Cross posted from scriptogr.am
Today, I’m part of a panel debate at KM Australia. I have 3-4 minutes to present my argument that we can and should make tacit knowledge explicit with collaboration technologies.
I’ll be using two images to explain my argument, both created by Dave Gray as part of his Connected Company series.
The problem of scale
Think at the level of the street
So, what’s the story behind picking these diagrams to make my argument?
More later…
Image credit: Dave Gray CC-BY
Employees who work remotely may end up getting lower performance evaluations, smaller raises and fewer promotions than their colleagues in the office — even if they work just as hard and just as long.
The difference is what we call passive face time. By that we are not referring to active interactions with coworkers or clients, but merely to being seen in the workplace. To be credited with passive face time you need only be observed at work; no information is required about what you are doing or how well you are doing it.
As you may know, I’m not entirely convinced by the techno-centric concept of the digital workplace. In this post by academic researchers, Kimberly Elsbach and Daniel Cable, they highlight the importance of “Passive face time” and the negative impact this has on remote and virtual employees. The comments on this article are well worth reading too.
This isn’t news to me. Over the years I’ve come to realise from looking at both the theory and reflecting on my own experience that the critical factor for remote working isn’t technology, but the attitude of both the remote worker AND the people they work with. Sure, you need some level of remote access to enterprise systems but it doesn’t need to be particularly sophisticated and the tools have been available for more than a decade.
In terms of technology, social media tools do provide a way to replace or at least augment the need for passive face time. Unless your business already works without the need for passive face time, all the transactional technology in the world won’t work unless you address this issue.
A digital workplace is a social workplace. Remove the ‘social’ and you place remote workers at a huge disadvantage and guess what, they know it!
I’m currently working on an Ark Group report on developing mobile apps for internal business users and the business partners that organisations work with. There is a growing acknowledgement by designers that mobile apps need to be created with recognition of their situated use, however most of the research and discussion I’ve seen is focused on consumer apps.
Business users are consumers too and much of the thinking about how consumers use mobile is broadly applicable to the business users when designing apps. However, the business context does need special attention to take into account elements such as:
This is a draft of a diagram to summarise that situated context for mobile business apps. I’m not sure if this will make it into the report or not at this stage, as the primary purpose was really to help me capture my thinking.
I’ve used a couple of sources to help inform the diagram, which you might like to review too:
Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for additional sources that examine the business context for mobile apps beyond what is presented here.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to fix email in the workplace, you’ve got to treat it as a systemic problem.
Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along with its many practical benefits, electric light also brought subtle and unexpected changes to the way people lived. The fireplace, the candle, and the oil lamp had always been the focal point of households. Fire was, as Schivelbusch puts it, “the soul of the house.” Families would in the evening gather in a central room, drawn by the flickering flame, to chat about the day’s events or otherwise pass the time together. Electric light, together with central heat, dissolved that long tradition. Family members began to spend more time in different rooms in the evening, studying or reading or working alone. Each person gained more privacy, and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.
Yes, even apparently small technology innovations can have a massive impact on society.
The impact of the physical workplace on how we organise is a fascinating topic. For example the transformation of factories thanks to electricity and electric light changed how they operated. Modern offices, in the shape of skyscrapers, are an example of another development that has also affected how we manage. However, both the modernisation of factories and the creation of the modern office primarily depended on overcoming physical constraints to create physical structures. This in turn helped to define structures for work that we became familiar with in the developed world during the last century (lets call them 2nd Generation Organisations).
As the digital era continues, my impression is that intangible features are playing a greater role in defining the workplace environment and creating what I would call 3rd Generation Organisations. One trend that is starting to show what a 3rd Generation Organisation looks like is the shift towards Activity Based Workplaces (ABW):
As the name suggests the work space is organized by spaces designed to support specific activities… This loosely structured physical workplace is supported by work practices that facilitate it.
Note the relationship between space design and how work happens – this is more than simply creating a pleasant office space to work in and shouldn’t be confused with hot desking or hoteling either. I recently had the opportunity to see Commonwealth Bank’s Activity Based Workplace, built out on the edge of Sydney CBD. Its interesting to see how in practice IT plays a defining rather than supporting role in making their Activity Based Workplace possible. In fact, urban planning consultants Urbis advise that:
During the 1990s, wi-fi didn’t exist, so flexibility was limited. Now, a successful [Activity Based] workplace must consider the IT environment to deliver productivity gains. ABW is fundamentally linked to technology and any ABW project will require significant investment in IT as well as the fitout.
The benefits of ABW appear to be a combination of soft and hard benefits:
Of course implementing an ABW is no easy task for a large organisation – it requires capital and motivation to make the change. Yet at the small end of town co-working spaces are becoming popular too, like Hub Melbourne. Just like their larger enterprise counterparts they are also enabled by access to mobile, social, Web-based and cloud information technologies.
It is easy to doubt the transformational impact of information technology in the workplace – including social software – but equally we shouldn’t ignore the symbiotic relationship to the physical workspace. It is the combination of the two that will actualy create a deeper systemic change to how we organise and will allow 3rd Generation Organisations to emerge.
According to Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group, social is the currency of engagement. While social technology has introduced a seemingly endless array of new interaction methods, in the end it is all about solving real business problems. Companies do not become social businesses for the heck of it. They embrace social to solve specific business problems because it offers a more effective way of doing talent management, supply chain collaboration, business agility, risk management, and more successful products to driving revenue. Social drives adaptation.
The state of social is not what you might expect. Sandy Carter of IBM shared that governments and regulated industries have the highest adoption rate of social. Eighty four percent of the top thirty five banks have a social media strategy and all G7 governments have embedded social in their Government 2.0 initiatives. At a country level, German companies are the leading adopters of social business practices and are the most successful at it. These companies embedded social first internally by folding it into their processes and getting that to work before extending social externally to engage with customers.
Through the lens that social is about solving real business problems, the question becomes just how to wade through all the hype, myths and hubris to realize (and prove) its potential. Embracing the organizing principles of social business comes down to change management. You know the drill, you’ve been through it before – it starts with people, process and ends with technology. The exact opposite of what is being advocated by the thousands of technology vendors and consultants shouting from the social bandwagon.
Dachis Group’s 2012 Social Business Summit seven city global tour kicked off in Austin this week (the Summit in Singapore takes place on the 26th July). Writing in Forbes magazine, Christine Crandell provides an excellent review of the Austin event and outlines some key points about what Social Business is and isn’t. Its a great overview on the state of Social Business if you are still trying to get your head around the idea or maybe you are just little skeptical.
My question is simple: if we are going to think about our organizations as cities, what can we learn from people who “design” cities for a living? Those “designers” are called planners and their profession is planning. Who are they? What do they do? How do they plan?
For those of us who are look at social technologies as being situated in organisations that we treat as complex human systems, the design of urban environments presents some interesting parallels with the domain of social business design. As introduction to this idea, Gordon’s post about his joint presentation with Thomas Vander Wal at E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 is well worth reading (and looking at). There is plenty of follow up reading in the post too.
The short answer is yes, viral adoption can work BUT only in certain situations. This is my attempt to pin down some of the factors I’ve observed out in the field…
…these are the anti-patterns I’ve actually seen:
Posted over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.
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