Jacob Morgan's Blog, page 40

Sharing is Caring

In the past few weeks I explored a few themes or concepts which I believe are heavily impacting the future of work.  The first was, Customized Work, the second was Connect to Work, and today I want to talk about Sharing is Caring.  I’m sure we all heard the phrase when we were younger and in fact many of us have used this phrase at some point in our lives.  It may be a bit childish in nature since it was mainly used when someone had something that we wanted and we would jokingly say, “sharing is caring.”  But still, the concept behind it makes a lot of sense in the context of the future of work.

Jeremiah Owyang recently released a report on the Collaborative Economy which explores this very concept in much more detail but it mainly focuses on sharing goods or products and focuses a bit more on consumers instead of on organizations and employees.  However, this concept is very relevant to companies around the world but not as it pertains to good or products.  Instead what is more valuable is the sharing of information internally.

Companies around the world are deploying collaboration platforms for this very reason.  They are starting to understand the value in sharing information across the enterprise and connecting people.  The traditional model of work saw only a few people at the “top” in control of all of the information, these were the same people that made all the decisions.  Now, information is being opened up instead of closed off, the hierarchy is being flattened and communication is becoming horizontal and vertical.  This is a big change in the traditional model of a company and it’s something that is going to take some adjustment.  But I strongly believe that the successful organizations out there are going to be the ones that can get their employees to share across the enterprise.  But share what?  Ah, good question!  Everything!

Sharing isn’t just about providing information when someone asks for it’s also about proactive sharing which means sharing your thoughts, ideas, and what you might be working on without having been asked to do so; this is a very foreign concept to most employees.  This type of sharing allows other employees to join you in helping come up with solutions for problems or identifying potential opportunities.  Of course, re-active sharing is also crucial, that is, responding to someone when they ask you to share something.  Sadly our organizations have been acting like school bullies over the past ten, twenty, fifty, and one hundred years.  We didn’t share and we didn’t care.  Not only that but we also didn’t have the capabilities to share with everyone in the schoolyard, now things are different.

As I’ve stated many times before our organizations today are taking their cues from what is happening in the consumer web where we can easily find people and information, build communities, collaborate, share, and create information at will.

For the future of work sharing is more than caring, it’s survival.

New Forbes Column on The Future of Work and a Month of Travel

For over the past month or so I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling to LA, Munich, the Republic of Georgia, and Milan.  My family is actually originally from Georgia so I went back there with my mom, grandmother, and now fiancee to see how they used to live.  Nobody from my family has been back in 35 years so it was quite an interesting trip.  With the exception of Milan where I keynoted the Social Business Forum, the majority of the trip was a vacation.  Needless to say this made it a bit hard to post content here but I’m finally back home!

There are a few exciting things happening.  First, as the title of the post suggests, I now have my own regular column on Forbes where I will be writing about the future of work.  In fact, my first post is already live on the Five Trends Shaping the Future of Work is already live.    I should be contributing there once a week so make sure to follow my column there.  The second big thing that is going to be happening is a complete redesign and change of this site.  I’ll have more on that later but basically this entire site is going to become much more focused on the future of work with new branding, a new layout and theme, and a much more user friendly design.  I’m very excited about this and have been working with our team on this for the past month or so.  I’ll still be the regular contributor so nothing will change there.

So that’s it.  I went traveling but am now back.  I have a Forbes column which I’m very excited about and this site will look completely different in the next few weeks so stay tuned!

It feels good to be back.

 

 

 

How Open is Too Open?

Since May 26th I’ve been traveling; first to Munich, then to Tbilisi (in Georgia), and then to Milan where I will be keynoting a conference on the future of work mid June.  Thus far it’s been an exciting trip.  My family is actually from Tbilisi and hasn’t been back in almost 40 years so my grandmother, mother, and now fiancee (who I proposed to in Tbilisi) traveled there to see where they grew up and what has changed.  Georgia is a beautiful place but there is a of corruption and political instability which leads to a high unemployment rate and poverty level.  One of the things that the current president of Georgia did was to create a glass administration building so people could see what goes on at the government level.  It’s not purely transparent from the outside but I’m told that once you go into the building it’s easy to see into offices and rooms throughout the building.  That got me thinking, how open is too open?

