Why Australian companies need to become Connected Companies

The Reserve Bank of Australia has been critical this last week about the depressed attitude in industry towards the state of the Australian economy. Like the rest of the developed world, there is obviously no way Australia can entirely avoid the competition of cheap labour overseas or the impact of global financial markets. But there is also a risk that Australian businesses use this as an excuse – research published last year highlighted that only a small proportion of Australian businesses are employing progressive management practices. This wasn’t some wonky marketing survey, but a piece of serious research highlighting that:

“high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable”

In a related piece of work, my Dachis Group colleague Dave Gray has been looking at what characteristics define long-lived, successful companies. He was shocked to find that the life expectancy of large companies has fallen from 75 years in the 1930s to only an average of only 15 years. Dave’s conclusion is that these companies are collapsing under their only dysfunctional weight. Right now, the logical reaction in some businesses to this “weight” problem is to downsize and outsource. Others on the other hand are embracing this challenge (that 12%).

I come into contact with some of those progressive organisations primarily from a technology perspective, although some are also attacking it from a broader social business level. What is interesting for me in this process is to observe that here in Australia, unlike say the US, our issue or need for concepts like Enterprise 2.0 isn’t so much about overcoming dominant command and control structures; rather we need to embrace social technologies so we can:

• Use them as a force multiplier that allows local companies to punch well above their weight in a global economy (social technologies are fantastic levellers).
• Enable these companies to turn ideas, insight and innovation into action more effectively (great idea, but what are you going to do with it?).
• Engage staff so that they voluntarily maximise their own productivity and professional development (carrot, not stick).
• Deliver better products and more personalised levels of customer service (get people to buy Australian because its simply better).

In our government too there is an opportunity that has been mostly missed to date in the Government 2.0 conversation about enabling those inside government and those involved with service delivery to use these same technologies to also work more progressively. This is a missing piece in a puzzle that has spent more time focusing only on the veneer of citizen engagement through social media.

Of course, I’m not claiming that social business tools like software for workforce collaboration and social intranets trump the global and local financial and economic factors faced by Australian businesses. I’m simply saying don’t ignore the evidence about how to be more productive and profitable. When wrapped up with the right implementation approach, these tools provide a critical technology platform for helping this to happen.

Productivity And Business: Seize the day!

According to the lead researcher, Dr Christina Boedker, high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable.

…

The management practices that do best, according to the study, are being highly responsive to changes in customers’ and suppliers’ circumstances, encouraging high employee participation in decision-making, achieving on-the-job learning through mentoring and job rotation, making effective use of information and technology and attracting and retaining high quality people.

Emphasis Added

via smh.com.au

Ross Gittins, Australia’s respected and clear thinking economics columnist for the SMH, reports on the government sponsored research into productivity by the Society of Knowledge Economics (SKE).

Ross notes that only 15 per cent of the research sample exhibit the characteristics of such “enlightened” business practices. I imagine that the other 85% are still waiting for bottom line ROI on the minutiae of individual practices, tools or technologies to be proved – symptom or cause do you think?

UPDATE: Here is the actual report. Hat tip to Nicky.

Mythbusting the productivity hole of the Internet and Social Media

Facebook may not be the black hole of workplace productivity many consider it to be, as research conducted by Swinburne University of Technology with web security company MailGuard shows.

The research partnership between MailGuard and Dr Rajesh Vasa, a lecturer in the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, has revealed that the average employee spends between 30 and 60 minutes online for personal reasons each day.

Although 40 per cent of people in the sample of approximately 50,000 used Facebook in the six-month period analysed, the average time spent on the site was just a few minutes.

While other studies have drawn on consumer data and qualitative research, this is the first to scrutinise individual behaviour over an extended period.

The uses of internet for personal reasons tend to be comparatively banal: people check the news, weather and transport timetables. Sports news sites are particularly popular and online shopping is rising.

Only 20 per cent of staff were classified by the researchers as ‘heavy explorers’, exceeding a baseline of ‘normal’ that was set at 200 websites a month. It’s at this level that staff productivity is considered to deteriorate.

Dr Vasa’s primary research at the faculty focuses on the behaviour of computer programmers when they build software. He helps companies who subcontract computer work to assess whether billing is correct and if the project is being managed at the declared pace. But the methodology easily transfers to web usage.

“I study how people use tools to build software and the browser is just another piece of software. The data that we store and the maths we use for analysis are identical. It’s the same maths that economists use to detect whether people are getting richer or poorer,” Dr Vasa says.

The anonymous data, provided with the consent of client companies, tracked staff browsing habits from 2009.
MailGuard CEO Craig McDonald expects the usage patterns to continue to evolve. Twitter was used by just 2.6 per cent of individuals in January 2009, but that had grown to 17.1 per cent by year’s end.

Mr McDonald does not believe the information warrants employers tightening the screws on their staff:
“How do you harness the experiences of heavy explorers who also achieve high productivity for the benefit of the business? It’s about working smartly in the new terrain, rather than banning social media and frustrating some of your best performers because one or two employees are misusing Facebook.”

via swinburne.edu.au

The only hole I would pick in this research is that it only looks at personal use of the Web using their employers Internet connection; it doesn’t account for people’s personal mobile Internet access, so its conceivable that people are spending more time online than is visible in the data used. However, its good to see some data (and Australian research too) that challenges the assumptions about personal use of the Web at work.

The sentiment of McDonald’s conclusions are correct too, which is what we should be talking about.

Of course, for the companies who are building businesses out social media FUD I’m sure this data won’t be seen so positively. Its a real shame they get more coverage in the media and this news barely made a ripple.