The Rise of the Engaged Enterprise

A pervasive lack of focus is epidemic in today’s workplace, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the New York Times, the average American worker consumes 34 gigabytes of information and reads 100,000 words in a single day. At the same time, employees are constantly shifting their attention; computer users change windows or check email and other programs an average of 37 times an hour. Multitasking is no longer an art but a norm. 

Distraction is one of the most destructive forces facing businesses today. This lack of engaged focus rapidly erodes a company’s productivity, but it doesn’t limit itself to employees alone. Disengagement has an equally negative impact on key audiences like customers and partners as well.

The Risks of Distraction

Customers: Your customers are confronted with more competing messages, more options and more distractions than ever before. More than 30 billion apps have been installed on mobile devices, where people are spending 94 minutes a day — even more than the 75 minutes they’re spending on the web.

Employees: With additional email overload, internal instant messaging platforms, social media platforms and open work environments, employees are bombarded by distractions throughout the day. When an employee doesn’t remain focused on the job at hand, they find themselves forced to work longer hours, later into the night and on weekends to compensate. This can quickly lead to burn-out and disengagement. Accord to Gallup, 50 percent of employees today are disengaged at work, costing U.S. business US$ 300 billion per year in lost productivity.

Partners: The same distractions tugging at our customers and employees are also impacting our partners. Beyond the obstacles mentioned above, partners are struggling to keep up with the training and products of every OEM they represent. Partners are asked to take training courses, register deals and connect with customers, all while trying to keep their heads afloat. Our partners are suffering from an understandable lack of focus, and companies that become complacent about their partner networks are inviting significant risk.

The Elements of Focus

Having realized the importance of keeping audiences as focused as possible, businesses are making every attempt to achieve focus. When looking at examples where focus is regularly achieved, we find a common set of elements that include:

• A clearly defined goal
• A system of measurable progress leading to that goal
• A notion of status against achieving that goal
• A reward for reaching the goal

The focus concepts of goals, progress, status and reward aren’t novel; they’re often used concepts that appeal to the human psyche (e.g. Frequent Flyer Programs). But today’s games target more digitally sophisticated players and therefore require a more intricate and involved playing field.

Putting Games to Work

Just putting basic elements in front of individuals isn’t enough. Over the past several years, a growing number of businesses have started investing in gamification technologies to bring focus mechanics — goals, progress, status and rewards — into their digital experiences.

Gamification helps businesses engage with customers and motivate employees. By applying the same principles that inspire people to play games to websites and other online experiences, businesses can dramatically increase the size of their audiences, boost customer engagement, drive deeper employee motivation and increase revenues.

In effect, businesses are transforming themselves into “Engaged Enterprises,” a term that refers to leading-edge companies that are successfully engaging every aspect of their organizations into cohesive, collaborative, loyal and focused communities. These companies, such as IBM, Cisco, Jive and Bluewolf, are characterized by highly active, loyal and focused customers, employees and partners and they realize that through the adoption of gamification technology, they can gain a competitive advantage across every spectrum of their businesses.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Six Core Digital Workplace Capabilities: Designing with the Workforce in Mind

There has been much buzz lately about the results from a study by McKinsey Global Institute, which estimated that knowledge worker productivity could potentially be increased with 20-25 percent with use of social technologies. Whether or not these figures are realistic or not, they point to the great potential for improving knowledge work and how social technologies can play a key role in unlocking that potential.

It's clear that to realize even a tiny bit of the potential hinted at in the study, we cannot continue being blinded by technology, putting technology first and people second. The failure of technology-centric approaches was recently illustrated by the findings of the 4th annual IT Adoption Insight Report produced by Oracle UPK together with Neochange. The study found that technology-centric organizations spend 2 to 3 times as much money on technology than organizations taking a more user-centric approach, yet the latter proved to be more profitable, indicating there is substantial ROI in becoming more user-centric.

