When you think about it there are really only two things that are unique to every individual, their email and their phone number.  This is important when we talk about emergent collaboration especially when the topic of moving people away from email comes up.  I know that there are many people who believe in the death of email, minimizing the usage of email, or perhaps switching people away from email to another platform, but I don’t think this is really going to happen.

Let’s assume for a moment that there was no email and you wanted to get in touch with me, your options would be to leave a comment on my blog (assuming you read it), send me a message or a reply on twitter (assuming you use the service and can find me), a note on linkedin (again assuming you can find me), or a facebook message (also assuming you can find me and can friend me).  Now let’s say I get 50 messages a day on various platforms, this becomes inconsistent and inconvenient both for me and for the people trying to get in touch with me.  Now, if you are a colleague of mine you can use the phone, an internal collaboration tool (assuming there is a standard platform for this), or perhaps you can come over to my office.  Furthermore, we start to run into problems with archiving, labeling, attachments, and a host of other things that email has become very good at.  When we have someone’s social media account we are never sure if we can really get in touch with them.  Email on the other hand is one of the few constants we have when it comes to communication.  Not only that but email is oftentimes required to access entire websites or download pieces of content.  Virtually any service you sign up for any product you order requires you to enter an email address.

Collaboration platforms today don’t have standards, meaning that every platform can handle data in their own way, on their own technology, and in their own format.  Thus if you wish to switch from one platform to another and wish to take your data with you then you’re going to have to do some work to make that happen.  Collaboration platforms are not constant regardless of how hard they try to be. Not everyone uses them the same way, some uses multiple platforms, and some prefer not to use anything at all.

What’s happening right now is organizations are trying to develop central hubs for their organizations aka “the front door for the enterprise,” meaning one place that employees can go to in order to access all of their information, a work “command center.”  While many vendors are attempting to do this there isn’t really anything that can come close to solving this problem.  Vendors are spending a lot of time focusing on integration, in other words, being able to pull in multiple systems into a single system, clearly something that is quite costly, time consuming, in most likely never ending.

But, let’s remember that everyone has two single unique identifiers, their email and their phone number, chances are that one of these things can be annotated to everything that someone does from sharing a piece of content, to engaging with a customer, to sending a colleague a message.

I wonder if integration is really the answer here.  Maybe instead we should be looking at aggregation and filtering instead of continuously trying to fit one system into another.  I actually believe that email can be the solution to this problem because it is a constant that you know everyone you communicate with uses.

So here is the puzzle, knowing that virtually everyone on the planet has two unique identifiers, an email address and a phone number, what would you devise to allow for collaboration and communication among employees and among people in general?

I’m going to talk about this more in upcoming posts as I have several ideas.

I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently titled, “Do Happier People Work Harder?”  I think the title pretty much sums up what this is all about but the research cited in the article was quite interesting (taken verbatim):

• Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before
• Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually
• Inner work life has a profound impact on workers’ creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality
• Employees are far more likely to have new ideas on days when they feel happier
• Of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work
• 95 percent of these (surveyed) managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses

Now what’s particularly interesting about all of this is that nothing here has anything to do with technology, with workflow, with integration, or with any types of features of products.  I keep reading a lot of articles written by my peers in the space who continuously stress the non-human factors which influence collaboration.  However what we should instead be looking at is how collaboration can solve some of the problems mentioned above.  What if instead of focusing on engagement, productivity, and decreased email we focused simply on making our employees happier.  Could the single greatest metric for the success of emergent collaboration be company morale or employee attitudes?  Based on the article and the research it looks like that can very well be the case.

I don’t read many posts about using employee attitudes and morale as measures of success.  Instead we are all trying to look at hard numbers for how much email has decreased, how much more information is categorized, and how much better our productivity numbers are.  We are not treating the cause we are simply treating symptoms.  We should shift gears and focus on our employees as people and on how emergent collaboration can help our people feel better about the work that they do and how we can further support “progress in meaningful work.”

I believe that emergent collaboration can help people feel better about the work they do because it will help them understand how the organization as a whole operates and how their contributions influence and affect business decisions.  Employees also have the opportunity to be recognized for the work they do not just by managers but by peers and colleagues, which is just as equally important.  Employees forming communities of interest and practice can also help spur innovation and spark creativity.

