Jacob Morgan's Blog, page 41

Free Ebook on The Collaborative Organization

Before The Collaborative Organization came out I actually wrote a small ebook to capture the ideas and concepts that then became the full 314 page book.  I wanted to share this ebook with all of you as a bit of thank you for your support and encouragement over the past few years.  I think the message of creating a collaborative organization and investing in the future of work is a powerful one and you will see some big changes around those areas coming to this site soon, but more on that later.  I think we are living in very exciting times where the traditional definitions of what it means to work, to be an employee, and to be a manager are all changing radically.

We are still learning a lot about what this change is going to look and where we are going to end up but a few things are now certain:

the way we work is being forever altered with social and collaborative tools and strategies in the enterprise
employees now have a voice within their organizations
leaders don’t have to be managers and managers aren’t always leaders
mangers who manage by fear have no place within organizations
the theme for the future is “connect to work”
for the first time in the history of business organizations are able to invest in strategies and technologies that not only positively impact the lives of employees at work but also outside of work

Several other things are discussed in the ebook below and for those of you looking for a much deeper time into how to create a collaborative organization, please check out The Collaborative Organization on Amazon.

I uploaded the ebook to slideshare so you can view it below, you can also view the ebook directly on slideshare here.

Announcing The Future of Work Survey; Take it and Share it!

Today Chess Media Group is launching a new survey; The Future of Work: Collaboration and Flexible Work Solutions for Today and Tomorrow.  The goal of the survey to is to uncover a few things around:

the usage of social and collaborative tools within the enterprise
the state of flexible work arrangements
BYOD policies and approaches
motivations for employees to leverage new ways of working

The way we work is changing rapidly.  New tools and strategies are entering the enterprise and there isn’t enough guidance around what employees and business leaders need to do to adapt to the coming changes.  The goal of the survey is to allow us to produce a free report which will help guide organizations around how to plan for the future of work and build a more collaborative organization.  We conducted another report in 2011 around the State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration which received responses from hundreds of people around the world and was read by many thousands.  Our goal is to get even more responses and attention for this one.

A lot has changed since 2011 and we want to explore other topics around the future of work which are mentioned above.  The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to fill out and we will not be sharing your contact information or answers with others.  We would love your support in both taking and sharing the survey to anyone or any company that is currently using social and collaborative tools internally (for employees).  We plan to complete and release the report in a few months time and it will be free for anyone to download.  I personally hope that the finished product will become a valuable resource for employees and business leaders on the future of work.  We hope to continue other such reports in the future.

This project would not be possible without four vendors who are underwriting the report.  I encourage you to check out the products they offer and connect with them on Twitter.  If you would like a personal introduction to any of these companies just let me know.

Central Desktop created a cloud product called SocialBridge which has features such as document and project management, mobile apps, workspaces, integration with third party apps, and much more.  Customers include companies such as the American Red Cross, Career Builder, and WD-40.  Connect with them on Twitter.

Citrix offers a variety of products in the enterprise collaboration space and you may recall that they acquired Podio not too long ago which offers everything from CRM to lead management to meeting planning to social collaboration.  Citrix is probably most known for their GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar products.  Connect with them on Twitter.

Moxie Software actually made headlines recently when they announced they were giving their product away for free.  Their positioning is specifically geared around allowing employees to leverage the collective intelligence of employees to help customers.  Moxie has the ability to create both internal and external communities.  Connect with them on Twitter.

Atlassian is most known for their Jira product for project and issue tracking, and their confluence product which is designed for employee collaboration.  Confluence features everything from a robust wiki editor to task management to mobile access and a robust ecosystem for third party apps.  Connect with them on Twitter.

Click here to take the survey, and thanks in advance!

 

 

Investing in Enterprise Collaboration Can Help You Attract and Retain Top Talent

According to a Forbes article by Jeanne Meister:

“The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that.  Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years…”

This is obviously a concern for many companies around the world because they invest a lot of time and resources into making sure they can attract and then retain top talent.  One of the many benefits of investing in enterprise collaboration is being able to do both of these things.  Before I explore a few of the reasons why this is the case, ask yourself; would you rather work for a company that invested in collaborative tools and strategies or one that didn’t?

Giving employees a voice

Traditionally most employees never have their voices heard in their organization.  The platforms and the culture to accomplish this are just not in place.  Oftentimes this results in employees resenting their managers and their jobs because they feel like they have valuable ideas and feedback to contribute and nobody cares to hear it.  Enterprise collaboration platforms change that by allowing employees to be heard and recognized in a public way by their peers and managers.

Becoming a leader

Leaders used to be associated with managers or executives.  That is no longer the case.  Any employee within an organization has the ability to become a leader regardless of their level of seniority.  Collaborative platforms make this possible in much the same way that social media allows this to happen in our personal lives.  Employees can share their ideas, build a following, and get recognized as subject matter experts in their areas of interest.  This was not possible in the traditional construct of an organization.

Greater sense of purpose

Enterprise collaboration platforms allow employees to see how their contributions and feedback are affecting a broader part of the organization (whether it’s a specific team or the organization as a whole).  They can see how their work is being used what happens to something that they create or contribute to.  Again, in the past this wasn’t possible; the old model is you complete your portion of something, hand it over to your manager, and move onto the next task at hand.

Flexible work environments

One of the most attractive benefits to employees is the ability to work flexible hours and from various locations (such as from home).  However, the concern for management has usually been around productivity, employees getting access to information and people, and work getting done in general.  Most organizations today that investing in collaborative tools and strategies are more aggressively adopting flexible work environments.  That is because new platforms allow employees to get access to the people and the information they need to get their jobs done anywhere, anytime, and on any device.  In today’s organization you don’t have to go into an office to work, you simply need to “connect to work.”

Customized career paths

Unfortunately the traditional model of work has usually been such that if you get hired in a particular department you are typically going to stay in that department or at best can move to another related area.  The problem with this is that our passions and interests can change and organizations are not flexible enough to cater to these changes.  Enterprise collaboration platforms allow for the discoverability of passions and interests.  Managers now have the ability to see and pay attention to what their employees care about and can offer suitable opportunities in those area.  Business unit leaders can collaborate with each other to help fill roles for new openings which may be eyed by existing employees wanting to take on new challenges.  This is exactly what happened in a client engagement where an employee wanted to switch departments to something she was more passionate about. Through their collaboration environment business unit leaders where able to find her a more suitable role and were thus able to keep her employed.  As another example, you might be in the marketing department at your organization yet have extensive knowledge about IT related issues.  After contributing to IT related discussions and groups in your collaborative environment you build thought leadership in that area and are recruited to work on the IT team.  Employees are rarely interested in one specific thing and one of the reasons why employees switch jobs is because they want a career change.  Organizations no longer need to lose these employees; they can offer career changes in the current company.

The list goes on with things such as:

improved work-life balance
reduced stress at work
better relationships with managers and co-workers
improved overall happiness
and others

The point is the organizations who invest the time and money into building a collaborative organization will not only be able to retain current employees but will become more attractive to new employees.

What kind of a company would you rather work for?  One that made these investments or one that didn’t?

 

 

 

 

Three Reasons Why Your Department Shouldn’t Wait for Corporate to Invest in Collaboration

In an ideal scenario the corporate management team at your organization will make the necessary technology and strategy investments around collaboration and the future of work across the enterprise.  However, what if you’re a part of a larger organization and corporate is just moving too slow?  Oftentimes departments make these investments independent of what corporate is doing.  This is actually the case with some of our clients right now, one of them is a 500,000 person global company.  In these types of scenarios the business leaders of specific regions or departments shouldn’t feel the need to wait.  There are several reasons for why departments shouldn’t wait for corporate:

Corporate can learn from you

There have been several situations where corporate finds out of regional or department deployments and then piggy-backs on top of those for an enterprise wide deployment.  Your department can be the pioneering group for the whole enterprise and can help educate and show others what the business value is and how to make it work.  This approach can also help dramatically speed up an enterprise wide deployment backed by the necessary resources from your corporate management team.

Don’t sacrifice opportunity

There is no reason for why you should be sacrificing the potential opportunity and business value of investing in collaboration just because corporate isn’t.  Your department or region can still benefit from creating an engaged and connect workforce.  Don’t wait just because other people want to.  That’s their problem.  This evolution of how we work needs to start somewhere, it might as well start with you.

Timing

I know of several initiatives being led by departments within larger enterprises that have been ongoing for at least the last two years.  Meanwhile corporate management in many of these organizations is still trying to make decisions around what to do.  The best thing you can do is communicate with corporate around what your plans are, your successes, and challenges.  But sitting around idly and waiting is useless.

The reality is that in many larger organizations there are already several collaboration initiatives being led by employees that management just isn’t aware of.  I can pretty much guarantee that in large organizations there are already some Yammer deployments, perhaps a few instances of Confluence, Jive, MangoApps, or some other platform.  When employees see an opportunity to improve the way they work they typically go after it.  Consider that setting up any of these cloud-based platforms just takes a few minutes and only requires a credit-card.  The barrier of going through IT or getting the blessing from corporate is completely removed.  This is why management needs to really pay attention to what is happening in the enterprise.  Smart management will leverage these pockets of collaboration as a springboard for a much broader initiative.

If you’re running a department or a region within a larger company and corporate isn’t making the investments in collaboration that you want to make, then make them yourself, corporate will eventually follow.

 

 

The Five-Step Maturity Model for Building a Collaborative Organization

In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research.  The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there.  Organizations typically fall into one of five types of categories when it comes to collaboration in the enterprise.  These are:

The unaware organization
The exploratory organization
The defined organization
The adoptive organization
The adaptive organization

Here is a simplified version of the maturity model:

When the collaborative capabilities of an organization increase, so does the business value that the organization will realize.    Let’s take a look at these 5 types of organizations in more details (much more comprehensive information and a grid is available in the book).

The Unaware Organization

Not surprisingly, unaware organizations are just that…unaware.  Meaning, they are not really up to speed on what is happening around collaboration and the future of work; they just don’t know what they don’t know.  Manager resistance is going to be strongest at this stage as value and business cases have not yet been established.  There is also a high degree of uncertainty and fear as the organization tries to understand how emergent (or social) collaboration applies to the way it works.  The opportunity and the upside for emergent collaboration here are great.

The Value

The value here is quite low, but the potential is the greatest.

The Exploratory Organization

At this stage organizations are spending more time researching and understanding what emergent collaboration is and how it can affect the business.  In fact, organizations here may start defining what this means and what it can look like.  Typically, organizations here start to see the possibilities of what can be done and begin to understand how emergent collaboration can solve business problems.  We also start to see the formations of teams that are going to help drive this initiative within the organization.  This is also where organizations will see most of their IT (and some manager) resistance.  To move to the defined stage, there needs to be a very solid understanding of what emergent collaboration means to the organization and a strategic direction and vision has to start forming.  Depending on the size of the organization, it can remain in this stage from one month to over three months.

The Value

The organization clearly sees where collaboration can benefit the enterprise.  The strategic value gap begins closing as the capabilities for emergent collaboration start to increase.  Teams begin forming that will be tackling this evolution of the organization.  The key value here lies in knowing that things can be improved.  The organization starts to get excited, and innovative ideas for collaboration begin flowing.  The organization is now educated on emergent collaboration.

The Defined Organization

Here the organization needs to have a clearly defined strategy and direction for the emergent collaboration efforts.  At this stage, the organization is getting ready to communicate and share the direction and vision and teams and roles are clearly defined.  We also see use cases developed, measures of success defined, and potential technology solutions selected.  To progress to the adoptive stage, organizations have to communicate their vision and direction for emergent collaboration and start implementing everything that was outlined and put together in the defined stage.  The process of defining emergent collaboration for the organization can usually be completed in one to three months.

The Value

The organization is one step closer to realizing the business value of emergent collaboration.  The strategic framework to make this happen is complete, and the organization is ready to begin implementing.

The Adoptive Organization

At this stage the organization is in the process of full implementation.  Everything has been explored, teams have been established, the vision has been communicated, measures of success have been established, risks have been evaluated, and the road map and strategy have been developed.  Organizations here can typically implement in one of four types of enterprise collaboration deployments.  This is the stage of greatest learning for the organization as progress is evaluated and bench-marked and feedback is continuously collected.  This stage can last from one to three years, depending on the size of the organization and how quickly things can get done.  Employee resistance here is greatest as they try to embrace new strategies and technologies at work.  The remainder of the emergent collaboration life cycle is spent in the adaptive stage.

The Value

Employees share anecdotal and data-driven information about the benefits of emergent collaboration.  Information starts to be easier to find and share.  Teams are more easily formed, and employees start to open up and trust one another.  Company morale begins to improve as employees begin to understand their roles and the roles of their colleagues better.  Senior-level leaders gain much greater insight into the way the organization operates.  The organization now sees opportunities to engage and inspire employees and to retain and attract new talent by being perceived as innovative and cutting edge.

The Adaptive Organization

This adaptive stage isn’t an end state; it’s a continuous cycle of improvement and evolution.  The adaptive organization has a very solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t and is capable of making the right decisions.  Organizations can easily regress into previous stages if, for example, they stop listening to and incorporating employee feedback into their efforts, which in turn can cause employees to abandon platforms.  If employees don’t feel supported and listened to, then chances are that adoption rates will never rise. The important thing here is that there are always going to be improvements, updates, changes to technologies, new best practices, new team members, new leaders, and evolved strategies.  An adaptive organization is one that learns what works and what doesn’t and is able to improve.

The Value

This is where the organization sees the greatest business value from emergent collaboration as problems are solved and successes are repeated.  Inefficiencies begin to be eliminated.  The organization is now able to adapt to new changes, behaviors, or feedback from employees.  Company morale increases as employees see that they have a voice and their feedback is being implemented. All necessary components for emergent collaboration are integrated, and sharing, finding, and collaborating on information are at their peak.  As new use cases emerge, the organization is quickly able to create solutions.  Productivity increases, and opportunities are identified and implemented regularly and efficiently that result in cost-saving or revenue-generating

opportunities.

Here is a more detailed version of the maturity mode (click to expand):

 

For more detail on this model and strategic advice on everything from employee adoption, to vendor evaluation, to strategy development; check out my book, The Collaborative Organization, on Amazon.

When is the Best Time to Get Started With Collaboration?

Getting started with your future of work and collaboration initiative is typically the biggest step that an organization has to make.  It’s that commitment to changing and evolving the way you are going to work from here forward.  However, some of the organizations I have been speaking with recently are wondering, “when is the best time to get started?”  I understand the skepticism and the temptation to put things off but in all honesty the best time is now.

Every organization typically has multiple initiatives going on that are keeping people busy.  In these situations management wonders if it’s worth waiting a few months before making the investment so that people can have more time to work on this project.  Have you ever heard of that saying, “life gets in the way?”  Well the business version of that is “business gets in the way.”  Putting off these initiatives will get you nowhere because there is always going to be something that comes up.  The reality is that your organization and every other organization out there needs to get started somewhere and at sometime, and now is that time.

I had one organization get in touch with me around 9 months ago wanting to get started on something but then postponed because of “timing,” we still talk all the time and they still haven’t done anything but if they would have gotten started 9 months ago they would be much farther ahead today.  If you commit to changing the way your organization is going to work then you need to commit to no excuses.

You don’t need to make giant steps on day one.  Realize that this an ongoing and evolving journey that realistically doesn’t have a finite end.  You can’t learn to swim unless you actually get in the water.  Here are a four things you can do to get you moving in the right direction now:

Figure out who is going to be leading your collaboration initiative and empower that person to make decisions related to this project.
Get together a few collaboration use cases around how employees will use new tools and how their behaviors will change
Explore some of the collaboration technologies that exist today (for bonus points read this post on the eight variables to evaluate collaboration vendors and this one on how to actually select a collaboration vendor
Read this post on getting started with collaboration in the workplace

As I’ve said many times, there is no such thing as a future of work initiative in an organization that doesn’t invest see where the future of work is headed.  Get your head in the game and get moving.

The Future Employee Must Posses the Skill and Will to Learn

Thomas Friedman recently wrote an article for the NYT titled, “Need a Job? Invent It” which addresses how our educational institutions are not teaching students the skills that value most.  He goes on to point out that in today’s economy there is no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job.  Things are changing quickly and by time most students graduate from college the things they studied have evolved.  What’s more common is that the jobs people are going to school for haven’t really been invented yet.

I went to school at UCSC and graduated with a double major in business management economics and psychology.  When I was in school social media, enterprise social software, emergent collaboration, and anything related to the future of work was not taught.  Facebook was just getting started, Twitter didn’t exist and neither did many of the enterprise collaboration platforms such as Jive, Yammer, Chatter, and dozens of others.

Experience used to the the hot commodity to get a good job.  When I graduated from UCSC even the entry level jobs I was applying for were asking for 2-3 years of experience and these were basic jobs.  I was always candid during my interviews and told the people interviewing me that even though I may not know how to do something that I’m sure I could figure it out.  Experience, experience, experience, that’s all I would ever hear.

Today experience is no longer the primary commodity.  Things are changing and evolving so quickly that experience is becoming less and less relevant.  New jobs are emerging that didn’t exist a few years ago and so experience for them is irrelevant.  Instead what is more valuable today is the ability to learn new things and then apply them in order to solve problems.  Anyone with an internet connection has access to limitless information to help them learn about anything and everything they want.  However as Friedman points out in his article, we spend too much time getting people to be college ready instead of innovation ready.

According to Thomas Wagner (who was featured in the article), author of “Creating Innovators” and Harvard education specialist:

“Today because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know.  The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.  As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.”

The future employee must have the skill and will to learn.

The Evolution of the Networked Enterprise: New McKinsey Research

McKinsey just released some more research on the use of social and collaborative technologies within the enterprise.  Not surprisingly they found that adoption levels are continuing to climb and are almost double what they were in 2009.  The more important finding from the research they conducted was that organizations are moving beyond the experimentation phase with many of these tools and into more mainstream applications and deployments.

Although most of the executive respondents reported seeing benefits from deploying these tools, the research shows that these benefits have achieved a plateau.  According to McKinsey:

Executives are optimistic but sober about the next leg of the social-technology pathway: they expect increases in employee productivity but also recognize the significant organizational barriers that prevent their companies from capturing the full potential of social tools. They also acknowledge the new open environment’s risks, including possible leaks of confidential information and intellectual property—yet 60 percent of respondents still say the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

This is very much aligned with what I am seeing with the companies we work with and speak with.  Business leaders are really starting to realize that technology can only do so much; change is required.  Now organizations are starting to explore what these changes are that need to happen and how they need to happen since they fundamentally impact the core of the company.

 

Many organizations are continuing to focus on empowering their remote and mobile workers by allowing them to connect to the organization through a mobile device aka “connect to work.”  I’m finding that there are some security concerns around mobile but companies are finding ways to deal with them (for example losing a phone which has an app that allows someone to get access to a companies’ internal environment).  Allowing employees to work and connect from mobile devices appears to be a big priority from what I’m hearing.  Again, according to McKinsey:

Remarkably, 65 percent say their companies have adopted at least one technology that’s used on a mobile device and that 48 percent of their companies’ employees have mobile access.

This is certainly supporting research which employees can take back to their organizations to help build support and the case for evolving how they work.  The fact is that the way we work is changing and the smart organizations are adapting to that change.  In just 3 years the number of companies adopting social technologies in their organizations has almost doubled and I fully expect this growth to continue at an even more rapid pace during 2013 and 2014.  Organizations are clearly seeing the value in deploying these social and collaborative technologies and are going to have to move the technology focus.

Organizations looking to succeed with these initiatives should read, the 12 principles of collaboration.

The First Step to Recovery Is Admitting You Have a Problem

There are many reasons for why organizations invest in social and collaborative tools and strategies (or for that matter anything else).  However, for successful organizations change doesn’t typically happen unless there is either a problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity that needs to be pursued.  There are some organizations that have invested in social and collaborative technologies without understanding why they were doing it, they didn’t perceive a problem and they didn’t see an opportunity.  These organizations never mapped their collaboration use cases to platform requirements.  They made the investment because other people were doing it and ran into heavy obstacles along the way because neither of the above two  reasons existed.  These companies purchased expensive hammers looking for things to bash into the wall.

As the title of the post suggests, the first step to recovery is admitting that your organization has a problem (or an opportunity).  If your organizations doesn’t accept and understand that it’s time to change and that their are better and more effective ways of working then there is no point in allocating resources into these initiatives.  The future of work cannot exist in an environment where business leaders don’t understand where the future of work is heading.

 

Mozilla Launches Open Badges; Creates an Educational and Skill Currency

Mozilla recently unveiled a project that they have been working on for over a year and a half called Open Badges.  The concept is built around people being able to gain recognition for skills that they earn on the web, anywhere on the web.  Ideally an individual will be able to acquire virtually any skill on any site.  Right now we see the concept of badges being deployed on social media sites such as Foursquare or on enterprise social software applications such as Yammer but Mozilla is looking to take this one step further.

I always use my brother as an example.  He’s turning 21 this year and although he’s going to school for business he was able to build a career for himself as a videographer and photographer for free by watching Youtube videos, joining discussions, and getting access to other relevant resources through social media and the web.  Now, he has no formal training or degree in these areas yet is very good at what he does and has recently amassed the equivalent of a little studio including top-notch cameras, green-screens, and lights.  Open Badges from Mozilla seeks to take these type of skills and assign badges around them to signify a legitimate form of expertise.  They are taking the concept beyond the common of idea of badges as fun or rewarding incentives and putting some structure around it.  The goal is ultimately to have a single place (what Mozilla calls your “Backpack”) where you can display your badges, which again, you can earn from anywhere on the web.

The Providence After School Alliance has already taken this as far as issuing badges to students who complete a semester, these badges are then going to be visible on college transcripts.

The reason this is so relevant today is because we have access to a virtually unlimited database of information and people which means we can learn just about anything and acquire skills in just about anything.  Today however, there is no way for us to recognized for these skills that we acquire.  Think about new college graduates that are going to apply for jobs.  They are judged on a resume which shows what they studied in school even though their arsenal of skills may be much broader.  Open course ware is becoming a recent phenomenon and some of the world’s top educational institutions are making their course material available for free and even offering certificates of completion for some of them.  One of the interesting things about Open Badges is that it not only allows you to showcase your digital badges but also badges you might earn in the real-world.  You have the option to manually upload a “badge” to your “backpack” to showcase your skills.

Open Badges is still very much in the early stages of development but the direction they are going in is quite interesting and you can expect integration with collaborative platforms such as Jive, Yammer, Chatter, and others in the future.  This is very interesting as far as “the future of work” is concerned and impacts several areas:

How employers view and hire employees, moving beyond the resume and looking at other skills which may have previously been non-credentialed (yet still very real and applicable)
Evolves badges from oftentimes being thought of as more fun and whimsical to having more serious business value
Encouraging learning at all ages of anyone and everyone that has a web-connection
Challenges the value, necessity, and cost of a traditional educational institution
Creates a new type of educational and skill currency
Merges personal and professional skills by allowing you to bring in your badges into your existing work environment (or it will in the future)

Here are a few examples taken from the KQED write-up of this announcement.

NASA is working on launching badges in robotics and in the STEM fields to be earned through working with NASA content and used to identify candidates for internships and jobs.
The Manufacturing Institute is developing a badge to be earned by current workers and students to demonstrate skills necessary to succeed in an advanced manufacturing job or internship.
The Intel Society for Science and the Public is developing badges to affirm and evaluate scientific research and tie it to professional and academic skills.
Carnegie Mellon is developing badges that will eventually be issued on a curricular path that terminates in certifications recognized by computer science and STEM industries.
Badges for Vets is creating a series of badges that will help offer civilian-applicable credentials for professional skills learned through military training.

It’s still very early in development with the first version jut launching a few weeks ago but it has a lot of potential, especially when considering the platform that Mozilla has.  I’m very much looking forward to see where this is going to go in the next few years.