Collaboration in Culture and Practice

April 22, 2018 | Author: Anonymous | Category: Arts & Humanities, Communications, Marketing
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Collaboration in Culture and Practice Creating value, investing in ideas, and discovering untapped internal knowledge by enabling teams to work together.

In today’s business environment, it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about evolved practices without discussing collaboration. More than ever, companies are embracing the value of having more than one mind tackling a business problem. They see the potential in working with partners and vendors and other stakeholders to create new products or new services. They certainly embrace the idea that their employees and teams will work more effectively and be exponentially more innovative if they’re empowered to work together. In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that better collaboration could increase productivity of interaction workers by up to 25%, and translate into nearly $600 billion dollars in value across commercial sectors alone. 1

Yet organizations still struggle to create an environment in which collaboration thrives. How can we change that and build organizations that nurture and encourage rich collaboration and knowledge sharing? It’s all about enabling people.

What Is Collaboration, Exactly? By definition, collaboration is simply the act of working with someone else to create something. In business, that definition gets expanded a bit to imply that the product of collaboration creates value that wasn’t there before, and that wouldn’t necessarily be possible through individual efforts alone. In the era of social business, we often think of collaboration as a key characteristic shared by the most progressive companies. These are the businesses that believe that fluid, open communication and constant knowledge exchange throughout the organization is imperative to thriving in today’s environment.

The benefits of team collaboration are clear enough for organizations to aspire to be more collaborative, but the practice of creating a collaborative culture is a challenging one.

The Struggle for Adoption The emergence of social technologies has created an enthusiastic rush to capitalize on all of their capabilities, from sharing to content creation to interaction, feedback, and conversation. Many companies have made significant investments in today’s robust social collaboration technologies, from individual tools like real-time chat to full-blown platforms that include robust features and capabilities. The problem is that leading with technology is almost always a dead end, and leads to frustrated initiatives that struggle to take hold and find a place in the day-to-day workflow of teams and employees. It’s a familiar scene; both the CRM and Enterprise 2.0 movements struggled for traction for many of the same reasons. Proponents of those ideas rushed to adopt and implement technology first, believing that the right platform with all the right features would be so irresistible that employees would flock to it and use it in droves. But it didn’t quite happen that way. Why? Collaboration is a model first, and needs to be approached as set of values shared by individual people who want to improve the quality, depth, and reach of their work through collective effort. Which means that the very root of successful collaboration is not in the technologies you use, but in the people that use them. Put more simply, collaboration is a means, not an end. Technology and platforms should enable people by improving their productivity, their expression and communication, and their ability to easily access the information they need from anywhere. These imperative components make up a successful collaboration strategy and platform but need a strong cultural foundation to be used to their full potential. If we can shift our thinking to consider how and why people work successfully and approach collaboration as a mindset, we’ll find a greater degree of success and deeper, more sustainable adoption of whatever technologies suit the practices of the day.

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The biggest benefit of Podio is time savings. I can go to one place and get everything I need instead of sorting through tons of emails to find the latest document or the latest update on a project.

Donny Gore Manager, Product Support CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business

Collaboration as a Core Value So, let’s reframe collaboration as a mindset and an organizational orientation. What does it take to collaborate well?

Organizational Design When you look at the way people work, it’s often very different than the way it’s written on paper. All the boxes and lines on organizational charts are relatively meaningless when it comes down to the daily practice of managing tasks and working toward solving business problems. Look carefully at the way your organization is designed in order to identify potential bottlenecks in information flow, functional barriers that are created between departments because of reporting relationships or hierarchies, or even individual team dynamics and relationships among peers. Enabling more fluid communication and knowledge sharing means removing barriers between humans, which can be physical, organizational, or a combination of both. This is where a combination of the right attitude, the right processes, and the right tools is pivotal. Looking at the way your organization is designed on paper—and perhaps making some adjustments—can provide more elbow room for encouraging collaboration in reality.

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We tried so many different web conferencing tools before GoToMeeting with HDFaces. Now, the faculty, administration and staff have told me, ‘This is it!’ GoToMeeting works for everyone. Joanna Elliott Coordinator of E-Learning Technology Distance Learning Department Washtenaw Community College

Leadership and Management Every manager and leader within an organization knows that they’re responsible for achieving certain objectives. Those objectives are usually part of their job description, their annual performance evaluation, even their financial compensation. Professionals tend to invest their efforts in two things: 1. The things that they are compensated and rewarded for investing in; and 2. The things that give them an intrinsic sense of purpose, contribution and value as a professional. If we want our organizations to be more collaborative, we have to make it both a leadership imperative and something that is attractive, interesting, and rewarding for those leaders to do. Company values and culture are established and socialized both from the top down and from the roots of the organization upward (and outward). As collaboration’s value increases in tomorrow’s businesses, we have to embed it as not just an activity, but as an attitude that we foster through our actions, behavior, and consistent language. We can try to mandate activity—“Collaborate or else!” or “You MUST participate on the company platform”—but we can’t mandate mindset. That’s something that has to be cultivated and encouraged at all levels of an organization.

