The death of oral exchanges in the workplace ?

September 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Résumé :some people are more comfortable with oral exchanges, some others with written ones. Similarly, some companies have a culture that’s more “latin” than others. Before even thinking of changing the way people work we have to admit that some of the tools that have to support these new ways of working do not fit a part of the workforce and even many companys for which switching from oral to written  is vert hard. Does it mean that enterprise 2.0 is doomed to failure ? Will the upcoming evolution happen to detriment of oral culture cimpanies ? No, because tools are getting more oral themselves. But a question remains : will tools evolve before many people give up ?

Do you prefer oral or written communication ? And your enterprise ? We all have our own preferences, each company has its culture and an efficient work requires to find the right balance between staff preferences and the corporate culture.

This is not trivial at all. Imagine two people having to work together, who have a very good relationship together, if one is more “oral” and the other more “written’ it may cause many issues and misunderstandings in their everyday work. Imagine a high level executive who joins a new company, if he’s “oral” in a very formal organization or very formal in an oral culture company, things will be very difficult.

That clearly impacts the capacity any organization has to change the way it works, to embark on social media. What, seen from a different standpoint, could be turned into : “will enterprise 2.0 kill oral cultures ?”.

Traditionnally, organizations favor written things. More reliable, more “engaging” while words only engage those who hear them, easier to track and to be used as an evidence the day someone has to find what has gone wrong and why. But there are also organizations where people prefer to talk together rather than write, where the direct human contact is prefered. The Chief HR Officer of a company of this kind once used the word “latin” to describe their culture when we were discussing this kind of issue together. That’s the same for people, each have their prefered way of communicating.

The fact is that writing is the enteprise 2.0 tool’s favorite way of communicating. It’s easy to understand why. [Read more...]

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Fun at work or fun in work ?

August 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

Résumé : albeit the funny side of social media is often used as an argument for adoption, we have to admit that even if organization prefer to have happy employees they ae not ready to pay to make them have fun at work. Either we consider that’s regrettable form of schizophrenia or the consequence of a culture that dates from another century, facts are facts. So fun should only be the happy side effect of something else above all…be free. Used in the workplace, social media offer possibilities like nothing beforme : more than creating funny spaces and times in the workplace, they allow to make fun a part of people’s work, making it at the same time a consequence, a lever,and a part of a continuous improvement logic that interest and reassure organizations.

Amongst the issues that inspire me contradictory feelings about enterprise 2.0, fun at work is not the least.

There’s a belief shared by everybody in the workplace : employees who enjoy what they do are more efficient and it has a positive impact on work atmosphre. One of the best way to make it happen is, to some extent, to make work more fun. In the same way, everybody knows the value of a good atmosphere in the workplace. Note the difference between both : in one case we talk about the nature of work, in the other the context where it takes place : some people may hate they job but love their company, colleagues and the overall context (despite it never lasts for a long time).

A part of enterprise 2.0 value proposal is to bring fun, some even saying that in such a context the intranet looks like a big party were all employees gather. I fully suscribe to this point of view but, at the same time, I’m very uncomfortable with it

- because I experienced it (and still doing), I can tell it changes the way you interact with others, it improves relationships and, even if I consider my internal social network as a business too, I prefer to connect to it when I open my computing rather than openning my mailbox (in addition to the fact it’s a more efficient tool too…).

- no organization would refuse to make their employees happier.

- there’s a lot of organizations (even a majority ?) where the concept of fun at work is not seen as being compatible with work. It means that employees are wasting their time and would be more productive if they didn’t have fun or that they are not busy enough. Anyway, in such organizations, most of employees don’t want managers to think they’re having fun (and managers don’t want their superiors to think they’re having fun too even if they’d like…all are human being and share the same DNA). Maybe it’s a pity but the fact is things are more complicated that we would like them to be.

- most companies would be ready to invest to make their employees happy. None to make them have fun at work. I’m not saying that no one understands how it matters, but it’s impossible to come with this argument alone in front of any executive to get fundings for such a project.

- to some extent, even if the “productivity” side of enterprise 2.0 is seducing, many organizations may fear its “funny side”, only for self-esteem and image reasons. So that’s an argument that has to be used very cautiously.

So…how to do ? [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 conference : a strategic agenda for 2010-2011

June 18, 2010 By 15 Comments

Before going deeper into some points I mentioned on my first post on the conference, I’d like to sum some things up about the last two days and the conclusion of the event.

