We don’t realize enough the progress that has been made over the last 20 years in terms of collaborative tools, with a clear acceleration over the last 10 years.
Users will always complain about the limitations of this or that collaborative suite deployed in their company, and rightly so, but if we try to be objective it becomes difficult to reproach them for many things from a functional point of view.
Formal or informal collaboration. Structured or emergent, adhoc. Real-time or not. Conversational, documentary or process-based…. All the limits we knew in the 2000s have gradually fallen away , and today there’s a channel for every need, and a granularity and integration between tools that has nothing to do with the behemoths of the time that were supposed to do everything and did everything badly.
We’ve come a long way
A short while ago, looking back, I realized just how far we’ve come in terms of offering. It’s an opportunity to think back, almost with a touch of nostalgia, to a time when :
– Outside the big portals and email, nothing was possible, and Sharepoint was sold to us as a social network.
– The cloud was unthinkable and our storage space was limited by our hard disk.
– Mobile? What are you talking about?
– We could collaborate remotely, but…on site. Remote work? Don’t even think about it!
– Any solution bringing a new use was viewed with suspicion or condescension.
– User Generated Content in the business? Only experts (validated as such) had the right to speak, and no message could circulate on a large scale unless it came from the Communications Department.
Go back even further. An email for employees? But not for all, otherwise they’ll be writing to each other, or even to other people, without respecting the hierarchical line.
Internet access? What for?
In the late 2000s, I remember a trainee who was recruited to look after the social networks of a large business, but because she wasn’t high enough in the hierarchy she wasn’t allowed access to Twitter and Facebook. Her manager ended up installing a box in her office, a common practice at the time. Which goes to show that excessive security creates more loopholes than it closes.
In short, the combination of uses and tools has made phenomenal progress, and our tendency to look only at the present and the future should not make us forget how far we’ve come.
As someone who was at the forefront of these battles at the time, you might think that it’s with a certain satisfaction that I observe the current situation. Well, yes…but no.
And while back then it was easy for me to blame the tools (but not only them) for the lack of emergence of new practices, today that excuse doesn’t hold water. Even so, I’m sometimes dismayed by what I see.
Email remains the workstation’s center of gravity
If we’ve multiplied alternative channels, it’s been to relieve the pressure on email: chat, business social networks. Have we succeeded?
Somewhat, but not really. The mass of email in circulation continues to grow. Why is this?
Firstly, because the adoption of enterprise social networks is still in its infancy, partly due to the tools used, their governance, and the way people work and manage. Instant messaging has gained ground in terms of quantity, but not necessarily in terms of quality.
Secondly, contrary to popular belief, use cases may be born bottom-up, but they are perpetuated top-down. If a manager or director keeps up bad old habits, everyone below him or her will do the same, because there’s nothing worse than choosing your mode of communication according to the person you’re talking to.
Finally, because even if we adopt good practices, the tools that are supposed to unclog email send us…email notifications.
There’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to notifications: on the tools’ side in terms of experience, and on the user’s side, who is subjected to the emails generated and does little to parameterize them, even when this is possible.
The wrong exchanges in the wrong pipes
I often say that for a given message, the tool to use depends on various factors: the number of recipients, the urgency, the complexity of the message.
An email exchange with just a title and one line is called a chat.
A 15-paragraph chat message is called an email, a social network post or an intranet publication.
Chat and email are not document-sharing tools, but let’s face it, Teams plays its role as a collaborative hub to perfection, bridging the gap between the tools in the Microsoft suite.
Nor are they to-do list managers: there are tools for that.
When there are 10 or more people copying an email and everyone starts replying and replying to replies, it’s urgent to put an end to the exchange and organize a meeting or even call someone directly.
By the way, some people still send a document as an attachment rather than a link to it.
A mailing list in 2024?
There’s another subject that horrifies me: mailing lists. I’m not saying that they’re not useful, but that they’re intended for certain specific uses.
Informing a whole group of people? Well, there’s an intranet for that, isn’t it? And it’s often a triple whammy: message on the intranet, mailing list and notification of the message on the intranet.
But there’s worse: the famous “bottles in the sea”! You know one of the very reasons why business social networks like Yammer were created.
