What do employees need to turn 2.0 ?

May 27, 2010 By 2 Comments

The paradox of enterprise 2.0 is that even when businesses manage to go on their fear of the unknown and decide to embrace this new paradigm, they are often not followed by their employees even if they bring a solution to their problems with solutions that are supposed to make their work easier.

Everybody now understands that employees need mor than tools and communication campaigns to adopt new practices and behaviors even if that would be beneficial to them. Even saying “do whatever you want, we trust you” doesn’t work”.

Here’s a little checklist of customer’s expectations.

• What are the expected outcomes ? What am I supposed to “produce” on these tools, and what is expected from the groups / communities I’m a part of.

• What are the limits to my responsability ? To what extent am I autonomous, beyond which point should I ask for permission or refrain from doing anything.

• Is it a part of the job I’m paid to do ? Will my manager or any person paying me with his budget consider my activity as wasted time ? Will they blame me for participating or reward me ?

• What’s my exposure ? How to control it ? What kind of information am I supposed to share ? Facts or opinions that engage me ? Can I set my own limit ? Who can access what ? And what will the information I share be used for ?

• Show me first and then I’ll follow.

• Before asking to me to any new thing, show me how all that can help me to do what I’m already doing today, how it makes it simpler and easier.

• Don’t scatter my attention. I already have so much to do so don’t distract me with pointless information and issues that have no added value according to my objectives and daily tasks.

• Don’t break my “personal workflow”. I don’t have time to play with 3 applications, aggregate information, forward it, copy/past. In this case I’ll focus on the tool that is not the best but that can do a little bit of anything, even not in an efficient way, without having to switch between several apps. (email ?)

• Don’t add but remove. For 50 years, the response to any new issue was a new layer of solution (tools, rules, practices), These layers have been piling up for decades and we’ve reached such a point that they slow me down and are sometimes contradictory the one with the other. Instead of adding new layers, remove those that are actual burdens, doesn’t make any sense anymore and are useless.

• Don’t bring me into one more experiment. I’m not a guinea-pig and the time I’m investing penalizes me in my real work and is even bad for my image and reputiation. I’m ready to learn, to explore, provided it won’t be shut down in 6 months and it will help me in my day-to-day word.

• How information will be used ? Reused ? It will help me to know what to share.

• Teach me, show me how to articulate the structured and unstructured part of my work, the formal and informal ones. And I hope tools take this need for articulation into account because I don’t want to play the human connector.

• Teach me how to seamlessly integrate it in my daily work and how to translate it into a simple, scripte, reassuring routine I’ll follow without thinking about it.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , ,

Some collaboration lessons by John Chambers (Cisco)

April 29, 2010 By 1 Comment

I already mentioned CISCO’s collaborative experience a long time ago. I’m taking advantage of a recent article to share a few things about the “Chambers method” for collaboration.

I’m tempted to say that there’s no miracle and that what the article says is only common sense. Anyway, it’s helps to identify the main lines of any successful change project :

• Start with the “human matter”. A leadership change is not something one can improvise. It needs explainations, people need to be reassured and to be able to imagine themselves in the future situation, to make the change theirs.

• Align systems and remuneration. I often say “tell me how you’re evaluated and I’ll be able to tell you how your work”. Trying to make people collaborate while they’re given bonuses to ignore or even fightt againts each other is useless. In other words, in many cases it will be hard to avoid thinking about evaluation models.

• Think about “articulation”. Chambers talks about structure change, but what I can see beyond that is the necessity not to eliminate the hierarchical structure but implement systems that will help hierarchy to articulate with more horizontal and adhoc work models.

• Frame and explain : explain the future and make it clear. Autonomy and flexibility don’t mean absence of rules. On the contrary, employees who are often mistrustful by nature (and sometimes for good reasons…) need that the rules of the game and the frontiers between what’s allowed and what’s forbidden are clearly set.That’s what will make them focus on their rethought work instead of continuously wondering about “how to work” and “how to implement change”.

• Use social media. I don’t know if it’s done in purpose but even if it’s an essential part of the approach, it comes in last position in the list. Maybe because it’s of no use if nothing is done about the above mentioned points.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Does education cause a lack of collaboration ?