We talk about openness, transparency, and sharing, but how far would we be willing to go with it?  Would you feel comfortable working in an all glass building where people can see everything you do and every move you make?  I do believe that organizations need to be much more open and transparent but there’s a balance that needs to be struck here.  There’s a big difference between showing everything to everyone vs making things open to people should they want to see it.  To use an analogy it’s the difference between constructing a glass building vs constructing a regular building that just doesn’t have locked doors.

Can everything always be open to everyone?  I’m talking about product development, financial statements, investor meetings, etc?  I’m not too sure actually; especially at the enterprise level.  It might be a bit idealistic to expect that a company like Apple, Disney, or GE will just open everything up to everyone internally.  This is the key difference between building a present day company from the ground up based on the idea of openness and transparency vs trying to make an existing enterprise more open and transparent.  I’ll explore this more in an upcoming post.

Being open and transparent is a scary yet interesting thing but as with everything else there needs to be a balance.  In a more corrupt country like Georgia, extreme measures are taken to force transparency but this approach would do more harm than good in many other parts of the world.

But, what is the purpose of being open and transparent to begin with?

This topic alone can easily take up several blog posts but simply put the purpose is to:

Keep everyone on the same page
Build trust and foster better relationships
Allow employees (and customers) to contribute ideas and value where they see the opportunity to do so

If the strategy and approach that your organization is taking isn’t doing these things you may be doing more harm than good.

So, let me ask you.  How open is too open?

 

 

Structuring and Building Enterprise Collaboration Teams

In developing enterprise collaboration teams it is common to find that some employees are more involved than others.  David Straus developed a concept called “rings of involvement” that applies to how involved relevant stakeholders are in collaboration.  That concept inspired the chart shown below and I talk about it in much greater depth in my book, The Collaborative Organization.

In looking at how emergent collaboration platforms and strategies get implemented in an organization, it’s helpful to think of several degrees of involvement, as shown in this figure:

 

Implementers

This is the core team that essentially works on rolling things out.  Implementers are the day-to-day employees who do everything from selecting the vendors to developing adoption strategies.  The implementers are usually full-time employees devoted 100 percent to making sure the effort is successful.  They can be thought of as the construction workers responsible for building the organization’s emergent collaborative house.

Enablers

This is an extension of the core team but is not as involved.  The extended team might work on a subset of the core project such as trying to figure who the evangelists within the organization might be or trying to predict certain risks.  Ultimately, the extended team isn’t a part of the big-picture strategic initiative but assists the implementers in making sure the big picture fits together.  The extended team is akin to a right-hand man.  The enablers effectively help make the implementers’ job possible.

Strategists

The strategists work closely with the implementers and the extended team as they help develop the big picture.  The strategists can be thought of as the architects who design the blueprints for the implementers and the extended team.  Often there is crossover from the implementers and the extended team to the strategist role.  All these categories are permeable.  Strategists may not do the actual implementation.

Feedback Providers

These employees attend meetings and receive all the information they need to provide feedback and/or insight to assist in the project.  Feedback providers don’t actually have a hand in the roll-out or strategic decision making but contribute ideas, recommendations, and insights when and where needed.  These employees are great for bouncing ideas off of.

Update Seekers and Advisors

This group of employees just wants to know what’s going on with the initiative.  The group can be large or small, and typically it receives updates via alerts, e-mails, newsletters, or perhaps briefings.  Sometimes certain executives like to be the update seekers; they want to get enough information to know what’s going on and that things are going well.  Keep in mind that we are describing nothing more than involvement.  This doesn’t have anything to with seniority, the size of a group, or importance.  It’s possible that someone senior will be part of the implementing group and an entry-level employee will be part of the update seekers group.

How involved employees are can depend on all sorts of things, such as how much interest they have in the project and whether they have the time to contribute.   Also, these types of involvement groups are not mutually exclusive or permanent.  Employees can be a part of more than one group and can also move between groups; for example, an employee who may start getting updates and information about the project and then realize this is something he or she wants to be part of.  This isn’t meant to be a rigid bucket of employees; it’s merely an overview of how employees are typically involved.  It is something you can easily adapt and modify so that it fits your organization.  Try to identify where and your team fit in this framework.