The conference was, in my opinion, doing in a peaceful way, with good and useful contents but nothing really impressive. The cause may be the fast spreading of best practices and adoption methodologies (mostly thanks to the Council) that increased the number of successful projects while making them all look a little bit alike. This is quite a good thing : we can’t be deceived to see that success is becoming more and more the norm and less an excpetion. So, no spectacular new case but many interesting things from a qualitive standpoint, like MITRE or Sony that are a good evidences of the more and more bluring nature of the organization borders.

I wanted to focus on sessions about “measure and value”. The result was a mixed feeling. Many interesting and insightful things but I felt there were many hesitations : the often used “over the flow” approach needs some time to deliver operational results while a “in the flow / business process” driven one, even if more “technical” and hard to implement, may bring some measurable things faster.

Then came what is, my opinion, the major teachings of this event. We had to wait for the very last session to get it. People were ask to list the issues they would have liked to be more addressed in the conference. The result was eloquent :

- integration with business processes

- metrics

- local culture issues

In my opinion these points have been, for many reasons, overlooked too often for years, but they can’t be swept aside anymore if we want to, first, demonstrate that enterprise 2.0 is a major improvement to organizational models and not only a “nice to have” and, second, address the most reluctant and mistrustful businesses that only pay attention to rational approaches.

I’ve been writing and focusing a lot on these issues for the last twelve months what makes me say that the fact these three issues come together is not a  coincidence.

- enteprises create value through business processes, so overlooking them is the best way not to impact value creation. I don’t mean all these processes are efficient or useful and that a cleaning session is not needed. Anyway, this issue must be dealt with as a priority.

- when the goal is to improve a business process, it’s not difficult to find the right indicators since they are those that apply to the process in question. THat said, it’s obvious that new ones can also be introduced and some irrelevant one removed.

- multination companies realize that they can’t use the same adoption model in every country and have to customize it according to local cultures. Most of all, the adoption council that gathers many organizations from all around the world, alerted the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem on that. Seen from my european and french viewpoint, cultural and business process issues are tied. When it comes to address less open but sceptical and change averse cultures, involving people who fear overexposing themselves and engaging too much, the best way to bring both organizations and people to adopt new behaviors and tools is to take them by their lowest common denominator, that is reassuring and less sensitive on a human point of view. This point of entry is business processes.

In short, it’s about adding to adoption strategies (a word I’ve often found restrictive) that often focus on affect, enthusiasm and not enough on delivery, the sense and alignment that are key to any successful transformation.

These three issues are the pillars of the work that has to be done in the upcoming month in order to build comprehensive corporate strategies and this message is a strong signal for those who are starting their social media journey and only see it under an informal viewpoint, disconnected from day to day operations.

Lots of work to do. But lot of promising things for organizations too.

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My takes on the Enterprise 2.0 Forum : Enterprise 2.0 and the end of social washing

March 23, 2010 By 9 Comments

Capture d’écran 2010-01-23 à 00.12.50I’d like to take a few minutes to share with you my takes about the last  Enterprise 2.0 Forum that took place in Paris on march 17th et 18 th. First, a few words about the context.

I was looking for a professional event about enterprise 2.0 in Paris. Why do I mean by “professional” ? I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that insteat of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything. I don’t even mention the events where we gather among experts, gurus, convinced practictionners to share certainties and common places before we realize that those we’re supposed to help weren’t in the room.

I came to the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt with this idea in mind and, there, two things surprised me in a positive way. First, the format, that favors exchanges instead of one way talks (exchanges with the speaker but also among attendees) and, second, the fact that sponsors, even present around the event and the conference room were not allowed on stage to turn case studies into disguised sales speeches. So I we had the idea to bring this format to Paris, with a modest ambition regarding to the time we had : demonstrate it was possible in a local an french context and provide attendees not with discourses but with a strong added value. I think we did it and can already promise you there will be a second edition next year and than having 12 months instead of 2 to organize it will allow us to make things even better ans maybe bigger.

Last thing before delivering my takes. We usually judge this kind of event regarding to the quality of speeches (and of the buffet if you’re french). That’s not enough in the format we chose because it relies on an active participation from attendees (what implies to keep an “human size” to favor discussions). If I got many positives feedbacks, it’s also mainly because of the audience that asked the right questions and started vibrant discussions. When a conference room is crowed with people that have to het things done in their company, the debate easily reaches a higher level.

After the form, the substance. Here are my conclusions in a few points

[Read more...]

