E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Don’t Underestimate the Power of (Social) Collaboration. It Is Not a Given

Ok, back to Social Business. After the last few days where I have been blogging a number of different times about some musings on redesigning and refining further along the workplace of the future, it’s time to get down to business again and continue to share further insights around social networking / computing for business or the good old Social Business itself. By the way, stay tuned because very soon I will be putting together an article where I will explain why I’m going to move away from the social business concept into another one that I think is much more accurate and fitting in helping explain where we are today with the whole mantra behind Social. But till then, how about if one of these days you come to work and you bump into a rather controversial article, a superb read, actually, that questions the whole social business industry, right where it hurts the most:  Social Networking for Business doesn’t count much on today’s CIO’s top priorities, after all. Disappointing or a huge opportunity? Both, eventually!

A couple of weeks back Prem Kumar Aparanji, a.k.a. Prem, put together an article where he was reflecting on a recent research study by Gartner (Strongly recommend going through the links he references to get a better grasp of what the survey tried to accomplish), where some really interesting data came up; the most thought-provoking piece was probably that one where it was mentioned how Social Networking (for business) wasn’t a top priority for CIO’s out there in 2012. Not all CIOs though, but about 100 of them who took part in the survey study, which I still think is significant enough to notice. You would expect that it would be rather worrying that, still in 2012, the whole area of Social gets questioned and even misses the point of reaching the Top 10 priority list from CIOs. In this case it comes up as the 11th priority. And, it may well be, indeed, worrying to some extent, but it is not new. It’s been happening all along for a good number of years already. But with a different name. 

Indeed, I am referring to good old Knowledge Management and Collaboration, once again, just to detail a bit more the parallel roads both fields have been running all along. And it’s interesting to notice how when I used to work within the European Knowledge Management deployment team inside IBM, about 11 years ago, we faced the very same upsetting reality: KM (And Collaboration, for that matter), wasn’t the business top priority at the time. In fact, it didn’t even show up on the Top 20 priority list for Lines of Business. Thus, a few years later, seeing how social business is coming into the Top #11 is not such a bad achievement. On the contrary. Lots of opportunity in here!

So, I know what you are thinking now, if social is not in the Top 10 priority list from (some) CIOs why is that? I mean, what’s happened for that scenario to be so gloomy and yet strike us as a common reality for the last 18 years and counting… First with KM and Collaboration back then and nowadays with Social Business. Well, I am not sure what you folks would think, but I tell you what my gut feeling has been telling me all along: KM, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Social Networking AND online communities have always been “taken as a given” by both IT and the business. And the higher you go in the organisation the much more ingrained that perception of being a given it is.

Just think about it. When was the last time that you, as a knowledge worker, received some kind of formal, (or informal) training, or education, for that matter around how to collaborate effectively, or share your knowledge in a much more open, transparent and public manner? Even through email (Yes, I know, quite an oxymoron right there, right?!?). Probably never, I would guess. But then again when you join a company that’s one of the traits that is expected of you: be a team sports, of a rather open and collaborative manner, that is, a good team player who can collaborate across the board, otherwise it would be rather tough. Or simply put in another way, in today’s current working environment, would you be capable of getting work done on your own, in a single project, on a single team, and with a single set of priorities and goals without having to collaborate with others? I will go and answer that one for you… You won’t. You never have. You never will. 

That’s why collaboration, whether traditional or social, is no longer a nice-thing-to-have but more than anything else a business imperative. Yet, it’s hardly embraced by the corporate world. Why? Because everyone feels that every single knowledge worker out there is a collaborator by nature and as such it’s a given that everyone would know how to collaborative effectively. When we know that’s not going to happen, at all, and to prove that we have got the perfect example that’s been demonstrating and showcasing it decade in decade out and we are still struggling with it: email.

I probably don’t need to say much more about it, right? Although I can perhaps formulate a single question to try to address and answer that concern: do you feel you are effective and productive enough in your day to day collaborative work today using email, or traditional knowledge based repositories for that matter? Like I said, no need to provide an answer on that one, although I think we all know it already. I think we all know what really needs to happen to turn that situation around 180 degrees and start thinking it’s a good time to shift gears and realise about a single fact that would change the way we do work today: never underestimate the power of (social) collaboration. 