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Individual Investment As individuals, we are wired first to look at most situations through a personal lens. Organizations are perpetually strapped for resources, and always asking their employees to do more with less. When it comes to collaboration in the workplace, the most prominent question in an employee’s mind is often “How is this going to help me?” or sometimes more realistically, “How much more work is this going to create for me?” And while company objectives for collaboration can be motivating for the executive board—cost savings, efficiencies, ideation and innovation—the individuals participating in collaboration initiatives also need to be personally invested in the outcomes. How will their jobs be made easier by collaborating? How will they feel a deeper sense of individual achievement and contribution? How will they be recognized and rewarded for their efforts? Are their opinions and ideas welcome even if they aren’t considered “experts” in a topic? Share this information with them at the start of your collaboration program to help ensure your employees are personally invested in collaboration. Collaboration programs must be established from the point of view of the people who will be charged with driving them: the employees themselves.



I used Podio during a month-long customer engagement in India, connecting from my iPad. Podio made it easy to stay up to date with work being done by other CCH teams -- QA, product management, development -- even though we were located all over the world. Donny Gore Manager, Product Support CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business

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One strong indicator of culture in a company is how the organization recognizes and rewards contributions to the overall success of the business. A collaborative organization values—and therefore invests in—recognition for teams and employees that embody collaborative characteristics: open communication, investment in collective achievement, teamwork, shared accountability and credit, and free sharing of expertise and specialized knowledge for the betterment of the organization. Most traditionally hierarchical organizations reward individual achievement alone in the form of salary raises or bonuses, individual promotions, performance evaluation, or awards (like Employee of the Year). While those things can be incredibly valuable, individual rewards alone tend to incent competition over cooperation, even in “collaborative” settings. Truly fostering a collaborative culture requires thinking about ways to reward not just individual contributions, but the achievements of groups - whether formal or informal when they work together to solve a problem or generate new ideas. That could also mean recognizing effort rather than simply success, since many collaboration efforts can result in projects that don’t take off, maybe for good reason, or initiatives that don’t necessarily succeed. The impact is in openly and enthusiastically encouraging the behavior of collaboration in your organization so that individuals know that working together is not only encouraged, but formally supported and recognized as a key part of the business.

5 Ways To Foster Collaboration in Your Organization Shifting a culture is not an overnight project, and establishing a more collaborative approach to business is a process, not a project. Instilling new and different cultural values in an organization is an effort that takes several years, and is an ongoing quest rather than a firm destination. So if that’s true, how do you start with practical actions that can establish that culture in realistic, manageable pieces? Think in terms of initiatives that are concrete in scope but that demonstrate and depend on collaboration throughout. Collaboration then becomes about not just talking about the value, but experiencing it through tangible efforts.

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1. Organizational self-awareness: The assessment When was the last time you took a good, hard look at your organization and how you equip your workforce to collaborate more effectively? It’s difficult to know where you’re headed and how to get there if you don’t first know from where you’re starting. Conducting a thorough Readiness Assessment for your company is a worthwhile first step. Think of it like part survey, part discussion, part investigation and part exploration. Some of the areas you might explore include: • Cultural values: When you talk to people across the organization, how do they describe your culture? How does it differ in varying levels of the organization, or across departments or business units? Are those values in conflict or well-aligned? Are there ways to balance them better? • Leadership: How invested are your senior leaders in collaboration as a core component of your culture? How do they describe “collaboration” and what do they see as its benefits to the organization? Do their actions seem to support that vision, and if not, where are the disconnects? • Organizational structure: How are your departments and teams designed on paper? Does that design enable or inhibit collaboration and how? Are there adjustments that can be made to reduce friction in communication or reduce barriers to more collective work effort? • Roles: Are the “right people on the bus”? Are there gaps in skills, capabilities, or personality and work style that need addressing? Do you feel like you have adequate leadership and ownership potential for expanding your collaboration efforts internally? • Knowledge & understanding: How well versed do you believe your teams to be in collaboration? Are they enthusiastic or skeptical, or somewhere in between? Are there successful collaboration projects taking place now, and what makes them successful? Have there been failed projects in the past, and do you have a good understanding of why they didn’t succeed? How much education will you need to do to socialize collaborative values, approaches, and expectations? • Available resources: Do you have the tools, budgets, processes and other infrastructure necessary to expand your collaborative culture and projects? If not, what are you missing?

