Liza Sisler (@lizasisler on twitter) pointed me to this article on collaboration on Information Week titled, “The Right Way to Get Employees to Collaborate“. Michael Sampson has obviously been around the block when it comes to deploying collaboration solutions and I completely agree with his main premise. Just building something and throwing it over the wall won’t work. A couple guys within Perficient refer to it as the ‘if you build it they will come’ fallacy.
What do you do when the very technology that’s supposed to encourage collaboration ends up creating strife and undermining collaboration? Whenever I find an organization at this place, I have three specific recommendations:
1. Start talking about it. The bigger the mess you’ve made, the more important it is to meet in person and start talking it through. Convening a half- or full-day workshop is a good place to start. Get someone from outside the organization to facilitate it, someone not aligned with either “side.” And start talking about what happened, what could happen, what should have happened. Acknowledge the mistakes and see if there’s an opportunity to try again.
2. Go back to basics and develop the vision and strategy. Organizations are complex entities, with political structures, hierarchical demands, country-specific, and even departmental-specific cultures. There needs to be something that everyone can rally around, though, if collaboration is going to work. What’s the vision, the desired outcome, the intended objective of working together in new and different ways? Through discussion, observation, and experimentation, see if you can pull people together to point in the same direction. If you can, you’ve laid a great foundation for the next step.
3. Start experimenting, and include real people. Go out into your organization and look at how people work together today. What’s going well for them? What’s a real pain? What would people like to be able to do but are unable to make happen with current approaches or technology? Where is there an appetite for change, an appetite for doing things in different and enhanced ways? Find real people doing real work, and run experiments to explore opportunities and ideas.
Without repeating Michael’s points, I’ll add that I agree with them all. I especially like the idea of creating a vision and strategy and then including people. (points two and three). These days, whatever you do has to be tied to a specific objective. The objective need not be tied to ROI but it needs to bring some business value. You can’t bring business value without involving leadership and without finding out where the pain points exist.
I’ll add my two cents to this though. You must take into account what kind of organization you have. Are you part of a cutting edge organization that’s willing to try new things? Does your company take a more conservative approach? How willing are people to stick their neck out to share information?
I was at one company recently where when we brought up some approaches to social networking, he told me that the company culture was risk averse and we needed to be careful how we allowed commenting on new content. At that point, the rest of the people there chimed in to agree.
That doesn’t mean that social networking or collaboration is dead in these kinds of companies. It means you have to take it into account and ensure your governance policies are in place and that you target the departments or people in the company who are willing to go against an existing culture. Find the people who most need this type of collaboration and then enable them in small ways. Success will then breed more success.
Obviously if your company supports a different culture where sharing is more accepted then you can more easily develop a plan to roll out a social networking tool. The plan should still start small and let it expand over time.
I’m open to any readers expressing their own opinions on the subject. Every company is different and success or failure means we’ve learned something.