Whether you are the CIO, the CFO, or from whatever other high end of the org chart, you should always consider the fact that not everyone is a true collaborator, that not everyone knows, and fully understands, how to use (social) collaborative tools, that not every knowledge worker out there would know how to get work done in a open, collaborative, transparent and public manner and that as such you would need to accommodate an opportunity for knowledge workers to get properly trained not only on how to make use of the various knowledge sharing, collaborative and social networking tools, but also the behaviours that would involve such change. Social collaboration is all about a mindset. In fact, I would come to question the validity of using social networking tools to collaborate effectively. You can still do that, that is, become much more open, public, transparent, trustworthy, engaged, committed, etc. etc. without perhaps even relying on (social) tools. They are more cultural traits of how knowledge gets shared across. And for that, it’s always important to have the right level of support and don’t expect other people to embrace new ways of working, because they are just simply not going to work. 

That’s why the role of executives, in whatever the organisation, is so important and rather critical, and in the context of social business, even more! Because knowledge workers, as they become more aware and excited about new, smarter ways of getting work done, would need plenty of support, sponsorship, servant leadership, commitment and proper attention to ensure the right mix is put together. I mean, imagine what would have happened if back in the day, folks would have been educated, and trained, on how to use email properly as a powerful collaborative and knowledge sharing tool, instead of being considered today a huge productivity drain, provoked by ourselves, in the first place! 

That’s certainly something that we wouldn’t want to have around nowadays with regards to Social Business, don’t you think? Take, as an example, the recent entry posted over at Mashable under the suggestive title “5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work” and think about it for a little bit. Here are those productivity wasters: 

1. “Trying to contact customers or colleagues
2. Trying to find key information
3. Duplicating communications
4. Attempting to schedule meetings
5. Unwanted communications”

Now, if your company suffers from any of those business pain points, do you feel that having proper education and training on social networking tools AND habits would help you address and fix some of them accordingly? Take the example of tagging. Done and shown properly, it’ll help address #1, #2 and #3 right there! With very little effort, and yet with tremendous potential and huge benefits. And that’s just tagging. Think now of the huge amount of unwanted communications you could reduce by adopting that social mantra of narrating your work, working out loud or just simply observable work. And the list of use cases goes on and on and on… Here’s another one: how much time do knowledge workers waste on inefficient meetings? Those meetings they get dragged into time and time again for hours no end every single day. Well, imagine what it would be like if those same knowledge workers would reduce, dramatically, the time they spend on meetings and get work done smarter, not necessarily harder, using social, collaborative and knowledge sharing tools. 

Still think that Social Collaboration is a given, and therefore should not be in your Top 5 priority list? Hmmm, you may need to re-think again the business pain points you are trying to assess and a find a solution for. Because you may have it already right there! Waiting for you … 

Engineering Life Work Integration

I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well need to do so! As we may be missing far too much of what really matters… because of work.

Like I said above, the video is a short, crisp and rather powerful awakening call for all of those knowledge workers out there who may feel that their job is eating up not only all of their work time, but also most of their personal time, along the way, too! Now, I understand the video has got some strong language, but I think Pam gets the point across very nicely and in a tone that while I understand may not be getting through for some folks, I think it’s all just too down to earth, and rather realistic on helping everyone understand where we are and how we may need to keep on challenging a good number of the presumptions that we have always been taking for granted in a business environment when talking about work time AND personal time.

“Go the F*ck Home: Engineering Work/Life Balance” is a rather provocative watch, for sure, but well worth the time to discover the real consequences of working overtime, of giving up your time, just like that!, for free, of constantly being used (and treated!) as an asset, of showing how there are better, smarter ways of getting the job done, of re-focusing on what you would need to do and do it!, in the time that you have been allotted, so that you, too, could get a life. I loved her comment about naming more than two things that we all get to do outside of work and if you can’t name more than two, you have got a problem. Indeed! Too much work time, too little play, personal time! Priceless!

You see? It looks like the best option for all of us is to have an escape plan, something else to do, other than work, to occupy our time during the course of the day, when we are no longer working, and still have the feeling we are achieving something meaningful. And all of this going all the way to the top, including management!, who should be acting as leading examples, in the first place, helping their employees understand that they, too, have got a life and therefore should leave work, and do something else, before they would come to realise that their knowledge workers may be rather unhappy with their overall jobs, just as much as they themselves. When we all know that happy employees are the ones who produce the better outcomes: happy customers. After all, if Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg can do it, why can’t everyone else, right? What’s our excuse?