If we decrease the amount of email by 10% or improve productivity by 10% is that a success?  What if employees feel like shit in the process and don’t feel fulfilled?  We are focusing on the entity as a whole instead of on the parts that actually make up that entity, this is a mistake.

The topic of risk isn’t new and I’ve discussed it here along with a risk assessment framework.  However the typical types of risks we keep hearing about are those which pertain to the company as an entity.  What about actual risks to employees that work at these organizations?  We haven’t really spent enough time talking about these things have we?  Think about it, what are the risks for employees using these tools at their companies?

One of the biggest risks that employees face is the fear of looking stupid in front of co-workers.  It’s blunt but it’s true, in fact this is the exact wording that was used several times by employees who described their risks to me.  It’s almost silly but at the same time it’s very real, nobody wants to look stupid especially in front of co-workers.  This was a problem that was experienced at Oce when they first rolled out their collaboration tools, nobody wanted to participate because of the fear of being judged and being perceived as being weak and stupid in front of colleagues.

Imagine your an employee at a large company that just rolled out a collaboration platform.  Let’s say you have a few questions on a project your working on or need some help with something, would you be willing to publicly admit your weakness or tell your colleagues and co-workers that you are unable to do something that you were assigned?  The reality is that many employees at companies are not comfortable with sharing such information, especially when many organizations are so competitive with employees going up against each other for the same job.

Other risks that employees personally face are:

• time and effort needed to learn a new technology which can cause a temporary slow down in productivity
• not wanting to share information because employees might lose their competitiveness
• risk of other people taking credit for or using work that employees share

Regardless of how great a product is or how integrated it is into employee workflows, if employees don’t feel comfortable using it for whatever reason then they aren’t going to use it.  Let’s not forget about the very real human and personal aspects of emergent collaboration.

What other risks do you believe employees are faced with?

I’ve really become quite fond of the work that Simon Sinek and Brene Brown have been doing (independently).  I was at a client conference in Vegas last week and was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Brown speak live at the event.  Both Simon and Brene talk quite a bit about motivation and inspiration, two things which are quite relevant to collaboration.  Dr. Brown and Simon both look at motivation as being synonymous with manipulation, that is rewarding or incentivising people to take a desired action.  Simple examples of this are seen in what is now being called “gamifcation” where employees are rewarded with badges, points, levels, and status upgrades. The problem with motivation is that it doesn’t create loyalty, it doesn’t build trust, and it doesn’t do anything for employee passion.

Inspiration on the other hand leads to action not because of an artificial reward but because of something natural and organic.  People that donate their time to build orphanages or help people in need don’t do it because of motivation, they do it because of inspiration, they do it because they believe in what it is they are doing.  This belief and this organic pull to do something is the difference between motivation and inspiration.  As long as organizations continue to focus on superficial rewards and points they will have a very hard time inspiring those around them to take profound action.  Motivation can easily be programmatic, you do a certain amount of actions and get rewarded, keep doing those actions and you rise a level and get featured on the leader-board.  Inspiration on the other hand is human and can NEVER be programmatic.

Does this mean that motivation is bad?  I’m not sure if I’d take it that far.  I know virtually all emergent collaboration platforms (and many other companies) are integrating badges, points, and other reward mechanisms into their platforms to help employees take action on something.  Heck, I know that this type of motivation works for me when it comes time to fly with an airline and even though I don’t like United Airlines, I still give them my money because I have status with them and get flyer points.  However, where I think organizations fall short today is by only focusing on motivation and completely ignoring the enormous power that emergent collaboration can have on inspiration.

Emergent collaboration platforms offer organizations the ability to discover employee passions, beliefs, and interests (among other things) which are key pieces needed to inspire.  So while many are thinking of ways to motivate think of what you can do to inspire because inspiration is what makes people and companies great.

Just because something good or bad happens when we interact with a brand doesn’t mean they get social business or that they don’t get social business.  It’s not quite so simple to paint every organization with such a broad brush, especially when social business today doesn’t really mean anything, ask several people to explain it and you will get many different responses.

Companies aren’t as simple as would like them to be, they can’t just change something because we want them to (look at the airline industry as a simple example).  We don’t know the inner workings of most businesses today and because of our ignorance it’s very easy to call-out or praise a company for doing something.  Let’s all just take a big breathe and put away our “social business” paint brushes until the walls really get dirty.