Connect to Work

Last week I wrote about one of the key themes that I believe are going to make up the future work, I encourage you to read that post titled: The Future of Work is About Customized Work.  There are several of these themes that I’m going to be exploring in the near future and the next one is “Connect to Work.”  The traditional view of working  sees an employee waking up around 6:30 am, having their morning breakfast and then commuting anywhere from  30 mins to over 1.5 hours to get to work.  The employee gets to their office around 8 or 9 am and usually leaves around 6 pm.  This is what it used to mean to “work” or better yet “to GO TO work.”

What does it mean to connect to work?

The notion of having to go to work is dying, in fact for some it’s already dead.  Work doesn’t have to be done at an office anymore.  The only thing that most of us need is an internet connection that allows us to connect to the people and information we need to get our jobs done.  This is what it means to “connect to work.”  The many collaborative platforms out there are making this possible and what is particularly fascinating is the transition towards mobile work!  We can now access virtually all of the same people, files, conversations, tasks, and other types of information on our mobile devices that we can on our computers.  The power of these mobile devices that we carry around in our pockets is, for lack of a better word, awesome and it’s enabling and empowering a new type of employee, the future employee.

Connecting to work means that you can have access to everything and anything you need whether you are at a cafe, in an airplane, in a cab, or sitting somewhere on the beach.  You don’t have to go to work, work now comes to you.

This shift is forcing organizations to rethink some of the core assumptions that were made during the creation of these institutions, for example, do we now need offices or a central headquarters for our company?

I’m seeing more and more organizations implementing flexible work policies and our recent survey on the future of work (which you can still take and share!) is already revealing some very telling results on this which I will be sharing soon.  The giant elephant in the room is that we (including mangers and executives) all know that we have the ability and the capacity to enable this type of work to happen and we all inherently know that it is beneficial to do so.  It’s a virtually palpable shift that we can’t deny when looking at the future of work.

I’ll be exploring this theme in much more detail in the future but for now I just wanted to introduce it and I’m sure many of you are already quite aware of it.

The future of work is “connecting to work.”

 

The Future of Work is Customized Work

The typical career path for an employee starts in an entry level position in a particular department wherein the employee needs to then ascend the corporate ladder and move up the proverbial food chain to a more senior level role.  Most of the time the employee ends up stuck in a particular department or a particular role but occasionally some horizontal pivots are possible.  This is a type of pre-determined work because essentially the career path of the employee is set out for them once they join the company.  If they get hired in the marketing department then they will typically stay in that area.  It’s akin to set-up marriages which used to be common many years ago in some countries.  Before the child was even old enough to know what marriage was they were already paired up with someone.  Thankfully in most parts of the world this custom is now no longer being practiced but we run our companies in much the same fashion.  This is how it has been for many years inside of organizations and it’s starting to change.  The future of work is about customized work.

What is customized work?

Customized work is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s the ability of an individual employee to shape their career path within an organization and allows them to navigate to the roles they are best at and most passionate about.  Employees no longer need to focus on ascending the corporate ladder, they are now building their corporate ladder.

There are two things making this possible within organizations.  The first is technology in the form of collaboration platforms that allow employees to share their ideas and passions while becoming leaders in areas of their choosing.  The second is the changing behaviors we are starting to see in management around following from the front.  We still have a long way to go before this notion of customized work becomes pervasive within organizations but we are certainly moving towards that direction.

We are all still collectively learning what this is going to look like and how exactly it’s going to take shape but it’s a fascinating journey for organizations to be embarking upon and I’ll be doing my best to explore much more around the future of work and collaboration.  Stay tuned as I’ll be exploring several key themes around this!

Aligning on Purpose

One of the things we can’t neglect when thinking about the future of work is for organizations to align on a sense of purpose.  Many organizations who are investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies to a good job of messaging and conveying value but where many fall short is on being able to align the organization as a whole on a sense of purpose.  Atos Origin does a good example of this but publicly conveying their goal of becoming a zero email company by the end of 2014.  Another company that does a great job of this is  TELUS which set out an aggressive goal to have 30% of their almost 40,000 workers work full-time from home by 2015.  These are organizations who are truly planning and seeking to impact the future of work.

So how does an organization go about aligning on a sense of purpose?

