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How Executives Intentionally Create a Culture of Collaboration

John is an average person of the workforce. A 4-year veteran, he has worked at the same company since he moved on from the military and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Now, with newborn twins at home, John’s priorities have changed. While he remains a professional committed to his career and his employer, he now requires more flexibility in his work schedule.

John is not alone. Many members of today’s workforce are asking for more flexible work schedules. In one study, 45 percent of men want more flexibility in their work arrangements. (Surprisingly, that’s slightly more than the 39 percent of women who want the same thing.)

Adding to the complexity, Microsoft Office observes in their eBook “5 Faces of Today’s Employees” that “you’ll find a variety of employees spanning different work styles, personality types, skillsets, and generations” all working together in one organization. Management nightmare? Only if you’re unprepared.

Because of changing work expectations and longer hours, there’s greater pressure on executives to respond with more modern work practices. Specifically, schedules that allow for employees to have more choice over where they work and when. Google, for example, understands that traffic patterns in the morning aren’t helpful to Dads and Moms who need to drop off the kids to school. Employees can come in after 9am without hassle from management.

Employee work styles range along a continuum of “give me quiet” to “make it loud.” Their expectations of the tools to help them work virtually or in the same space range from using email to the having access to the latest collaboration tool.

The truth is work and non-work demands no longer neatly fall within their supposed boundaries.

The good news is technological collaborative-solutions have made it easier to pair them with business practices. Collaboration has become a fluid interaction, no matter the physical location of the employee.

For many executives, however, the question remains: how do you successfully implement a collaborative solution that satisfies the needs of your employees while also meeting the sometimes competing – even contradictory – needs of the business?

Begin with Understanding Generational Differences

When Work Works, a joint project between SHRM and The Families and Work Institute, found that over 4 out 5 people say work flexibility is a critical factor when considering or taking a new job. Beyond the obvious implications of this finding lies a significant workforce expectation: Employees have a growing need to fit both their personal and professional lives together more neatly. A way to support this growing need is to ease the way teams collaborate—onsite or virtually.

Both Millennials (34%) and Gen X (34%) are the dominant generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers make up 29 percent of the workforce. Be careful, however, to assume that Baby Boomers aren’t as tech savvy or don’t have needs for more flexibility in their work arrangements. Boomers also want flexibility to accommodate the season of their age: being grandparents, taking care of elderly parents, and time off to travel, for example.

Yet, when it comes to Millennials, the first generation born with access to advanced technologies in their youth, expectations are high regarding the use of technologies at work. It’s not enough to enable collaboration for onsite interactions only—meetings, brainstorm sessions, team lunches, etc.

Ubiquitous technologies make it easy to collaborate anytime and anywhere.

Resolve Competing IT Demands

The type of tools referenced above have put IT in a difficult spot. From a 2013 Symantec survey, IT found that 77 percent of businesses have encountered unsupported cloud applications. This exposes the organization to outside threats; the ones that keep executives awake at night: cyber-attacks or confidential data or information exchanged and stored in the cloud.

The unsupported applications, according to Microsoft research, are cloud-based file sharing solutions. The proliferation of rogue cloud applications is an indication of employees finding solutions to meet their needs—needs organizations aren’t meeting fast enough.

CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, and CHROS need to develop a business strategy that introduces collaboration practices AND related technologies that adapts to how employees now want – or need – to work

Tips to Boost Collaboration

  • Find your change champions—those who support or are likely to support the change
  • Develop a list of employees’ needs
  • Clearly define business needs
  • Develop a work flexibility policy that aligns with company values
  • Avoid big-bang technology implementations (break the rollout into phases aiming for quick win that shows that you intend to bring change)
  • Engage middle-managers early in the process
  • Don’t underestimate the emotional side of changed

IT alone can’t drive this type of culture change. And this can’t be a technology-driven change just for the sake of change. To introduce collaboration technology solutions and do it successfully, the business needs must be clear to all stakeholders. The whole organization must work together to co-create the shift in culture change.

Collaboration is a central part of our humanity; it’s how we have always accomplished important outcomes. From our ancestral history where working together meant survival to technology linking humanity across a global, virtual network, collaboration has always been the glue to achieving significant advancements.

Savvy executives recognize that technology plays an essential role to help employees work effectively in a global society.

What’s more, the make-up of those working for your organization is diverse. To cite Microsoft, “More likely than not, you have remote workers, independent contractors, and business partners, all working outside your office walls.” Resisting this current reality is the equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand.

Employees’ demands for greater work place flexibility isn’t a fad. As technology advances and our use of it further integrates into all aspects of our lives, there’s no denying its role in how, where, and when we work. Adopting and adapting to its influences is equivalent to a first-mover advantage. The sooner you move to deliberately change your company culture, the greater lead time you have over those who wait and wait – and wait.

This is a Microsoft Office sponsored post.

A version of this was first posted on switchandshift.com

Social Software: Will Leaders Decide To Adapt?

The key to collaboration is communication: we need to be able to talk to each other to get stuff done. And it’s a compelling facet of the global, hyper-networked, social and mobile new world of work that we are nevertheless in dire need of better ways of communicating with each other.

