Human collaboration: a new way of working!
In the past few weeks, I’ve met with several organizations that are asking questions about how they can foster better collaboration among their employees. Many of these organizations have adopted collaborative technologies, but have failed to achieve the desired results. Through the discussions, I see that they often have one thing in common: they do not think in terms of humans who want to collaborate … they only think of defining a collaboration channel.
Collaboration is a complex and multi-faceted thing. Basically, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a human being and ask yourself what you want to communicate. You must then ask yourself which is the best channel for you.
When organizations think about collaboration, the first reaction is to find a platform for sharing documents. They often forget that documents are one of the possible channels. Why not allow the creation of wikis, blogs or even a conversation on a wall? By including its other communication channels, you allow users to let their imagination run wild and unleash the collective intelligence of your organization.
The next step is to structure this collaboration. However, structure and control should not be confused. Structuring collaboration simply means that you provide a platform to easily publish and find the information you want to share. This structure should not be imposed, the idea is not to create a formal process as in a BPM (Business Process Management) project. In a simple way, the structure must make it possible to group information according to common interests with other collaborators or according to goals which are common with these latter.
The last step is to deploy this collaboration (this structure) so that users can benefit from it. I call that identifying the patterns of collaboration. A few years ago, IBM had identified “7 patterns” which are still very true today:
- Employees on-boarding
- Search for expertise
- Knowledge of the customer
- Mergers & acquisitions
- Knowledge sharing & innovation
- Supply chain
- Health and safety
It is by researching these and finding ways to innovate on how to execute them in your organization that you will be able to successfully deploy collaboration.
Are you interested in the subject of collaboration? If so, please don’t hesitate to contact me to discuss it!