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Why prediction markets have no success in France (and maybe elsewhere…)

March 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

When I talk about enterprise 2.0 with people, they often say things about blogs, wikis, social networks etc… When I say “prediction markets” they look at we with flabbergasted eyes. I find very surprising that while it’s always mentioned as being a part of the enterprise 2.0 field on many other countries, it’s never mentioned in discussions here.

If you don’t know what it’s about, let’s start with a quick look at the definition.

That’s nothing more than giving virtual tokens to people and ask them to place bets on questions like “what product of ours will have the biggest success next year” or “what part of the IT budget will be allocated to social networks…” etc. It may involve employees or even customers. Obviously many businesses are convinced of the benefits of prediction market overseas.

Experience shows that the results are as least as reliable as those obtained with methods that need much more time and are more expensive.

So I started wondering why it’s unrecognized in France

The idea that spontaneously comes to my mind is that it’s not compliant with our culture.

First, the idea of betting, with its fun and money game connotation, may be not accepted in workplaces where pleasure, fun and work can’t go together and where a shared belief is that when something looks fun it can’t be professional or serious.

Imagine employees betting against the success of a product, the ability to deliver a project at the due date ? On the one hand these people are closer to the customer, to reality, and they are often the best to guess what will work or not. On the other hand it means they don’t believe in what very important people in the organization decided and that does not look “corporately serious”.

Some french companies pay attention to crowdsourcing, what may invalidate my point. But discussing is one thing, placing bets like in a casino is another.

More, discussions brings feelings, ideas. Prediction markets brings numbers, and numbers are serious things. So anybody should not be able to impact them.

Can you see other reasons ? Maybe you know french companies that use prediction markets and that went under my radar ? Or maybe you know other countries where it works / doesn’t work ?

Tell me…

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Is enterprise 2.0 possible without positive thinking ?

March 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’ll start with a statement that’s nothing new and won’t surprise anyone. We are all different, with our cultures, values, expectations, and even if things may look quite uniform at a local scale, the diversity of our world becomes obvious when we have to work in a globalized context.

In the same way, any idea, trend, concept, carry with it a part of the culture of those who created it. May we talk about jazz, gastronomy, democracy, basketball…they crossed the borders with their creator’s values and, as time went by, managed to become implanted in many countries by embedding a part of the local culture, being revisited by locals to become acceptable according to their own identity.

One of the charasterics of enterprise 2.0 is that it’ s tinged with positive thinking, something that’s very unfamiliar to us and that we can’t really understand before having many interactions with foreign people (even if we’re sometimes made aware of it at business schools…but nothing is like real experience).

Without going too deep into details, let’s say that that a culture that promotes certain values, where people always things they could improve things, make tomorrow better than today, where work and being successful at work are seen as means to improve one’s personal life, carries genes that are not neutral at all. It makes it natural and easy for people to explore new things, to engage with others and that becomes very interesting when a new field has to be explored, most of all with the topics that are ours.

This is clearly explained here:

Successful people act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Successful people often find themselves in situations where risk and uncertainty is hanging over them and if they were to take on a negative mindset then failure would rear its ugly head. Instead high achievers embrace risk and uncertainty in difficult situations and keep a positive outlook. Nine times out of 10 usually end up with the results that they had in mind all along.

Positive attitude is extremely important, as it encourages individuals to approach each day, and each problem, with a bright outlook. In a team environment, a positive attitude encourages a team to work together with individual styles and personalities. Positive attitude is not only about choosing to have a good outlook through good times and bad, but also about learning to love what you do. I have observed that outstanding business people are successful because they deeply love their work.

The french edition of wikipedia tells us that :

• it’s supported by moral qualities such as love and work, courage, compassion, résilence, creativity, curiosity, integrity, knowledge of oneself, moderation, self control, wisdom.

• collective value and ideals are : justice, responsibility, public-spiritedness, parenthood, support, professional ethic, team spirit at work, leadership, project and tolerance.

I can’t prevent myself from thinking that, not only the behavioral logics of enterprise 2.0 can be seen there, but also that everything that deals with deployment, adoption, often leverage these values.

I can’t prevent myself either to notice that, to be direct, our culture is quite the opposite. Not better, not worse, but different. Strict separation between private and work life, work seen as a constraint and not as something that helps self-fullfillment, mistrust toward enterprises and any attempt to “swallow” the individual, to lock him up into the group. I’m exaggerating on purpose but things are very close to that….

Once we acknowledge that, what conclusion should be drawn ?

[Read more...]

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New report on the state of enterprise 2.0

March 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Cécile Demailly had the kindness to send me the report she made about the state of enterprise 2.0, a report than can be purchased here. It relies on the responses of people from 50 large organizations, often international, and the fact 48% respondants are french gives a very interesting picture of the double context (local culture in a global organization) that makes the matter unique and unsuited to generalization.

