RN Future Tense: The Changing Nature of Work

What impact are new design practices and changing technology having on not just the physical office but also on the way we think about work itself? Is the idea of the individual office a thing of the past? In this program we explore the physical, social and cultural trends affecting the changing nature of the office and the way we work in the 21st century.

via abc.net.au

Another great episode from Future Tense. I was recently talking about activity based workplaces (ABWs) and this podcast provides a good overview of Macquarie Bank’s Shelley Street building and the overall trends in open plan office spaces. Again, the role of technology is highlighted as a key factor but balanced by the need for the new leadership skills in the workplace, particularly as workplace demographics change. The show also discusses the impact on worklife-balance and our relationship with the people we work with.

Trying to fix how people use email can backfire

Some attempts to limit email haven’t gone as planned. One client of Christina Randle, a workplace productivity expert with the Effectiveness Edge in Austin, tried remedying employees’ email overload by banning staff from sending messages on Fridays. It backfired. Employees just stored outbound messages and sent them all Monday morning. “Instead of getting 100 messages on Friday, [people] got 200 in their inbox on Monday morning,” she says.

via workforce.com

If you want to fix email in the workplace, you’ve got to treat it as a systemic problem.

Patient Opinion Australia

Patient Opinion was founded in the UK in 2005 and since then has grown to be the UK’s leading independent non-profit feedback platform for health services. Patient Opinion Australia (POA) was established in 2012 and, similar to its UK counterpart, is registered as an independent not-for-profit charitable institution. Patient Opinion is about honest and meaningful conversations between patients and health services. We believe that your story can help make health services better. How it works:

• Share your story of using a health service
• We send your story to staff so that they can learn from it
• You might get a response

Your story might help staff to change services Share your story and help make our health service better!

via patientopinion.org.au

I’ve frequently shared the story of the original Patient Opinion with the Australian Gov 2.0 community, so I’m really excited to see Patient Opinion Australia (POA) finally launch. Its going to be interesting to watch how Australian health consumers and institutions respond to the idea.

UPDATE:

Looking around at the small amount of coverage POA has received in the media and social media, it looks like we’ll have to work through the same concerns they experienced in the UK:

Nurse for Nurses blog:

I have a concern with the anonymity of the process. Our existing government complaints process is also anonymous and this has led to organisations being put under the microscope because disgruntled people have used the process to mischief make.

I am also concerned that this website will encourage people to circumvent existing complaints management systems and use this website as their first port of call rather than giving the organisation an opportunity to address their concerns.

ABC Radio National:

Norman Swan: So what do you do about the fact that some people in the health care system who have some of the most difficult circumstances have the least access to online sites such as yours? So that you’re going to get the middle class complaining but not people who have three kids, single parents and out of work?

Michael Greco: Well, again experience in the UK has shown that that’s not quite the case. There were some concerns about for example, that elderly people don’t use the internet. Well they’ve disproven that.

However, they have received more positive coverage on the Australian Ageing Agenda (also provides a lot more background on the project in Australia).

Forget if you build it they will come

Adoption is a fulltime job,” said Staresina. “Forget if you build it they will come.

via idm.net.au

A quote from Emily Staresina about the SharePoint + Newsgator intranet recently implemented at Australian property development company, Stockland. Since they launched at the end of last year, about a quarter of Stockland staff have completed their Newsgator profiles.

Social intranets and the rebirth of internal comms

An example

Recently, there was a large conference at work with many senior managers in attendance. Traditionally, the internal communications staff would write up an article after the event, post it on their intranet portal, and send an email to employees with a summary and a link.

This time, though, those same communications people selected more junior staff (outside of communications) to attend the conference and serve as roaming reporters. The reporters posted live updates throughout the conference using the firm’s new collaboration platform. Communications staff also posted but they added to the conversation instead of dominating it.

Now, without email and without searching, people at all levels from around the world were following the conference by following real people (“I felt like I was there”). And, more importantly, they were able to participate.

The graduates were particularly active, asking questions and contributing content. But senior people at the event also used the social platform, soliciting ideas and feedback, adding comments to other conversations. People discovered the hot topics via their newsfeeds, added comments and likes, and interacted with people across their division (and some from other divisions).