At a very high level there are a few things that need to be done:

Set out an ambitious goal that is going to significantly impact what it means to work at your company.  This goal needs to be something that all employees can relate to and easily understand.
Convey this goal (or sense of purpose) to the company at large, and if possible communicate this with the general public as well.
Make sure this goal is consistently being reinforced within the organization
Create public updates and announcements on the progress of the organization as it moves towards this goal, Atos does this quite well with their “zero-email” blog along with public appearances, interviews, and events that they host.  This makes sure that everyone inside and outside of the company knows what the big picture is.

These four things should be the foundation of helping your organization align on a sense of purpose around the future of work.  The investments that are made in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies are all being driven by this sense of purpose that everyone at the organization shares.  It’s the driving force behind change at your company.

Before doing anything else, make sure your entire organization can align on a sense of purpose around the future of work.

Enterprise Collaboration Technology Deployment Scenarios

I’m seeing a few trends around how organizations are deploying enterprise collaboration platforms.  Typically one of four paths are taken which are: a unified solution, multiple solutions (not connected), an aggregator solution, or multiple solutions which are integrated together.  These are explained in more detail in the table below.

 What is itProsConsWhen it occurs




Unified solutionSingle platform across the entepriseIn most companies this is the ideal scenario. All of the employees will wok across a single platform which acts as the single source of truth for information. All employees have access to this central "collaborative operating system for the enterprise."Not all of the business units or departments are going to derive the same value from a single platform. Oftentimes a specific unit will know of another platform that better fits their needs or will want some customization that is not available, this can hurt adoption. The larger the company the harder it is to get everyone using a single collaboration platform. It's challenging for the organization as a whole to keep everyone happy and with such a low barrier to entry any business unit can beak off and deploy something else without needing the backing from corporate.When commitment exists across the enterprise and the necessary resources are in place for customization and integration. Integration of employee feedback and ideas as well as feature updates may be required regularly. The organization needs to have a plan in place for how to deal with rogue/side deployments that may arise. Somewhat frequent occurrence.


Multiple solutions (not connected)Multiple platforms acoss the enterpriseThis approach gives every department or business unit the ability to deploy something that best meets their needs. Each department essentially owns their own deployment and make the changes and customizations that are most relevant to them.With multiple platforms deployed across the enterprise larger silos can be created. Information and activity doesn't pass from one system to the other so complete organizational collaboration is still not possible. Oftentimes employees will work in one platform but may need access to someone or something in another platform that they can't get into.Typically this is seen when corporate level support is minimal or takes too long. In this situation business unit leaders take things into their own hands and deploy solutions which make sense for their respective business units. Seen frequently but is not something I would recommend.


Aggregator solutionsMultiple platforms acoss the enterprise, with a central aggregator platformThe ability to use multiple platforms is still an option but now the activity can be aggregated into a central environment that anyone and everyone can access. This approach is a bit of a combination of having a unified and multiple solution. Everyone can use what makes the most sense for them.These types of solutions don't really exist. Platforms do allow for integration into other systems but oftentimes this integration results in information being duplicated in mutliple places. Integration and aggregation is not the same thing and while many vendors can integrate well there is still a big gap around being able to bring together multiple collaboration environments (or several instances of the same platform) into one area. Organizations seeking to go down this path become a bit of a product company as they need to develop customized solutions to allow this to happen.If an organization has already been using multiple systems but wants to get the organization on the same page then this method can be used. The business units still use their own independent platforms but the activity and data is aggregated into a central platform that everyone can access. I haven't seen this happen much but am aware of some organizations who are attempting this.


Integration solutions (multiple solutions, connected)Multiple platforms across the enterprise that are integrated together but there is no aggregator.The ability to use multiple platforms is still an option but now the platforms can "speak" to each other and pull/push information from one to the other. There isn't a central platform which aggregates information.This approach typically doesn't work (or is difficult to make wok) in situations where an organization is using multiple instances of the same platorm in addition to other plaforms. The same content may also be present in more than one place as oftentimes the platforms simply "sync" together. Upgrades also become a challenge as complex integration's can make things difficult.This is perhaps the most common scenario and happens in many organizations where multiple platforms are being used and those platforms needs to "speak" to each other. I see this more often in larger enterprises. Oftentimes there isn't a central platform, instead each business unit uses what they want but the multiple platforms allow for communication and collaboration across them.