And if you need an escape plan, how about having a vacation? That would probably help out everyone out there start up with making that separation between work and personal life, right? And stick around with it altogether as well, upon your return. After all, we all know how beneficial, relaxing, chilling, unwinding and healthy it is to take a good long vacation, of, at least, two weeks disconnecting from everything for optimal results (Yes, even my own boss is confirming that!). Even better, we all know and embrace the many other good benefits from having unlimited vacation days, as I have also blogged about in the recent past sharing the experience of the delightful Maggie Fox from Social Media Group So why not do it? No, don’t worry, contrary to what most people would think, knowledge workers, in general, would not slack off. Why? Because they are hard working professionals, remember?, the ones you hired in the first place, the ones who you have trusted all along to do the right thing, i.e. getting their work done. So they are not going to abuse it. All the other way around! They are going to become even more productive and effective at what they do and work harder, because they are the first interested parties in keeping things that way!

Ohhh, that you cannot take vacation, because you can’t afford it? Even your work project won’t allow it? Well, let’s take it into the next level… How about *not* having any vacation, nor off sick time altogether? Let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s wipe out the entire concept of taking a vacation from the workplace and instead, like my good friend Kevin Jones blogged about just recently, let’s introduce this rather fascinating and refreshing new policy: “Need it, Take it“, which goes pretty much as follows:

“If you need time off, take it.  If you are sick, stay home.  Just continue to do amazing work“

Yes, I know, if you have been reading this far you are probably thinking I am just crazy. But why not? Why couldn’t we just live without vacation days and, instead, shift gears ourselves and change mindsets thinking that you may not need to have a fixed vacation period eventually, but, maybe what you need is just taking the time off, when you need it, for the time you consider responsibly enough to take off and just go ahead and do it! Knowing that it will happen when you know it will have the least impact on the business. Your business.

Smart companies like Evernote are already doing it and proving that it can be done and I guess at this point in time you may be wondering what you would need to do in order to make it happen for yourself, right? Well, something relatively simple: just ask! You know, like I have always been telling people, if you don’t ask, you already got the “No!” for an answer; if you do ask and get a “No!” for an answer, that’s just totally fine, remember you already had it. But if you get a “Yes!” for an answer you may find yourself you are right on track and you got it! A win-win situation for everyone, because when you get that “Yes!” you would probably be *the* most interested party in keeping things going that way. And I can’t blame you. I would do the very exact same as you would be doing. In fact, I have already been doing it myself for the last 8 years working AND living in Gran Canaria. Remember, for many years I didn’t ask, so I had a “No!” already. But then, one day, I eventually asked, took the risk, a good chance that things could work out, and, I got it! I got the “Yes!” and two weeks later I moved permanently to Gran Canaria where I have been living and working ever since. And still having a blast!

But if you don’t ask, if you don’t provoke that conversation to take place, it will never happen. So you are back to square one. And I am not sure what you would think, but I do believe it’s worth while taking the risk of asking away (your immediate management or whoever else), because in a way you are also helping your management line to understand how they need to shift gears themselves and instead of measuring your performance by the amount of hours and days that you work, they would probably be much better off measuring your overall outcomes, your deliverables, your output, and understand fully how, in a good number of times, you would be providing that extra level of top quality value by taking time off to focus on what you need to focus on: yourself. Re-energise, charge your batteries and come back for more!

After all, it’s a beautiful, wonderful world out there and every extra hour that we spend doing overtime or not having that time off for ourselves to do other things as part of that personal work life integration strategy you should all start working your way through on it, you are losing out. And you are losing big. As big and mind-blowing as this:

Don’t you think it’s worth while asking after all? Don’t you think it’s a good time now to take your life back and instead of talking about work life integration you start living more that life work integration for yourself and for what really matters?

You bet!

Addressing Social Networking Gripes with Shared Value

I am sure that if I would go and ask you folks about naming over here some of your pet peeves from traditional collaborative and knowledge sharing tools, you would probably be getting on a roll for a good while and share all of those gripes you have been exposed to and that you wish something could be done about them. I am sure that if I would go ahead and ask you the very same question for social networking tools, they may not well be the same pet peeves, but I am certain you could name quite a few of them as well. No doubt! Well, that’s exactly what the folks from Dice News did just recently, while at SXSW, by interviewing a whole bunch of people about that topic. Calling it rather revealing, thought-provoking, mind-bloggling and sobering would probably fall short altogether. Just think of it, what’s your social media pet peeve? Ready?