That’s what makes the emergence of social software such a remarkable and powerful gift — with profound implications for fostering innovation, driving collaboration and deepening engagement. It’s fast and scopey, enabling everything from messaging to team-mailing to live chats to file sharing to all of the usual. Yet as far as user adoption does, the workplace is proving slow on the draw. That’s particularly apparent in HR.

We are not so much at a crossroads as we are at crossed wires. A range of vendors are launching new, powerful products, and the market is growing. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, productivity improves by an estimated 20-25% in organizations that have connected employees. So how do we overcome the “you can lead a horse to water” challenge facing social software?

To facilitate user adoption, social software has to truly enhance and deepen collaboration and engagement. It has to look, feel, and act useful: 

Integrated

Social software has to be more than an addition. It has to be a total solution. It’s an understandable workforce complaint that shiny new platforms may just decentralize communication, requiring the management of increasing layers of inter-office email / outside email, internet / company server, and so on. We want to get things done, not stymied by choices or fractured functionality. To be an asset, social software needs to truly integrate (and not complete) with all of the above.

Really Social

Social software needs to be better: quicker, faster, smarter, more usable than the existing norms. Your social network should have lots of tools for engagement and collaboration, including social profiles, individual and group and community chat and focum capabilities, blogs, wikis, and all the bells and whistles of a bona fide social network. Otherwise, it will be eschewed for those social networks that are already well established (such as the one that has nearly 1.4 billion active users and counting).

One common obstacle to user adoption is feeling like the tech is unable to accomplish any more of the heavy lifting than what we already have. But if social software is not only truly integrated but can also leverage its unique position to generate meaningful intelligence, there’s the added value. That additional layer of perceptive analytics makes adoption a no-brainer, and offers a competitive advantage as well.

Embraced By Leadership

What will enable social software to make the smoothest entry into the atmosphere is its source. This shift must be initiated and mandated by leadership: it should be presented as a clear driver of organizational change, not a byproduct of it. Communication is part and parcel of workplace culture: social software should feel like anything but a trial run. Given the option, we all revert to the norm when we’re under pressure. If leadership makes social software the new normal, the workplace will follow.

The sweet spot lies in not doing away with what we’re used to, just improving upon it. In this age of relentless innovation, the status quo lasts about a minute, and depending on the demographics, that can be trigger a certain level of discomfort. Yet one thing that truly drives employee engagement is a shared sense of discovery — and growth. Given that, social software may truly be our game changer.

A version of this was first posted on Forbes.

Photo Credit: profit8652 via Compfight cc

How to Build a Solid Foundation for Better Work Relationships

Search any of the top business, leadership, or HR blogs and you’ll find that one of the key drivers to employee engagement is clearly communicated expectations. You know this old song and dance; if employees know what’s expected of them and understand (and value) how they fit into the big picture, then they’re likely to be highly engaged. And engagement equals productivity, satisfaction, and longevity.

Communicating your organization’s goals and providing clear direction is essential to engagement. But what about communicating the everyday stuff with your employees? What about understanding how your employee actually works? How they problem solve, what frustrates them, what motivates them, and how they prefer to communicate?

I once had a manager who I felt utterly and completely out of sync with. He’d send me a task over email, I’d write back with my results, he wouldn’t reply. I’d email suggestions for departmental improvements, I’d receive no response. He’d tell me, “You don’t collaborate well,” and I’d scratch my head in confusion. Finally, one day I had a list of follow-ups to do in person. He reviewed my list and explained for each item, “for these types of requests, I like in person discussions better. And for that type of suggestion, I recommend you just go ahead – I’m not into those types of details.”  

Well, had I known four months ago that he preferred face to face over email, I would have held more meetings. And, if I had known he wasn’t into certain details, I WOULDN’T HAVE SENT THEM. {Face Palm}

Establishing boundaries, guidelines, and exchanging mutual expectations in any relationship is critical – work relationships aren’t exempt! Learning communication preferences from the desired medium to the preferred level of detail, understanding workplace frustrations and motivators, to learning what energizes (and deflates) your employee…. All of this needs to be standard information gathered from the onset. Think of it as building the relationship foundation.

To set up a solid relationship foundation, facilitate an open conversation with new employees and set the stage for understanding each others work styles. Here’s a format you can follow to set the groundwork for a positive working relationship:

  • How do you prefer to communicate? [Oral, Written, Instant Message, Text, etc.]
  • How do you like to receive feedback? [When, Where, Using which Communication Tool]
  • Do you like public recognition? How does it make you feel?
  • What motivates you? What energizes you?
  • What’s important to you in a work environment?
  • What are your personal values?
  • What frustrates you?
  • What makes you feel unmotivated?
  • What do you expect from your leader?
  • What can I expect from you?

Start out using these questions as a loose guideline and adjust them according to your company culture, environment, and so forth. The goal is to understand how your employee works so that you can define how you work together.

(About the Author: Writer, connector, collaborator – Gabrielle Garon is an enthusiastic HR pro on a simple mission to be a person of value, not of success. Gabrielle got into HR because she really liked helping others and soon found an overwhelming curiosity for behaviour, motivation, and how it all intersects with business. Gabrielle loves to talk! Her favourite topics are performance management, training & development, culture, and employer branding. Connect with Gabrielle here: @GabrielleGaron or gabriellegaron.com)

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