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Gathering the information is likely to take several weeks and require the effort of many people in many different roles. Evaluating and interpreting that information is likely to take several more weeks. But at the end of the process, you’ll uncover hidden opportunities for better and more useful collaboration, the potential obstacles that could stand in your way (and which of those are moveable), and best of all, better understand how and why your colleagues work the way they do so you can all work more effectively together.

2. Scenario planning “What if...?” It’s the question that sits at the center of many business discussions, especially when exploring new ideas. Take social business as an example, one that many organizations are exploring in depth right now. Most people want to understand the potential upside of being a more transparent organization overall, the potential risks of integrating social practices throughout their organization and the potential complications that could come along with changing fundamental business practices in significant ways. A practical way to attack this kind of problem is by doing a scenario modeling session. Gather stakeholders from varying levels in the business or department, considering carefully who might be indirectly impacted by social business efforts, or directly accountable for their success. Bring in everyone from executive management through your practitioners, from HR to marketing to legal and operations. Bring in remote employees or employees in different offices virtually, and use video conferencing to connect everyone in a face-to-face environment, since it’s really helpful to see each other during these kinds of exercises. Then, brainstorm all of the best-case and worst-case scenarios you can imagine that social business practices could create. What if a collaboration project with a partner results in a strained relationship? What if someone shares personal or confidential information on an open company platform or on a social network? What if a customer helps you find a critical flaw—or an unprecedented opportunity for—one of your key products? Prioritize those scenarios. Then use a few of them to walk through in detail. You can post the scenarios to a private workspace in your internal collaboration platform to continue brainstorming the details, or you can post it to a wider group for ideating on additional scenarios that might come up in the future as a sort of “living resource”.

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You’ll uncover interesting interpersonal dynamics and potentially limiting or incomplete processes, resources, and decision paths. And you can use what you learn to devise playbooks, guidelines, or other governance tools to help you better manage your programs. Most importantly, you’ll have demonstrated right out of the gate the value of gathering a cross-disciplinary team to solve a business problem through collaboration. And once you learn scenario modeling in practice, it’s a technique you can use to address unfamiliar business situations anywhere, anytime.



ShareFile helps us easily and securely send important documents and video material to our lawyers, experts, and clients wherever they are. Mike Doyle Doyle Razner LLP

3. Frameworks The very best, most successful and most sustainable collaborative cultures have invested in the infrastructure that allows it to be part of who they are, not just what they do. For many progressive companies, that means making “collaboration” not just something that’s nice to have, but something that is deliberately designed for. In an organization that has any level of complexity, that requires establishing both an accountability structure and a way for each part of the organization to be represented in strategic direction and planning efforts. Consider designing a Collaboration Hub or laboratory in your organization that can function as a collective authority and embassy for this mindset in your organization. Get representation in the Hub from across your company (all those same groups you used in your scenario modeling is a great start), and focus on involving those with a passion and enthusiasm for what collaboration can help accomplish. They can and should meet and work together on a regular basis, whether in person or virtually, and establish a vision and goals for the group that align collaboration with core business objectives.

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The Hub can also become the entity responsible for evaluating resources, reporting on initiatives to executive management, carrying back executive vision to share with the group (if an executive isn’t a regular participant), and developing a comprehensive collaboration program that considers mindset as well as practice, and how both can become better established within the business. By formalizing an infrastructure to support a collaboration culture, collaborators know they have resources and organizational support for their efforts, and the company has a scalable, sustainable structure that makes collaboration an integral function in the business rather than an abstract idea.

