Time to rethink your collaboration strategy: Enable a hybrid workforce by applying a design-led approach
Collaboration remains a significant challenge across many companies. This was the case for a recent client who was a Director responsible for the Digital Portfolio in a large multinational organisation. He, like many Business and IT Decision makers, spend a considerable amount of time and money researching new technologies to buy or latest features to upgrade to or roll out. The jolt into remote working led by Covid19, the ‘Chief Digital Officer of 2020’ suddenly exposed holes in his enterprise collaboration stack and he observed a significant rise in Shadow IT activities. Rather than plaster over the holes with yet more technology spend, he sought to take a step back and use the opportunity to rethink and develop a comprehensive collaboration strategy that fixed issues at their root causes and design solutions that would enable hybrid ways of working, saving costs in the long run.
As we start to see glimpses of the end to the Covid19 pandemic, now is the time for you to evolve from a reactive, tech-driven approach to a more design-led collaboration strategy that can drive advantages for workforce productivity, open, diverse and inclusive engagement, and facilitate innovation across organisational silos.
Find the right balance between physical and digital experiences.
Replacing traditional physical office experiences with digital experiences is challenging and often not the desired target state. We still yearn for those unplanned unexpected occurrences, corridor moments and coffee corner chats where people casually catch up on the latest opportunities, exciting new initiatives or find out where projects may be struggling. The current digital alternative involves a series of intentional, sometimes recorded, timeboxed back-to-back meetings with set agendas. Digital experiences enable new opportunities for creating content that can be stored, shared and referred back to at a later date. Yet, the trust relationship between colleagues is simply not the same, and the risk of information leaks and security attacks is higher than ever. We have to accept that working in a shared physical and digital world is our new reality and risks and rewards must be equally balanced.
Expect technological innovation to unlock new possibilities.
Competition spurs innovation especially among technology providers who have been rapidly evolving their collaboration products this year to accommodate emergent user needs and expectations. For example, Zoom’s Breakout Rooms was a huge success and drove competitors to respond quickly with Microsoft launching its own variant in its recent release. Online whiteboarding is another key battleground with leaders like Miro defending their early dominance whilst other platforms play catch up. Looking ahead into 2021, Enterprise Content Services platforms like Office 365, Google Workspace will continue to release new, smarter feature updates that make extensive use of AI. M&A activity will continue to build on the momentum this year from Salesforce’s $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack and Asana’s direct IPO listing earlier this year.
Create a map of your current collaboration architecture.
When rethinking your collaboration strategy, you want to start by upgrading your employees’ value proposition before thinking about technology products. By applying a design-led approach, you can concentrate on where value can be created connecting business, experiences and technology together:
Business: Document how collaboration enables clear objectives and key results in your transformation agenda. Explore how your current Operating model, Knowledge management capabilities and Knowledge Assets facilitate successful collaboration across teams. Record investments and returns from previous collaboration initiatives.
Experiences: Build a snapshot of the cultures and attitudes to collaboration through interviews and surveys of teams’ activities, frustrations and challenges. Identify teams who are collaboration champions, and what rhythms, rituals and routines they adopt that can be scaled. Create experiments to test and baseline information discovery and content sharing practices.
Technology: Review organisational policies on information security, data sharing, and content management. Capture existing systems and tools that facilitate collaboration, their use cases, user logs of utilization and incidents.
Start by solving basic collaboration challenges first.
Employees often face obstacles around seemingly routine tasks like recalling relevant search keywords in an acronym-filled organisation, finding documents and their correct versions especially for new joiners, and sharing documents across teams, within and outside the company. Amidst all the tech activity, many organisations easily fall into the temptation of putting their efforts in acquiring or upgrading to the latest, shiny collaboration tool. Blind adoption of collaboration technology can directly harm productivity causing duplication and confusion, reinventing the wheel and scaling both desired and undesired practices. Organisations face the risk of limiting potential returns from investments and suppressing the full potential of the solutions available to them. By working from a comprehensive collaboration strategy and engaging employees every step of the way, you can identify quick wins to start with and accelerate your time to value.
