Category: Behavioural Change

We all love a good story

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Storytelling can be a powerful tool when you want to explain how collaboration tools can help colleagues.

Stories are one of the most powerful emotional currencies we possess. They move people to feel, and they move people to act.

At work, stories take the form of narratives, conversations and anecdotes that connect us with the narrator and the subjects and broaden our pool of knowledge. When you share a story, you will spark a story or idea.

We use stories to make sense of our environment. They make us care. They provide a shared context for mutual understanding of events and issues that impact us. And they inspire us to change our point of view.

Ideally a good story around working with collaboration tools should communicate some form of causal resolution of a problem and also have the addition of meaning and significance for the audience.

When I speak to people around the capabilities of collaboration tools I generally don’t talk about what each feature or button does but how the enabling tool (and associated behaviour coaching) has changed the way people have solved an issue; or created innovation; or developed new engagement channels.

My favourite stories of how these type of tools have helped include:

  • Solving departure delays at Istanbul airport
  • Ensured passengers flying into Heathrow received their ‘Bloody Mary’s’ just the way they like them
  • Helping sped up the alterations to passenger wash bags
  • Safety lessons from drilling rigs were shared across an organisation within hours
  • How a banana ice cream maker could peel a thousand bananas at the same time

Obviously these lose much of their currency once taken outside the context of that particular sector so it’s beneficial to begin building a library of wins / case studies as soon as possible. They don’t need to be too details – just a good story. .

Often a new manager or colleague won’t know how these tools and behaviours may have made a difference, but peers and other leaders may have a rich store of anecdotes and memories to make the use meaningful.

Avoid the usual suspects

Transformation programmes are changing dramatically in the digital age.

The main theme of traditional deployments of tools was that change programmes were slow (cascaded from the top, filtering slowly down), soloed (by geographies, levels and departments) and exclusive (owned by leaders and nominated change agents).

In the digital era change is now fast-paced (focused on habit-forming to kick-start new behaviours), focused around behaviours not technology and inclusive (allows everyone’s input to be seen and for social learning to happen).

One of the key changes is the advocacy network that can be built. Forget reaching out to management and asking for the ‘usual suspects’ – the same folk that get volunteered for most change programmes. Use digital and networking technologies to create a broad number of advocates.

It doesn’t matter about the time commitment. Ask then to do what they can when they can. In the digital age getting volume at the ground level is important. Avoid traditional messages on the intranet and focus on getting role models, word of mouth and great use cases. This will spread the transformation far quicker than going through traditional and failing channels.

Don’t mandate but encourage

Don’t mandate but encourage

The key to getting sense from any networking and collaboration platform is to embed good behaviours of users rather than force templates or processes through technology.

As people gain more experience they will see the benefit of how they need to relate groups or content and begin to adopt good behaviours rather than mandate too much at the beginning which I believes restrict the desire to engage.

I firmly believe that if you alter that level of ‘control’ to an extent where you mandate to much, much of that implicit knowledge is lost due to people’s lack of engagement. I’m sure everyone has seen systems that deal with every workflow, scenario and linkage, with lovely metadata and taxonomies but they remain graveyards. I would also stress that we are not discussing a ‘heavy duty’ document management system here but a networking and collaboration platform where we are looking for people to share their knowledge.

One of the most interesting studies on knowledge sharing was conducted by Constant, Kiesler and Sproull.* One of their findings was that employees differentiated two kinds of knowledge sharing. One type was sharing products, for example, equipment manuals, or reports they had written. The second type of knowledge was what employees had learned from their own experience, for example, how to get around a certain bottle-neck in the system, or how to deal with a particularly tricky bug in a program. This second type of knowledge they regard as part of their identity – part of who they were as professionals.

They were willing to share both kinds of knowledge, but the motivation for sharing each differed greatly. The documents and programs they shared because they considered them the property of the company. But the second kind, their experiential knowledge, they shared because they gained some personal benefit from doing so. The personal benefit, however, was not money or the promise of a promotion. According to the study, “Experts will want to contribute to coworkers who need them, who will hear them, who will respect them and who may even thank them.”

As this study shows, the primary driver for sharing experiential knowledge is the respect and recognition of peers. It is hard to overestimate the psychic value peer recognition. How does this relate to controls and mandates? The less freedom a user has over the ‘platform’ (whether this was a technology or a physical environment) the less they would share their own experiential knowledge.

Organisations that have created great engagement and value from collaboration technologies have done so because they have reduced many of the controls that you would find in their more structured channels such as intranets and document management systems.

It may not always be neat and tidy but it generates this ‘experiential’ / implicit knowledge that organisations have tried to tap into since KM programmes first started. If we initially focus on getting the engagement, input and desire for folk to share then the quicker it is to make sense of the noise that social collaboration platforms can bring.

Making the same mistake

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Every day I see a greater digital divide within companies. I recently worked on a collaboration project that involved both groups of apprentices / graduates and those that are more used to faxes than Facebook. It made me realise we are making the same mistakes with collaboration tools (open, social, transparent working etc.) as we did with email and Knowledge Management tools of the 1990s.

 

Apprentices and graduates ‘just get it’ in terms of understanding how to use technology to connect them to people and content, regardless of interface. Forget about corporate emails – they just don’t want to bother about desktops or email clients. But reach out to them on mobile day or night and they will respond. They see the value of making connections online and how to use the open and social tools to network within organisations. They expect good technology and connectivity and if the company can’t provide it they will use their own. If they can’t be provided with spaces to connect and network they will develop their own.

 

Other groups within the company needed far greater training, floor walking and hand holding to understand the potential and possibilities of the value of connecting and collaborating. With good content strategies, knowledge and people management, stewardship and governance many of these issues are overcome but what struck me was the change in approach needed by those responsible for implementation and success of collaborative working.

  

I’m old enough to remember the only ‘IT’ training you received was how to use the fax machine, the photocopy and the phone handset. When email arrived it was similar with one approach to training and ‘after school’ extra training for those that were slow on the uptake. The training provided showed us how to use the new tool. When you asked the trainer what to use it for that was a very different matter.

  

As we move towards more open, transparent and social ways of working within organisations I do fear we are making the same mistakes we made with email and Knowledge Management. We can introduce the tools and technology, show them how to use it but not guide people on what to share.

  

Too many times I have seen organisations deploy the technology, train people how to use it but give them no further guidance on how to work more transparently, open and socially. Hence we get the situation that the tools are not used, or maybe worst they are used to create additional noise but no value. If we thing email and various KM document coffins are bad enough imagine a screen full of irrelevant activity streams, notifications, thousands of 2 people communities (if you can have a community of 2) and invites to connect and follow with thousands of people you have never heard of and frankly don’t need to connect to every within your organisation.

 

To bridge this digital divide within organisations we need to ensure that these collaborative, open, social tools have sufficient strategy, governance and stewardship around them, aligned with a good content or knowledge strategy for the user groups so they have an understanding of what will provide value to themselves, their communities and their company. Once this is in place we can then worry about the floor walking and handholding from a technology level.