We’d never had anything like that before.

Better for the individual and for the firm

Far from being dead, the internal communications function at that conference became much more valuable. They went from producing impersonal content with few readers and zero feedback to using social tools and practices to engage a larger audience in more meaningful ways.

Whether you’re a communications professional, a senior manager, or just someone who has something to say, that kind of transformation is available to you.

If you’re still relying on people coming to you for your message (or visiting your portal or reading your email), then you’re missing one of the biggest communications shifts in history.

via johnstepper.com

Great story about how social intranets are changing internal communications for the better. Don’t keep you intranet stuck as a destination, make it a platform for employee participation.

Quoted in the SMH about the benefits of enterprise microblogging

Microblogging is great for maintaining a cohesive work environment among geographically dispersed offices, says James Dellow from the social business consultancy Headshift.

“With access to microblogs, executives can be in touch with what’s going on across the whole organisation. In a virtual sense, the CEO is sitting next to the employee.”

In the future, Dellow says enterprises will be using data analytics to pick up issues, trends, and opportunities from microblogging conversations.

via smh.com.au

I was quoted in the SMH, in an article by Cynthia Karena who was looking at the benefits of enterprise microblogging with tools like Yammer, Chatter and tibbr.

Deloitte’s 90 Day Implementation Plan for Yammer

I stumbled across this recent Webinar aimed at government folks in the US about Yammer, which outlines how Deloitte’s went about launching it to its global user base (Yammer originally started in Deloitte Digital, in their Australian practice). Deloitte is one of Yammer’s high profile success stories and its one I’ve been tracking for a while.

Formally launched globally within Deloitte on 11/11/11, they followed a 90 day plan to implement Yammer:

Only yesterday I was talking about Yammer governance on the Headshift Asia Pacific blog, so its interesting to see the elements that Deloitte included in its plan:

• Communications;
• Training;
• Technology;
• Risk/Governance;
• Policy;
• End User Advocates; and
• Progam Management.

You will also note they distinguish between the activities required to launch and achieving a “steady state”.

By following this process, Deloitte report in these slides that:

the Deloitte Global Yammer network now exceeds 43,000 members.

This is about a quarter of their employees (~180,000 in total).

The “social action” frameworks are coming

I would consider the social intranet solutions I covered at the NSW KM Forum on Tuesday as pretty mainstream within the social business software landscape. Of course there are many other solutions out there that mirror the same basic social patterns in those particular solution – e.g. products that are similar to Yammer, Jive or Newsgator. In fact there are too many to mention which is why I tend to focus on a short list of proven products. However, there are some other products I’m watching that I think are extending and exploring new collaborative patterns. Here are some examples, which have strong emphasis on structured tasks and taking action:

Strides (VMware Socialcast)

“Strides is a fresh approach to getting things done. With Strides, you and your team can work together more effectively as you tackle new challenges, hurdle information barriers, and soar to new heights!”

Do (Salesforce)

“Easily create and share tasks, projects and notes with your team so you always know what needs to get done, no matter where you are.”

SAP StreamWork

“It’s the first and only solution that brings together people, information, and business methods to drive fast, meaningful results. People: Get everyone on the same page. Information: Share documents and data all in plain view. Methods: Provide structure with tools for brainstorming and decision-making.”

NationalField

“NationalField leverages the power of private social networks to give you valuable insight into your company’s productivity and effectiveness. You can track teams, gauge results, even encourage healthy competition—all within one secure social network.”

Nokia Socializer

This isn’t a product as such, although it is built on top of an existing off-the-shelf package (Socialcast) using an API-based approach. Socializer is an example of a new bread of social action tools that “uses a clever combination of social analytics and game mechanics to maximise attention and action.”

Personally I think there is something rather special in Socializer that goes beyond any of the generic tools mentioned above – the point being, there is still room for bespoke (or at least semi-bespoke) solutions.

To date, the workforce collaboration discussion has been dominated by the focus on conversation-centric social tools (even with products that have features that support tasks and projects). But as you can see there is strong pattern of “action” through out all these products and examples.