I won’t go further into the details and conclusions to preserve the interest of the document, but I’d like to share some thoughts all the same.

- numbers are consistent with my own experience, what is a good start.

- the report also tackles some issues not everyone is comfortable with. In particular : ROI, doubtful leadership, the gap between what organizations expect and what makes sense for employees. Conclusion are objective without any kind of bias.

- some new surprising angles that are very interesting : comparing adoption in B2C vs B2C contexts for instance.

- it’s consistent with the way I see things, most of all on from the employee’s perspective. I have a few posts in preparation about that and that’s true that, at least in our local context, autonomy, even when offered, does not spread through good intentions. On the contrary, its beneficiaries ask for a clear definition, a defined framework, sense.

- an interesting maturity analysis and, here again, a relevant focus on employees, on the “does it make sense, what are my challenges, my needs” instead of the “how to make them adopt this thing”. This reminds us, once again, than trying to make people happy despite of them and fufill our own dreams through them is neither efficient nor desirable.

There are also some points I’d to go deeply into. I’ve a meeting with Cécile in the next days and it will be the perfect occasion.

Enjoy your reading !

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Networking and collaboration : is enterprise a land of trust or distrust ?

February 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I recently wrote that it what obvious to me that for many people some activities and behaviors had to remain in their private sphere and, that social networking and everything that comes with is not a part of what they naturally want to transpose in the workplace. I also temperated my words saying that, of course, generation and local culture factors had to be taken into account. But, according to the last discussions I had with people from all around the world, the gap between some european countries and the anglo-saxon world is more than a supposition.

Luck made me come across a Microsoft survey[fr] since then. What does it say ?

The survey shows that the French are attached to preserving a clear boundary between their personal and professionallives : with 86% respondants, French are,by far those who want to differenciate their online profile from their professional one. 61% do it systematically.

The whole survey is available  here en english.

The survey also tells us, what may seem paradoxical, that the French are those who think the less than their online activities will affect their professional lives. Why ?

France is the outlier. French respondents reported being less concerned than other groups, and study findings suggest two key reasons for this. First, the data suggests that the French do not rely as heavily on online information to make either social or professional judgments about others. Second, data shows that the French are considerably more proactive in monitoring and managing their reputations and have, therefore, less to be concerned about.

In short, we care so much about the informations that may exist about us that we are sure (and maybe we’re wrong) that nothing that is left online can be harmful to us.

Two obvious conclusions have to be made ad this point :

• Strict separation bewteen personal and professional lives. Question : does it only concern informations or the related behaviors too ?

• We do our possible that the informations that can be found online about us would not help anyone to judge us. Question : do we transpose this behavior in the workplace ?

[Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and personal constraints

February 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Like it or not, the smallest unit of work is the individual task. People’s workday is made of achieving tasks, and even in the context of group or collaborative work. A group only delivers the sum of the tasks achieved by its members. That’s why coordination matters. We can even say that, how ironic, knowledge work makes individual tasks even more important : if it’s possible to achieve a physical task through a joint effort, thinking jointly is impssible. We think individually and group work implies increased interactions to stay coordinated and consistent. Ten people can push a car together but they can’t think as one to solve a problem : that’s why it’s important to exchange to share task statuses, update, get coordinated.

Now, let’s guess how an individual does when they have a task to achieve.

If he can do it by himself, it’s alright. And what if he can’t ? He reports to his team to ask for help and sometimes the problem solving is assigned to the group. What implies a new individual task for members even if the numerous interactions makes it look like a collectivce task. By group I mean a formalized set of people that have been assigned an objective, would it be a department or a project team. This situation looks very usual but some “2.0″ practices may improve things as it may help to deal with a lot of informal signals aiming at making everyone’s work status more visible, avoiding an heavy,time consuming and poorly responsive coordination. But what happens when the group reaches a dead-end ?

In a traditional system, the group would be in big trouble : the solution to avoid being block would be to throw a bottle into the sea. But how to find the right people out the human structure one is used to work into ? At this point, a 2.0 approach becomes very valuable : people rely on their network, on communities where discussions on this specific topic take place. If a similar problem has already been solved, it’s ok. If not, it’s possible to find the right people/communities and submit the problem. People are easy to find because their social activity enrich their profile…

A first conclusion has to be made at this point : people start from themselves, then go to formal groups they’re part of and to networks and communities. They start with an individual work, then a coordinated work in a defined geoup and, at the end, unstructed  interactions within fuzzy-boundaries groups. Things happen in this order and in not other. That’s nothing but logic : from the nearer to the most distant, from the known to the unknown, from the certain to the uncertain.

