Yesterday I read about a rule within FORD that if you can’t solve an issue within 24 hours you bring it to the masses/team to help solve. This seems simple. You may have always heard the rule that you return calls or emails within 24 hours – that’s simple. But when it comes to ideas, issues, project risks or whatever within a project or organization – that is tough unless its an ingrained habit within culture.
As I have mentioned before, I believe collaboration is innate within each of us as that is how we were usually taught to learn in elementary years. But collaboration gets unplugged for many us through life with emphasis on SAT scores, GPA in college, climb the corporate ladder – everything on the individual. So when an enterprise decides they are going to roll out collaboration tools, there is a culture change that usually has to happen. It could be going away from using network drives for project file storage or writing a wiki on a topic of thought leadership you have. If you haven’t been in a culture where these were practiced, it will take some time to wrap your mind around it. That is where a “24 Hour Rule” or something like it might be useful. When you give team members a micro-timeframe to solve non-mission critical issues and then say – “OK, you can’t solve it. That’s fine, that’s why we are a team. Throw it up on a Team Forum, we let the community or team help solve it.” A rule will create a habit and when an issue or question arises when there isn’t a team there will be value seen in using an internal, professional, secure network to get it moved forward.
I think whether you use a “rule” to encourage culture change and collaboration adoption or other means – you need to create and build a tool belt to hand off to business users to allow them to best use the applications you give them to collaborate.
What tools/rules/roles/responsibilities do you give your company to foster and encourage collaboration?