Hang on for a minute though. Let’s go first and have a look into what some of the folks who were interviewed briefly by Dice News said about what were their main gripes with regards to social networking tools and the Social Web in general. Here’s the embedded video clip that lasts for a little bit under two minutes and which can surely make up as well for some really good fun to kick-off another week at work! Get your bingo cards out as well to see how many of those pet peeves you get to experience during the course of the day and check them all off! Oh, and don’t cheat!! This one is going to hurt a bit! Here it comes:

Frightening, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think about this one, but when I watched it for the first time I just couldn’t help identifying a good number of the same reasons why I stopped using corporate email at work living “A World Without Email” over four years ago, without opening up another can of worms along on my pet peeves on corporate email itself, thinking we could do better, much better, with social technologies, to help make us much more effective and productive at what we do at work, and yet we are finding out, probably through the hard way, that’s everything, but helping us out!

I am sure that at this point in time you may be wondering what would be my main gripes, right? Well, at the moment, and judging by my own user experience over the course of the years I guess I could just nail it down, for me, to three different items:

• Social technologies themselves: I mean, when was the last time you were 100% happy and content with the potential and your overall end-user experience from any of the external social networking tools out there, as well as your favourite Enterprise Social Software platform? If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you can see how I still think we are at the infancy of defining truly inspiring, engaging, rewarding social technologies experiences and, when we do we seem to nail it, we mess up with other things like privacy, security, copyright infringements, and whatever else. And we are back to square one.
• Think of social networking as just another marketing channel: This just would apply not only to Marketing and Communications, for which it’s a given, as I am sure you would agree with it if you have been exposed to either of those groups in social channels, as they themselves call them. Well, no, this is out for everyone who thinks that social tools are just another means of blasting out messages, their messages, broadcasting them along with very little interaction along the way. If anything, social networking is all about building strong personal business relationships, networks of people with a common interest, a common passion, wanting to do things better at their jobs, while still having fun, and still learning along the way. Remember “Life in perpetual beta?” Well, 10 years later, it’s still about conversations!
• Distraction: This is probably the one that most of us would feel identified with big time and probably right so, because the amount of noise one gets exposed to over the course of the day on the Social Web is starting to become mind-boggling, if not too worrying! Never mind my cry-out from a few weeks back about embracing a much more focused and purposeful social networking experience. We still aren’t there yet! Therefore, we need to work harder, smarter, on it.

And we probably won’t be able to address it and fix it properly during the course of 2012 either, as my good friend, Bill Johnston, annotated a couple of days back on a brilliant tweet he shared over at his stream:

IMHO, we will look back at 2010-2012 as period of mass distraction on the social web, vs. 2013 relationship building & focus on shared value

— Bill Johnston (@billjohnston) April 2, 2012

Spot on! That’s what I will certainly be looking into over the course of the next few months, so that when 2013 kicks in, I’ll be ready, if you can ever say that for the Social Web, because you are never ready. It’s a constant learning experience where every day there are dozens of new precious gems you get exposed to that you didn’t know were going to help or benefit you, and, yet, there they are for you to embrace them and make you better at what you do, if you can find them amongst that noise, that is.

So, a little bit of homework for us social networkers out there, I would think, if we would want to turn the tide around of bumping into more and more pet peeves around social technologies, and our consistent and growing abuse of them! We may as well start doing something about it, before it’s too late and break them like we have done with *cough* email *cough* over the course of the years. Now, I am not going to propose what folks can do, or should do, about it, since I have always felt it’s a very personal opinion, and experience, engaging with social networking tools, which is also the main reason why I have never believed in best practices for social networking in the first place, nor for knowledge work, for that matter! There aren’t any! What works for some people may not work for others, so where is the “best” in that? (More on this topic on an upcoming blog post, not to worry… hehe).

What I’m planning on doing myself though is continue to focus and redefine the purpose of my social presence, both internal and external, with simple activities like doing a bit of virtual hygiene of the social tools I rely the most on, like Twitter and Google Plus, for instance, so that over time I can continue to fine tune the overall experience, reduce the noise to a certain degree, and bring back that building of personal business relationships that Bill mentioned on that tweet, but, specially, focus, even more, on that shared value, because, at the end of the day social networking for business is all about: the value add (that shared value) you can provide to those who care about you and your business. And that all starts by asking yourself how can I help you today to become better at what you do?

Let’s bring back the focus on the WE, and move on from the ME. We will all be much better off. I can guarantee you all that!