4. Internal community: Finding experts in residence You have a wealth of knowledge and expertise within your company, and much of it lies beyond the boundaries of individual job descriptions. Fostering a collaborative culture involves tapping into that knowledge freely and enthusiastically, and empowering individuals to not only contribute based on their specific role, but to become advocates for the potential of sharing and exchanging knowledge to improve outcomes and results throughout the company. Many organizations think about how collaboration can benefit their external initiatives: sales, marketing, product innovation, partnerships. But one of the most powerful benefits of collaboration is the establishment and nurturing of an internal community, engaging and connecting employees so that they are not only more invested in their jobs but in the culture and fabric of the organization. Find your Experts in Residence in different topics, letting them self-identify, connect with each other, and recognizing them as publicly and enthusiastically as possible. Task this group with helping to establish education programs for the organization on different topics, delivering workshops, webinars, or other interactive programs to help get other people immersed in and excited about new areas of expertise. Allow them the time and authority to explore topics outside their typical role to highlight the diversity of knowledge in your organization and provide satisfying, enriching experiences for the Experts in Residence. They can also be an excellent resource for developing some best practices or guidelines for collaboration within the company. Encourage your Experts in Residence to be ambassadors for the platforms and technology you’ve invested in to show others what’s possible with a combination of knowledge and tools.

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5. Pilot programs Establishing cultural behaviors isn’t an overnight process. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to do it through discussion and education alone. Teams and individuals need to see, touch, and feel the benefits of collaboration first hand in order to make a personal investment in it. And often, executive and leadership teams need to see how an initiative will work in practice at a smaller scale before they’re willing to fund a broader-scale or more permanent initiative. One of the best ways to test the potential advantages and challenges of collaboration in your organization is to establish a pilot project. Choose a specific business challenge you’re trying to solve, like a plan for a new product launch, or outlining an ongoing employee engagement initiative, or working with partners to come up with more innovative ways to leverage those relationships. Then ask for participants from all across the organization, at all levels, from the areas of the business that will be impacted—either directly or indirectly—by the project. Form a sort of ad-hoc project team that will be the “pilot crew” for this initiative. The more cross functional and diverse this team can be, the better. Remember, you’re working to solve a problem, but the long-term goal is to embed these kinds of approaches as cultural values for the organization. Meet regularly and consistently outline the goals, explain what sorts of things you hope to demonstrate (i.e. using collaborative practices to solve these problems), and track what you learn along the way, including both the challenges and the successes, many of which may be unexpected. Employ all the existing tools you have at your disposal, like web conferencing, collaboration platforms, and internal social communities. Resist the urge to rely solely on things like email for this purpose; you’re trying to show the potential of collaborative work and technology, and email’s closed system won’t cut it in the collaborative work environment. Pilot programs can be excellent for helping to secure buy-in for larger projects, and for demonstrating the real-world obstacles and benefits of having a collaborative culture. They can be run for a fixed amount of time (ex. 6 months) or for a relative amount of time (ex. until X goal has been achieved or a project milestone has been reached).

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The very practice of working together to solve a specific problem using collaboration principles is an excellent way to introduce the idea of collaboration as a core value that can be applied more universally.



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Collaboration Is Better Business Collaboration is more than just a “thing you do”. When it’s truly embraced as a core value for organizations, the spirit of working together, collectively solving problems and contributing to the intelligence of the business becomes simply a part of the spirit and mindset of the company. The future is in shifting collaboration from simply an operational practice to a cultural value, and something that we invest in with enthusiasm. As organizations become flatter and more distributed, and as the social web is compelling companies to be more nimble and adaptable, collaboration is and will continue to be a critical cultural pillar that businesses need to have in place in order to not just survive, but thrive.

1. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy

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Building a Collaborative Organization Collaborating well means ensuring that your entire company is prepared to take advantage of all of its opportunities. That means investing in not just operational improvements and project plans, but building the right cultural foundation. SideraWorks is the only firm dedicated to helping you adapt your organization to all of the implications of the social web and collaborative technologies. We can help you conduct a readiness assessment of your culture and existing programs, design a realistic collaboration roadmap that puts adoption at the forefront, and deliver in-depth MasterClasses so that your teams are educated and empowered to take on collaboration as a cause, not just a project. To learn more about SideraWorks services and expertise, visit sideraworks.com.

Collaborating with your team As your company embraces collaboration as a mindset, collaboration technologies can help you further implement collaboration company wide. Collaboration tools from Citrix help workforces stay connected. GoToMeeting allows you to meet face-to-face through video conferencing with anyone, anywhere, from any device. GoToWebinar with video conferencing facilitates large online meetings, like all-hands meetings, analyst briefings, and department updates, so your employees can join live and stay up to date on company information no matter where they are. And Podio connects teams and offices when they aren’t meeting online. With file storing, task management, project management, instant messaging, Podio integrates with ShareFile – a secure file sharing application that is accessible on any device – so you can work securely with your team from anywhere. To learn more about Citrix collaboration tools, visit www.citrix.com.

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