The principle is well known: you’re looking for an answer to a question, and you send a message to as many people as possible , hoping that one of them will have the answer. The mailing list, in this context, helps to water a little less broadly by targeting better.
The limits are also well known: the person who can help is often where you least expect it! Not among the list’s recipients.
For a business, this can mean thousands or even tens of thousands of e-mails sent every day, read or unread, stored (we’ll see the importance of storage later) and rarely solving the original problem.
Worse still, some people even reply not to the sender of the message, but to the whole list.
One person recently confided in me that he receives more than a dozen of these messages every day, plus replies “to all”, most often on subjects that don’t concern him and with questions he doesn’t even understand.
So he did what anyone would do in his place: made a rule so that these messages landed in a specific folder and no longer polluted his inbox. As a result, if one day a request really concerns him, he won’t see it.
Well-used, with the right use case and appropriate governance, there are tools for this.
The meeting scourge continues to grow
I’ve always considered the meeting as a collaboration tool, even if it wasn’t computerized. Today it is.
A legacy of the pandemic for some, an old habit for others, the meeting is less and less a room (or not just a room) and more and more often people behind a screen. And that changes everything.
Organizing a meeting is just a click away! So simple.
So we’re doing more and more of them, planned or unplanned, as the need arises.
But one thing hasn’t changed: we’re doing more of them, but we’re still doing them just as badly. This is a constant with IT in the workplace: it allows us to do more and faster, but rarely better (and it’s not a problem of the tools).
Impact on mental workload, on the time available to really do one’s job on the side: the ripple effect of the power of the tools on their users, who are subjected to them, cannot be overlooked.
And remote meetings are anything but neutral from an environmental point of view. Which brings us to the next point.
No sustainable IT use
I was referring above to a time when our storage capacity was limited to our hard drive or even a few shared drives, and the cloud was out of the question.
How things have changed since then. Is this a good thing? In terms of practicality, certainly, but we’ve created a new problem.
We live with the impression that storage space is infinite ! So what? At a time when it seems that businesses and employees are just as passionate about the environmental emergency, this is a catastrophe. I was recently re-reading a study by Lecko in 2023.
1°) Today, emissions linked to our computer use have overtaken those of air travel, and will double in the next few years.
2°) An e-mail emits CO2 when it is sent, but above all when it is stored.
3°) In the office, 66% of our emissions come from OneDrive.
4°) On the panel studied by Lecko, emissions linked to our use of IT at work have increased by 62% in two years, and only 15% of employees have reduced theirs.
5°) 37% have no intention of improving their uses to be more environmentally responsible.
In business, the climate emergency is everywhere, but especially not in IT and its uses. Banning travel is one thing, sorting through waste is another, but better working and better use (or even design) of tools is out of the question.
At some point, we’re going to have to get to grips with the real issues, which could have a major impact on the way we work.
– Should the camera always be on during meetings?
– What is the reasonable capacity of an email inbox, and when should it be cleaned or even emptied (I say emptied, not archived)?
– How should we govern our online storage spaces, both shared and individual? What should be kept and deleted, and when?
– How many versions of a document should be stored?
– By the way, where are the datacenters and what electricity do they use? How are they cooled? In the Netherlands, for example, the datacenter of one of the market’s major players consumes….84 million liters of drinking water a year!
Bottom line: we’ve got everything we need to do well, but…
Today, we are equipped with powerful tools that enable us to work better individually and collectively. But to date, all we’ve done is generate more and more information, and circulate it faster and in greater quantities, with a major impact on our mental and cognitive workload, and without generating any gains in performance and productivity.
It’s no longer a question of tools, but of how we use them, collectively and individually. While “advanced uses” may have progressed in terms of quantity, we’re still a long way from using the full potential of these tools to work better and smarter. I’d even say we’ve regressed.
But the point doesn’t stop there: in order to equip ourselves with these (currently untapped) capacities for better work, we have equipped ourselves with capacities to pollute more, a pollution that goes hand in hand with the increase in quantity of our digital uses at work, and which could only be compensated for by better quality uses. But this is not happening.
Technology has made us powerful, but we’re not doing anything good with it.
Image : information overload by StockEU via Shutterstock
