This morning I blogged about the future of employment and talked about the networked employee whose actual team extends beyond their organisationally-imposed team and outside the organisation to their own social network of peers and colleagues across the world.
My thoughts are that as we move into the future of cultural change within the workforce particularly with generational evolution but also driven by technology that we will see more of this type of behaviour and expectation coupled with other changes in the way we work and the whole concept of employer-employee.
While we’re seeing some of these changes now (myself as an example) that shift is some time away. In this article I want to look at something more immediate, something that is in full steam right now. Staff collaboration using social networking technologies.
I’m currently working for an Australian Government agency as a designer/analyst in their communications area working on everything from designing interactive touchscreen kiosk applications to reviewing accessibility standards and contributing to social media strategies. I’m also working on developing the agency’s internal staff collaboration strategy and implementation and trying to introduce Enterprise 2.0 though for now my effort is specifically focussed on just one technology platform, a wiki which was installed some years ago by the IT department and has now come to the attention of the rest of the organisation.
To bring together the relevant expertise and operational decision-makers I’ve assembled a working group to write the policy, set the guidelines, encourage adoption and offer training … but there are a number of issues which live outside the general framework of public sector thinking which I am trying to introduce: Social interaction and fostering a culture of collaboration.
Yes, writing policy and establishing guidelines are an important step … but when it comes to designing collaborative technology the focus should be people – people who might read your policy and guidelines once, and then go away and turn the technology to do what they want. As I said in an essay I wrote and emailed to my supervisor on this very subject “Don’t believe me? It’s the reason the wiki exists. Case in point“. It has happened before and it will happen again – people will do what it takes to get the job done. Organisations provide employees with the tools they think their staff need – and then staff go and get the tools they actually need.
Collaboration is a social activity. It’s about people talking to people. You simply cannot take people out of the mix. You can’t take personality out of the mix. People have attributes, names, behaviours, appearances, moods, emotions, attitudes, opinions and the depth of social interaction is determined by the extent to which these facets are exposed.
You cannot have a policy for staff collaboration that suppresses the expression of personality until you truly understand the detrimental impact that will have on productivity, efficiency, adoption rate and utilisation of staff collaboration tools.
Social interactions over time do away with the need for formal protocol and make honest collaboration easier and faster. Social interactions result in communities which bring benefits of collective intelligence and accessible peer networks. A culture of collaboration increases staff morale, productivity and efficiency.
Organisational hierarchies are terribly inefficient creatures but they do come with their perks – they give those higher up the pyramid great power. Staff collaboration tools flatten the playing field; everyone is just a member of a community and can nominate their own leaders whose power and influence can match that of those high up on the ladder. It’s not an organisational risk, it’s a personal risk. Many people don’t like the idea of losing power for the greater good.
So in order to retain some of that power and control the depth of social interactions can be suppressed which is why we might see guidelines that require participants to be faceless ID numbers only, banned from sharing personal information and only permitted to release authorised information.
Organisations have never been able to stop people from having such interactions face-to-face but social networking technology extends the scope of reach and influence to “dangerous” levels and being a technology it can actually be controlled unless you wanted to have the equivalent of a probity monitor sit in on every internal meeting.
Let go of the reigns and let people figure it out for themselves. Don’t be shocked when you see non-work related conversation online … it’s not like it’s not already happening via email, face-to-face conversations and instant messaging. It’s how people interact and it will ultimately result in a faster, more responsive, more agile organisation and a friendlier, supportive organisational culture. Sure, such activity needs to be monitored and guidance offered to keep people on track – there may be some who abuse the privilege but don’t deny the rest the opportunity for the sake of a few. It enables the sharing across internal boundaries and silos that can result in novel thinking and generation of new ideas that can have fundamental positive effects for the organisation that would otherwise have lain dormant.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Well said Nathan! Let people take responsibility for their actions online. Of course, that means actually holding people accountable for their actions, as well as “letting go of the reigns”. So then people are empowered to share and to co-produce, and at the same time they have an incentive not to compromise themselves or their organisation.