I’m expecting that social action frameworks are going to rapidly become more important and I’m sure that some of these products will either eventually emerge as stronger contenders in their own right or we’ll see them have an influence over the evolution of the current crop of leading tools.

The Post Industrial Company through the Value Chain Lens

If Social Business is really transforming the way we do business why are most of the stories and cases out there focused on changes to a single business function like marketing, human resources, or customer service? Shouldn’t it act as a change across several of these functions, or for that matter will these functions go away or change so fundamentally that we can no longer tell them apart?

…If these hold out commonly, then we are starting to see the cracks in the Value Chain model at least in terms of the separation of functional areas.

via forbes.com

This is an interesting post (and follow-up), but an unfortunate mistake in Rawn Shah’s argument is that he appears to have interpreted the Value Chain as something that describes organisational structure, when in fact it is a model of activities.

Briefly: Porter’s Value Chain concept was introduced in 1985 as a tool to help large organisations make a more holistic cost analysis of their competitive position. It is true that this concept was developed primarily for product-based businesses, but has been adapted for service and knowledge-based organisations. Some people also use the model for qualitative analysis.

But Shah’s main question about organisational structure are worth considering through the lens of the Value Chain. My questions from this perspective are:

• What is the impact of Social Business on different activities in the Value Chain?
• Are organisations reconfiguring themselves enough to completely optimise the linkages between activities, bearing in mind what is possible as a Social Business?

Shah’s example of Social Learning is actually an excellent example of this shift in practice but isn’t a failure of the Value Chain. “Learning” activity is still happening, just in a different way. The question about structure is really about if the centralised corporate training function is actually adding enough value in this new environment.

More broadly I believe that Social Business is starting to have an impact, but most organisations have not fully optimised for it. Time to use the Value Chain to drive change, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The table experience in social intranets

Last night I presentated at the NSW KM Forum, where I talked about the range of social intranet software options available on the market. While a lot of the subsquent conversation was about being social inside organisations, one of the more practical discussions was about the issue of working online with ‘tables’… you know, like those you create in Word or Excel:

Creating tables and lists etc is a fairly common activity in the workplace. In fact, I suspect many people use tools like Excel more for organising information than they do actually number crunching. So if people are going to work effectively online together in a social intranet, then this type of functionality is an important requirement. Unfortuntely, creating and editing tables in rich text editors online has never been a fantastic experience but recently it has started to get a whole lot better.

Nothing yet beats a spreadsheet in terms of pure flexibility and tools, like sorting and calculations – so for really heavy lifting with tables you’ll need to use a Web-based spreadsheet like Google Docs and Socialtext’s Socialcalc, or embed a spreadsheet.

However, lets have a look at a few leading tools and how well they support tables:

Atlassian Confluence

The whole rich text editor has been given a massive upgrade in the latest version of Confluence and tables are a lot easier to use now that users don’t need to worry about dealing with wiki markup (which has been removed in the new editor). Confluence’s table editing is pretty good although Jive (see below) packs a few additional formatting features. However, as complete package Confluence also offers a range of file embedding, spreadsheet, charting, and task list macros that other platforms don’t offer.

Jive

Jive’s table editor is still essentially based on HTML tables, however the user interface removes some of the complexity of fine detail formatting – you can set the padding, background colour, text alignment (horizontal and vertical), font and colour without feeling you are going anywhere near the HTML code.

Yammer

Not a lot of love from Yammer for tables, unfortunately. You’ll need to make do with sharing spreadsheet files instead for anything more than dot points lists.

“Generic”

Most other Web platforms use a common rich text editor plugin, like TinyMCE or CKEditor. Support for tables has improved in these plugins but IMHO vendors like Atlassian and Jive are still leading the way. Note: the editing experience on a particular platform will depend on the version of the rich text editor plugin supported and how it is configured.

As you can see, on a particular feature (and apparently simple one) like tables there is a lot of variability between different social intranet platforms. Is there a winner? Well, I wouldn’t pick a platform on this feature alone but these are the sorts of requirements I want to understand when helping a client pick a platform. Its may sound like a minor detail, but if you want people to work online in your social intranets then its actually more important than some of the big ticket technical specs.