This is a very “in the zflow” approach. Here, the 2.0 dimension favors visibility, micro-coordination and quick problem solving. In the other hand, people don’t have to expose themselves, to do more than their jon, to engage more. The group efficiency is improved and people can even go and find answers out of it. This is an organization oriented approach : social practices are built around a process or a workflow to increase their bandwith.

But it also need another factor : to push the logic to its end, vibrant and relevant communities are needed, making it possible for people to swith in a network mode when the group reaches its limits. This is a more “social” approach. This communities are made of people who naturally share their experiences, their thoughts on a given subject, to go one step beyond their job description and their assignments, to put a little bit of their soul into their work. In this casen people expose themselves more because they share more than knowledge : they give opinions, propose things. This is clearly about “over the flow” activities, with a participation depending on people goodwill. This is what we can call pure 2.0 : conversations, communities that form and die, soft collaboration, informal, unstructured, unpredictable, with a hudge human component because it relies on people’s will to share, learn, connect to people they would never have met otherwise. This is nearly often what people think about when thinking about enterprise 2.0.

This brings things back to the distinction I already made a few months ago.

Now it’s time to go to the point.

[Read more...]

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Are in-the-flow activities a cure against cultural barriers ?

January 7, 2010 By 1 Comment

The importance of culture on the success of enterprise 2.0 projects is now acknoledged by everybody. The issue was widely discussed at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Franfort where I took part in a panel about it. Even apart from this specific session, culture was the hot topic in many discussions during the breaks and the lunches what proves that beyond the agenda of the conference this subject was naturally coming to the surface.

Besides that, let me make a short aside about that. I appreciated a lot to see some our overseas counterpart showing interest about this point. Even if Dion Hinchliffe can often be seen in events taking place in Europe, the attendance of Gil Yehuda who wanted to “see by himself how things were going here and have a better understanding of our context” (if I remember well his words) was a really good news. I don’t even mention those who would have liked to be there but couldn’t due to the closeness to the San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 Conference. In short, on the heels of all the discussions on  blogs or on twitter, both sides of the Ocean are beginning to get  closer, listen to one another and the idea that there is not one adoption model that is supposed to work everywhere emerges. So any international project has to take all local issues into account. In my opinion, discussions and cooperations between Europe and the US will be a major trend in 2010…

This allowed Gil to write two insightful notes (here et here) about his discovery of the german market.

Coming back to the conference’s discussions, it was very easy for each of us to find many example of cases where cultural issues impacted a project. Sometimes it was local culture (country or even region), sometimes corporate culture, or even language issues that are often cleared with the back the hand (“How course, all our employees are fluent in english and many other languages…”) and often come back as a boomerang. I also learned with interest by people from CSC that beyond the strict adoption, depending on countries, people do not necessarily use the same functionalities or don’t use them the same way.

In the “Culture hurts” series, competing to find the most painful experience was not hard at all. But, as conclusion was coming up, I felt that something was missing. Culture is obviously a key issue in many projects but…many projects went well without any problems due to cultural issues. Sometimes it was because culture has been properly addressed, but some other times it was because culture forgot to bother us. And, in my opinion, it was not always a matter of luck.

So I tried to quickly gather the common denominator of all theses projects (of course its only reflects my own experience). And the conclusion was obvious : most of times, the projects that successfully neutralized the cultural issues were those that favored the “in the flow ” dimension rather than the “over the flow” one.

This is also the difference between community management and team management : the first needs feeling like participating, conviction, and cultures plays a big part to make people decide whether to get involved or not, the second only needs people to follow the “official way of doing things” and, even if the cultural dimension does not disappear, it’s less impacting because people’s free will does not have much room.

I also found a corroborating voice in Andrew McAfee’s book (Enterprise 2.0) that also concludes that over the flow activities may not lead to a massive and uniform participation, contrary to in-the-flow activities.

So I let you draw you own conclusions from your own experience (and comments are welcome) but it seems that it’s something that as to be taken into account when designing an enterprise 2.0 project in a multicultural context. Maybe we can also consider that the best way to reassure people and make them feel more comfortable with the “over the flow” is to start with “in the flow” that is more worklow oriented but less involving.

This is one more argument in favor of in-the-flow activities which, more than properly addressing the sense and alignent issues also allow to lower the cultural risk.

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