December 27, 2006 By Leave a Comment

images-31.jpegWhen we’re young we’re taught a lot of “good principles” we keep deep in our mind as we grow old. We consider them as undisputable and they really affect the way we act with other peoples in our adult life. The fact is at the time we’re in search of collective efficiency, those principles quickly become freezing elements.For example :

• One only succeed alone : if you’re a good professional you must succeed by your own. We believe in this so much that we prefer not to do anything or make it imperfectly rather than to say “I need other’s people skills, I need their help to make it right”.

• Never copy ! Remember when you were at school… Copying is good because it allows you to use your time to improve existing things rather thant re-inventing them. Without copy innovation is harldy possible. Cheating is bad. Not copying.

• Don’t help others ! Not only we were not suppose to copy from our neighbour, but it was reprehensible to let him copy from us. The consequence was we were nearly building around our exercices to be sure the teatcher would be sure we didn’t give others people any opportunity to copy from us. Years later it’s not easy to understand we have to collaborate and share…

• Don’t talk with people you don’t know ! so we hesisate to share and exchange with people who are in the same company, in the same team, with whom we share the same projects and objectives.

• Don’t talk about you ! So be sure nobody will notice your expertise and will offer you to collaborate in the more challenging projects.

The purpose was to set well-manered people. The result of all that is that the educationnal systems build autistic people at the time we need professionnals who are easy with collaboration and interaction. And it’s so hard to make people change when they’ve been fed with such principles for years.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , ,

A new approach of partnership ?

November 18, 2006 By Leave a Comment

collaborationI appreciated much a note published by Jeremie Berrebi. He was offering anyone to use Zlio’s technology to build a competitor to is own company. And even to make something better !

Surprising ? Stupid ? Suicidal.

Not at all. It’s pure logic and is the perfect embodiment of a new kind of win / win strategy that may by usefull between people in a company.

My point of view:

Zlio’s strategy 

- using my technlogy you legitimite it

- if  come on my market and communicate, you’re advertising my concept

- if we use the same technical bases, it will be easier in case we merge.

- be worse and I will be a leader, are various (even better) you will give me ideas.

- make this market competitive, we will all take benefits of that.

A real win / win strategy as I said.

But what does it have  to do with managing an  organization ?

Logics of interpersonal partnerships in company

Here are a few behaviors we can identify in nearly every company:

- I do not speak about my projects for fear someones “steal” them to me.
- it’s hard for me to master all aspects of a problematics

- I reinvent the wheel every week

- management never gives me a “GO” to anything I suggets

- if I have a “go” nobody wants to belong to my team

- while speaking with nobody I deprive myself of internal sponsors. I am only one isolated voice whereas if several voices rise the decision makers will become aware of a need for acting. Thus firstly I loose my time  then I does not answer an identified stake.

- I also deprive myself of resources. From where the fact that I often arrive after the battle with a badly tied up project.

- I cannot count on those which worked with another project based on the same idea. They will not help the guy who threw banana skins on their way. If I have the green light impossible thus to gather everyone.

- impossible to know  if somebody thinks about the same thing that me and is more advanced than me.
- considering with final I prefer to only fail by myself that to succeed with others I will never be involved in a major success. Thus good-bye the promotion and I worked in silence for nothing.

One  sees intern competitors  everywhere whereas one should rather try to identify strong sponsors and some partners. The complexity of the current projects as well as the little of time we have impose a true collective agility.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

Collaboration for dummies (1): Collaborating is natural

October 10, 2006 By 1 Comment

angrySaying “collaboration is good but not quite natural” is a very common word in companies today. Managers and employees know that’s a valuable attitude, but it’s still very hard to make people collaborate, share and work together. I’ve been told so often that “collaboration is not a natural thing and it’s difficult to bring it into business” thatI tought I was true. But at this time I’m not convinced anymore. In fact, even if I don’t deny that “it’s difficult” I’m nearly sure that it’s natural.

An appropriate formulation would be “collaborating is natural but it’s hard to bring it into business”.

If you think about your everyday life, what do you do. Help your children doing their homework, give your friends pieces of advices and tips, help your wife to serve the dinner…and most of that without any direct reward.

Why? Perharps because you know if you help someone once, there’s a lot of chance he’ll help you tomorrow, because a piece of advice costs nothing, because you’re polite, because human beings are social beings…

It’s also a fact that the most directive manager, the most narrow minded guy at work is, most of the times, a very nice person outside.