There is no perfect approach and as I mentioned I’ve seen all of these methods attempted.  The reality today is these deployments are not perfect and organizations do need to make some tough choices around how they want to approach these technology deployments.  This goes hand in hand with understanding the four types of enterprise collaboration deployments.  The best solution for your organization depends on where you see this initiative going in the long run and the kind of support you are willing to give it.

Hopefully this will provide some guidance or at least start some discussions around what your organization should be doing.

 

The Gap Between the Consumer Web and the Enterprise

Much of what we are seeing in the enterprise is being fueled by the consumer web.  For example if there would have been no Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, chances are there would be no Jive, Yammer, Chatter, or any other enterprise collaboration platform.  The behaviors we exhibit on social media channels are also making their way into the enterprise.  For example we can easily use social media to: create communities, easily find people or information, share our ideas and insights, ask for help or get advice, create and share content, and get access to people and information anytime, anywhere, and on an device (among other things).  The same cannot be said for many enterprises around the world.  In fact there is a large gap between the consumer web and the enterprise (which is trying to catch up!).

The image below looks at some of the different characteristics of the consumer web and the enterprise and the gap that exists between the two.

The next couple years are going to be very interesting as organizations start to invest more resources into enterprise collaboration and future of work initiatives.  It’s clear that business leaders around the world are understanding that the way we work is evolving and that they need to adapt.  It’s still early in the game and we still have a long way to go in the innovation adoption life-cycle but we are moving in the right direction.

The gap above isn’t one that can’t be bridged nor does it need to be 100% on par with what is happening in the consumer web but our organizations can’t be THAT far behind (and thankfully some aren’t).  What I’m finding is that the first step is always the hardest, in other words committing to change and moving forward with that commitment.  As I always say, you can’t learn how to swim by watching Youtube videos, eventually you are going to have to get in the pool and when you do, you will find that you learn and adapt much quicker.

Here’s to closing the gap and learning how to swim.

 

 

The Future of Work is NOT About Replacing Sharepoint and Email

Some still believe that the whole point of investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies is simply to replace existing systems that organizations are currently using such as Sharepoint and/or email.  Let me be clear that it is about far more than that.  At the core; we are talking about the future of work.  Technology is inevitably a part of that but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

For as long as organizations have existed there has been a set of unwritten conventions that we have all followed.  Some of them are that employees came into the office at 9 and worked until 5, managers made all the decisions and those who brought in the most money got promoted, work was done on a company assigned computer, the communication was handled through email or some legacy intranet system, fear or getting a paycheck was the primary motivator to work, employees stuck to their own departments, and a sense of palpable hierarchy misted through the office.  In short, work was not pleasant.  As I’ve repeated many times, some of the dictionary synonyms for “employee” are: slave, cog, servant.  Synonyms for “work” include drudgery and daily grind.  And synonyms for “manager” include: slave-driver and zookeeper.

Replacing Sharepoint and email is not going to change the fact that our organizations were built from the ground up with these types of stereotypes firmly in place.

What we are talking about is an evolution of work, or perhaps a revolution of work.  We are challenging the very ideas of what it means to “work” and this goes far beyond technology.  We are questioning and challenging what it means to be an employee or a manager and what it means to work at company and have a “job.”  Fixed career paths are being replaced by customized work; managers who got promoted just by bringing in revenue are being supplanted by those who can collaborate with others and build an engaged workforce; a strict hierarchy is being replaced by a more horizontal, open, and transparent culture; the wisdom of a few is being replaced by the knowledge of many; the notion of working 9-5 from an office is being replaced by the idea of being able to “connect to work;” an employee feeling like a cog is being replaced by the voice of the engaged employee; email and intranets are being replaced by networked and connected systems; yearly reviews are being replaced by real-time feedback; working in silos is being replaced by cross-boundary collaboration, and the traditional idea of what it means to be an organization is being replaced by evolving to a collaborative organization.

No, the future of work is not about replacing Sharepoint and email, it’s about re-defining what work means, why we work, and how we work.  Pass this along to anyone who thinks otherwise.