The failure of the technology-centric approach to improving knowledge work is a major reason why new concepts such as “Digital Workplace” have a reason for existence. The Digital Workplace encourages us to take a more holistic approach when designing the digital work environment for an organization’s workforce. Rather than focusing on the individual solutions and tools such as intranet sites, collaboration tools, communication tools and productivity tools, we need to start with identifying the needs of the organization and its people and take a holistic approach to designing their digital workplace.

Questions such as “Should we replace our intranet with a social networking platform” are totally irrelevant and symptoms of technology-centric thinking that will be a sure path to failure. What we should think about instead is what capabilities a digital workplace needs to provide the organization and the people it should serve. These capabilities should be made available to people as services, designed to fit different usage situations, enabling them to get things done in the most efficient and effective way (see illustration below).

      

In this article I will highlight and take a closer look at six capabilities that should be the core of the digital workplace for many organizations.

1. Coordinating

Workspace awareness is about our ability to monitor and keep track of what’s happening at work: who is doing what, who is interacting with whom, whose turn it is to contribute, and so on. Having workspace awareness is essential if you are to coordinate your work with other people’s work.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that creating workspace awareness, and thus coordinating work, becomes a challenge in a distributed and complex work environment. At the same time, the need for effective coordination among different teams becomes increasingly important as the interdependencies between teams as well as the pace of change increase.

The problem is that many current digital work environments primarily have been designed for personal productivity, focusing on supporting individual tasks and less on the coordination of tasks and fundamentals such as creating workspace awareness. Ironically this has contributed to making people less productive and feeling isolated and disengaged.

What is lacking in most digital work environments is a really intelligent system that helps people quickly build workspace awareness and makes work visible. To help individuals and teams create workspace awareness that simplifies coordination, awareness tools such as activity streams can be introduced. Besides signaling to people so they know when it is their time to contribute, an activity stream can help them discover relevant information and external dependencies that they need to be aware off.

In other words, an activity stream can help to reduce workplace uncertainty so that people can make the required decisions and take action. Activity streams can also help to decrease workplace isolation. In a large and dispersed workforce, awareness tools can help bring people closer to each other and make them feel less isolated.

2. Finding People

"At the very least, our systems should help us find each other"

— Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText

Finding the right people is one of the most common needs in organizations and sometimes a very difficult task in a big organization. The bigger and more distributed an organization gets, the harder it is to know who is working for the same organization, what they know and what, how and where they could contribute.

The first step in getting to know someone and building a relationship is to be aware about that person's existence. This makes discovery tools important. If our systems can help us discover other people we could benefit from knowing about, maybe because they share a common interest with us or possess a skill that we might be in need of, chances are we will get much better at matching the right person for the right job. Doing so is a key to success in a business. Otherwise they might be wasting their talent and skills on something they are not suited for, and you might miss out on having person on your project that could be the difference between your team's success and failure.

Rich profiles are necessary components in solutions for finding and discovering people. Rich profiles give employees the ability to create an online presentation of themselves and their skills, interests, education, memberships and so forth. At the very least, a rich profile should include a photo of each employee.

The importance of a simple thing like adding a photo of yourself so that colleagues who don’t know you can put a face to your name cannot be stressed enough. For one thing, the photo will make it easier to remember your name and seeing the individual behind the name. You will become familiar to them, making it easier for you to have textual conversations.

3. Networking

In their research paper “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks,” Aral, Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne showed that people's social networks are very important to the information system in an organization as their networks “strongly influence information diffusion … and access to novel information.”

Information diffusion in organizations follows the structure of our relationships with each other, and having access to the right tools for building and maintaining relationships as well as for disseminating information through our social networks can have significant impact on the effectiveness of an organization’s information system.

An MIT study from 2009 by A. Pentland (pdf) showed that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7 percent more productive than their colleagues. Another study from 2009, sponsored by NEHRA and Partnering Resources, set out to answer the question of whether or not networking actually makes a difference for the success or failure of change initiatives. The study found that 73 percent of the least successful change initiatives were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks, and that 93 percent of the successful change initiatives were led by leaders with strong or very strong personal networks.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com