If people were at work as they’re at home we would not be talking about “how to bring collaboration in organization” because collaboration would be a common thing.

In fact we all stop being collaborative at the time we walk throught our office door.

That’s why I said collaboration is natural. The consequence is, if we want to make people collaborate, share, work together we have to ask ourselves why work make they (and us too) be so different. And, as a final point, what to bring into companies management and human context to down thoses virtual fences.

Considering things this way, we should realize that sometimes we don’t have to teach people how to collaborate but make them feel a different context in which collaboration is natural. Big stake isn’t it?

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , ,

Moving to enterprise 2.0 is nothing but anticipation

October 7, 2006 By Leave a Comment

intranetThere are many brakes that prevent you moving to enterpise 2.0. “Wer’e not ready”, “people don’t need it”, “it’s good for others but not for us”. My vision is different as I think you’d better change now rather than being forced to change later. Forced by whom? By strategic and organizational need, an by your new recruits for example.

As I often say to managers, there’s a generation that will soon come to the market that’s used to collaborative tools, information sharing, teamworking…they will ask to have had work the tools they use to communicate and collaborate in their everyday life.

Remember in the 90s…a lot of companies adopted emails and made corporate websites because their employees were used to using those tools at home.

Two other things to notice:

“Where the Internet goes the Intranet will surely follow…”

I like this sentence because it really describes how IT tools are adopted. People can’t understand that their working tools are less efficient than those they use at home. Once people validated the efficiency of such or such tools, they want to have it in their job.

“They are the future and they’re coming soon to a workplace near you”

That’s the title of an interesting article in the Financial Times. It shows us how the next generation will challenge the way of doing things in our companies. This generation, fed by video games and internet don’t have to be taught about collaboration, information sharing…they already know it. And they also have their own vision on management and organization. They could help organizations moving to enterprise 2.0 because they already have the needed values. As you know things must change, don’t make them adopt old methods but make them the pilar of the new practices you want to spread in your organization.

What’s their vision of work?

  • you have to react making decisions quickly, taking in account always changing elements.
  • visible feedbacks and awards needed
  • loosing is nothing, you can try as many times as necessary
  • learning is an informal process that’s made between friends
  • success is measured by completing tasks, not by being present for a defined amount of hours

Nice vision isn’t it? To take as much benefit as possible of those people you have to adapt your organization before they come and let them be facilitators of the change in progress.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , ,

Management 2.0 (3): (potential) Definition

September 29, 2006 By Leave a Comment

management20Let’s try to build a defintion, starting from that and that. It’s a kind of “definition in progress” so your feedback is very welcome. So how to define the management 2.0 concept?

” Implementation of managerial practices favorising the emission of any kind of information or knowledge by any king of actot to any kind of recipient, implementation of collaborative practices, the whole being dedicated to build a collective intelligence and practices supported by all the staff’s potentals, taken individually in purpose to gather them in an intelligent entity of wich they are actors without being merged in it.
Those practices adoption supposes to implement an information system that would be people-centric enough to support them. This IS would be as well consequency and support of these practices.

The key factor of success of these both side of the approach is to work as well on people (management practices and individual behaviors) and on the IS which flexibily would allow him to fully support humain behaviors and adapt itself to the organization challenges”.

Hum…very “heavy but I think everything’s in. And above all, what’s the big stake: working on people and systems together and make the IS (mainly the intranet) become people-centric.

Any questions? Something to add? Think you can improve it?…I’m waiting for your comments.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , ,

Management 2.0 (2): facts and premises

September 24, 2006 By Leave a Comment

management20So that’s the continuation of this post.

We’ll make a quick tour of company’s needs, see whats done to improve things and acknowledge that’s it’s not fully efficient (and very far from that) and see what to to to make it work.

Company’s needs:

Innovation as source of value

Employee’s implication in a corporate global project

Improve transverse communication and operationnal feedback in the company.

