Accountability | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Social business : target blue collars and forget technology ?

February 16, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : there’s still a large gap between the social media promise and what’s really happening. A gap that’s getter smaller every day but so slowly that many people find it worrying. While large companies still struggle with dealing with their internal contradictions despite of massive investments and fail at mobilizing employees that are mostly white collars, we can see that smaller organizations are sometimes more successful even if mostly made of blue collars. A surprising paradox ? Not that sure. In fact its all about what one think the social promise is. While some focus on building communities and adopting software, some implemented pragmatic management practices, focused on production, delivery and decision making. These last ones often get better results in terms on impact on work as well as employees’ well-being.

When we talk about the need to make organization evolve there’s an easy shortcut that emerges quickly : it’s about qualified white collars spending most of their time in front of a computer. This shortcuts comes even more easily that, for lots of people, the transformation in question depends on the use of a certain category of software, what restricts the change program to a certain category of people. This assumption is broken into pieces as we can see to what extent things are complicated with this population and are forced to admit that tools makes absolutely no sense if not embedded in the “official way work is done”.

As we also have seen before, nothing works without a strong will of changing things as deep as possible. What leads us to ask again the question : “what’s en enterprise 2.0 or a social business”.

We know that it does not depend on the use of such or such software. Software can help but is not enough to tell if a given organization deserves the 2.0 or social label.

So we could have a deeper look at organization principles and flows of work. Bottom-up flows, empowerment, intrapreneurship approaches aiming at making the right resources available at the right place, at the right time to deliver what the customer is expecting, focus on delivering a product or service and less of validation/decision workflows. A collective efficiency approach relying on agile coordination and fluidity in exchanges and learning.

In this case it’s clear that, considering knowledge workers, software can play a major part in the transformation job. But what about other workers ? Don’t they face similar issues ? Don’t they need responsiveness, don’t they have to make better decisions, be better at exception handling, problem solving ?

Do they have to be the casualties of the social transformation ? Not. And, in fact, they are sometimes more advanced than we may think.

Let’s have a look a three cases.

The collective is not always the answer

February 2, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : one of the assumption on which many enterprise projects rely is that the collective is better than the sum of the individuals that composes it. This have been proven being right many times. But is it that simple ? In systems that struggle at jointing people and groups, in which people have more and more difficulties to see to see what is their contribution to a global purpose and what this purpose is, there are three obvious risks. The first is to built an organizations in which the collective makes no sense. The second is to use the collective to avoid facing individual issues, a way to blame others for one’s lacks. The third, on the enterprise side, is to believe that the social or 2.0 orgnanization will be the remedy for irrelevant processus no one dares changing.

More ideas can be found in ten heads than in a single one. 100 people are stronger than ten. Crowds are wiser than individuals. We are more efficient when we act together as a living organism than as a sum of individuals. As many facts and assumptions that make organizations think about 2.0 or social approaches of work. With some “magic words” raised as remedies to all diseases : “communities”, “network”, “ties”, “together”.

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

Implementing those approaches and the tools that support them often aim at improving collective dynamics through more efficient interactions between resources, bewteen those who have something to do and those who can help them to do better and faster. Gathering and exchanging seem to be the cornerstones of these approaches. But :

• Interacting is not producing : conversations, exchanges are preparatory to action but, in the end, there’s still one person that has to deliver something, make a decision, act. People co-innovate, co-design but action is still an individual issue. One may mention co-writing something with solutions like Google Docs as an exception. But, with a closer look, it appears that someone always have to “clean up” the document, align styles and ideas. Doing so helps a lot a the beginning but anyone who once had to do this cleaning job on a document written by 4 or 10 people can tell it’s like hell. The more basic unit of work, the task, is and will remain an individual issue if we adopt an execution driven point of view.

• many organizations trie to use the collective as a remedy for individual discipline, accountability, professionalism issues. If one does not behave as a professional when managing his tasks, its workload, gathering everyone won’t solve the problem. Things may even get worse because of unproductive interactions that won’t improve anything, no one having done the preparatory work needed to make group discussions productive.

• the focus is put where there problem isn’t, avoiding to tackle what’s core, and accountability moves from individuals to the group. “If I don’t do that, the community will”. SInce everybody thinks the same, the collective does not do anything. Remember that a community is nothing more than a gathering of individuals who may have their own priorities and agendas. When the community does something, it only means that one or some of its members have individually decided to move forward. So we thank the community while, in many cases, only one of its members should be thanked. Communities don’t move forward if, at least, one member does not decide to.

• but organizations are doing the same mistakes. “If we bring employees to communities, if we make them more social, they’ll make up for our crappy processes without us having to work on that”. On the contrary, these dynamics need strong processes to give people reasons and time to move toward the collective. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: accountability, collaboration, collective, Communautés, Enterprise 2.0, Human resources, objectives, organization, processes, professionalism, sense, social business, Social Networking, work

Information leaks on social networks : that’s not the problem

January 27, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : businesses see social networks as possible channels for information leaks caused by negligence. What is right. But their retort, that is mainly technological, does not solve anything because social networks are only one of the many channels that can make risks become true, not the cause of the risk. As a matter of fact the largest social network in the world is the street. If a global approach through awareness and accountability will help to deal with the whole risk, solutions that are being currently implemented are only window-dressing regarding to the many channels information can use to leak. Human issues can’t be solved by technology only and firewalls will never replace trust.

It’s obvious that information leaks is a sensitive point for businesses and the risk of employees being negligent on social networks has to be taken seriously. Hence the need for limiting this risk. Most of time the response relies on technology. That solves a part of the problem but is far from being enough.

As a matter of fact, prohibiting any connection to these sites or filtering outgoing information may limit the risk. But such an approach has weaknesses. It only works on corporate devices. At the moment people use their mobile or connect from home the risk is here gain. Making employees aware of the risks caused by their own behaviors is more useful because, in some ways, tools are only the vehicle behaviors use to make information flow. Adopting this approach helps dealing with some of the consequences but none of the causes.

The largest social network is not Facebook or Twitter but…the world, life, the street. And no technology will prevent anyone to do anything there except accountability. The good side of this approach is that, when it’s successful, it works with any device, anytime, anywhere.

We all have examples to tell. This group of coworkers of Bank xxxxxx having a drink and talking about their employer’s solvency, not being conscious everyone was listening to them. These two executives discussing their secret new corporate strategy at lunch. Everyone around appreciated. This group of employees of YYYYY vacationing together and discussing, around the pool, of lay-off program they were secretly working on. The problem that, even if they were on the middle of the Indian Ocean there were lots of french people in the hotel. One more thing. I would like to thank the sales rep of ZZZZ that were discussing their plan to sign with a customer in the plane….since I was meeting the same client a couple of years later my colleagues and I make the best possible use of it. I also think about all the people that can’t prevent from working in trains or planes, making it easy for anyone to see what’s on their beautiful HD screen.

Of course such things never happen. I’m even sure that in the above mentioned companies, social networks are filtered or blocked. Human issues won’t be solved by technology and firewalls will never replace trust.