the machine?

The biggest clue, Underkoffler says, is space, and pointing is the simplest human gesture that applies to space. We point for the benefit of others, who can determine what space we’re trying to reference. Applying that idea to computers is what Oblong does, and the key is giving tangible space coordinates to every pixel on any screen in a room. Essentially, an entire room around you can be a desktop.

But you can’t drive three dozen screens with a single piece of hardware, so Oblong is focused on the operating environment to create a user interface that works across networked computers in a way that multiple workers can collaborate. This “removes the tyranny of meeting rooms and conference rooms where one person owns the experience,” according to Underkoffler. Screens for input and output — such as an iPad – can be used as a two-way screen to control main and add data.

We might be using one or two screens today in a desktop environment, but in the near future, every available screen in a room could extend our workplace beyond the constraints of an old user interface.

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But he said companies are increasingly turning to gamification to accomplish a number of real world goals and they’re not simply turning everything into a game. They’re realizing that gamification, or the use of key game concepts to engage users and solve problems, can be a powerful way to create happiness and innovation and spur on results and education among its workforce, said Zichermann at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference.

The key, he said, is that our brains are wired to want to go through a process of desire to mastery. That process, which includes incentives, challenges, achievements and feedback, looks a lot like videos games, following a similar path. By tying into those mechanics, companies are able to tap into the higher desires of people, who often see work through the lens of self actualization and esteem. When companies employ game techniques and provides broad metrics tied to social interactions, it can motivate people in very significant ways, he said.

Zichermann said it can be simple like a checkout game for Target cashiers, who get audible feedback noting how their product scans are going. It takes a mundane and job and makes it a little more fun and gives workers a little more sense of control or agency in their lives, Zichermann said.

Other companies are looking to leverage feedback and use it to encourage people. Apps such as Rypple and DueProp are being used by companies to prompt more immediate feedback among employees, so workers can recognize each other in real time for the work they’re doing. Car companies are using feedback in their hybrid cars to encourage users to drive in a more eco-friendly way, showing them the results of their driving habits on screen through representations like a growing tree.

Zichermann said teamplay can also have a strong effect. He noted the experience of NextJump, an employee rewards provider, which now has more than 80 percent of its employees working out because of a new gamified health system that splits the workforce into teams and doles out cash to the teams that work out the most.

Zichermann said that it’s still hard to create the change that companies want to see internally but they’re increasingly seeing game mechanics as a way to accomplish their goals. He said a Gartner study found that 70 percent of the Global 2000 expect to use gamification by 2015 and 50 percent expect innovation to come from game processes.

“In order to get us to collectively create the major change we’re looking for, we need to design things in ways that are motivating and meaningful for people individually. Gamification gives you a toolkit to accomplish that,” Zichermann said.

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