Capitalize all kind of knowledge

Managers’ needs:

manage team’s cohesion
identify experts
“take the temperature” of the human context
give sense to everyone’s role
build link between people
make people and teams collaborate

Employees’ waitings

transparency in top-down communication
take in account and delevop ideas, iniatiatives, (that supposes to eliminate brakes such as “little chief syndrome” and whitholding information)
feeling more implicated
being a part of a comunity without losing one’s own personality

I’ve surely forgot some. Moreover I wrote people’s verbatim instead of making a real formalization…feel free to comment and add what you want. In fact it’s based on the french context and you’ll be able to tell me if it’s the same everywhere or if cultural differences make expectations change from one continent to another.

Conclusion

We can see the what the one needs is globally expected by the others. In the other hand, it’s obvious that there’s a kind of divorce between companies and their people, that is very hard to make people work together and make them feel they’re a port of a community, they’re involved in a global project.

A lot of brakes have been identified that explain this situation, to say what people balk at adopting new practices even if what’s asked match their expectations.

So a lot of energy, of money is spent on internal management projects without encountering a global success. What’s ofter said is that you can make thing change in a little community such are a team, an office, but not in the whole company that’s split all over the the world, divided in thousands of offices and entities.

So, what’s the missing link?
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Very good (2.0) ideas at Air France Mexico

September 18, 2006 By 1 Comment

Air FranceAir France Mexico has launched an ideas management system monthes ago and we have now the first results. The followed purposes where of two kinds:

• Economic:

- Improve company’s performance

- encourage innovation

• Social:

- Make people being in touch with each other

- Identify expertises

- enhance the statutus of employees

All the procedure is described in this post (sorry link in french :-( ).

In so doing, Air France Mexico acknowledges that their employees thought and ideas are valuable for the company. If you want such a project to succeed you have to to make peeople confident because saying something can be improved also means something is not going as well as suitable. Implicating anything in the company is not very easy beacause some people may take it as a personnal attack, so you have to make people free to say what they think, and make managers open to such attitudes. I don’t know how people react to such things overseas but in France it may be a very sensible case, as a lot of people consider any suggestion of improvement as a personnal criticism (I’d be glad to have the feelings of US managers about that…..).

Another point is the way the process work. As said in the related post things work as “human to human” process for the moment, with the purpose of formalizing the workflow on the intranet. I’m convinced that it’s a tipical situation of a good use of collaboration driven intranets as described in the Razorfish report. For example a blog based collaborative intranet would allow people to suggest, discuss, comment…so doing managers would also identifiy what seems to be important for everybody, it may help them capitalizing more ideas and make global discussions, evaluations and project c-builnding about them. Involving the whole company in the process, allowing not only individual but also collective suggestion may improve the value of the ideas mananagement system and make the changes more easy to accept.

As a result, after less than one year, the company acknowledges a 22 to 40% participation rate, and some projects due to the ideas management system made the company save more than $ 200.000.

The process in itself is a good idea of what to do to increase innovation, by the way these new kind of approachs are a significant plea for intranets 2.0 as a discussion and innovation tool, making innovation become collective.

Just one more thing: Air France Mexico also have a blog. A true enteprise 2.0?

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Have you heard about management 2.0?

July 11, 2006 By Leave a Comment

collaborationNo? Don’t panic…that’s the subject of this post.

Perharps you’ve heard about web 2.0? Not either? It’s supposed to be the new trend of the internet, called “social web”. It’s not about technology anymore (despite some are still trying to explain it by telling how it works instead of what it brings), it’s about uses. Using net services are not a goal but a way to get to a different management because a new kind of web services is empowering social relationship, co-operation, co-buildind, co-thiking and co-whatever you want. The web is now on the way to be a worldwide think tank, a huge collaborative open space.

I first used the term “management 2.0″ in last december, in a post on my french blog in order to say that companies are more and more interessed in collaborative practices, participative management etc… That it’s not a very new thing (Mc Gregor thought about it years before for example) but what’s new is that, using the new kind of services that’s being developped, we can bring people centric behaviors to the company’s information system.

That’s the real point about management 2.0. Before, people who tried to adopt collaborative pratices had to face information systems that didn’t allow to develop social links and take added value from it. Now you can build a real social network based on communities of practices or interests, share information and have a collaborative and creative approach of relationship between people in the company, even if they’re located all over the world and doesn’t even know one the other.

As a conclusion, management 2.0 is not about web technology: it’s about management practices empowered by social web-powered services. But what’s important are practices: the information system side of the thing is just some means not a goal.
Let’s learn more about it in the next posts..

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , ,