Are You Removing Friction from Collaboration?
When it comes to collaboration, friction is not a good thing either from a behavioral of from a technological standpoint. Imagine your collaboration effort is a equivalent to a skater gliding along the ice, every time you add a point of friction you basically make the gliding motion harder and harder to achieve until you get to a point where you’re trying to skate on concrete. Enough friction will kill even the best and most thought out collaboration initiatives. Here are some ideas to help remove or prevent friction from happening.
Technology
Implement single sign on
Make sure the platform emulates common social experiences that people expect (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc)
Allow for easy integrations
Consider employee feedback in future feature roll-out
Make sure it’s easy to use and understand
Import profiles from Active Directory or other existing database
Implement suggestive features such as “people to follow,” “groups to join,” or “conversations to participate in”
Provide easy alerts and notifications when relevant
Allow employees to get access to daily or weekly email digests
Behavior
Provide educational resources and training along with community management
Make sure the physical and digital work environments both emulate and support each other
Understand use cases and pain points
Speak the language of the business
Focus on conveying individual value to employees instead of just corporate value to the organization
Make sure business and technical teams are both involved in the collaboration deployment
Have an internal marketing plan and make it fun
Reach out to the exemplars and the managers
I’m sure you can think of plenty of other things to add to this list but the point is that organization’s need to be thinking about how they can remove friction and not add it. Take a look at some of the rules, policies, or approaches that your organization is taking to collaboration and ask yourself if they are adding and removing friction. Do whatever you can to make sure that your collaboration efforts are as smooth as blades on ice, because nobody wants to or can skate on concrete.
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