The №1 Problem With The Digital Workplace
“Collaboration is an essential skill of the digital economy. And yet how to collaborate productively is hardly ever taught either in universities or in the workplace.” — Gerry McGovern
It’s only a couple of months since I posted Why We Don’t Collaborate, but a few things I’ve been reading and observing make it a subject worthy of returning to.
The people selling us the digital dream (agile working, always on connectivity, work from anywhere) too often skip important questions. Are we really more productive? And do we really collaborate better that we used to?
As Gerry points out in his post , collaboration isn’t taught. You’re just expected to know. “Productive collaboration is really hard. It requires a whole range of communication, organizational and social skills.”
I’m old enough to remember when my pre-digital inbox ( a filing tray) was actually audited by my team leader. In my first real job my performance related pay actually depended on my ability to effectively organise my day, my work and how I communicated and collaborated with others.
Today, I could have thousands of emails in my inbox and nobody would know. I could be presenting an image of an organised and well functioning colleague when I’m actually drowning.
The abundance of technology and the myriad new ways to interrupt someone’s day isn’t necessarily evidence of progress.
A new report on the potential impacts of digital technologies on co-production and co-creation finds that there is a lack of hard evidence of actual impac t. Indeed, “conceptual fuzziness and tech-optimism stand in the way of collecting such evidence”.
This tech optimism is worth dwelling on. The report notes we tend to stress the enormous benefits digital technologies could have, but tend to ignore the profound uncertainties and risks that come with technological innovation. Digital transformation in a nutshell!
The report ends with an important question — who controls the shape of digital technologies in public service delivery and, by implication, the opportunities for co-production and co-creation?
In a more optimistic piece for Harvard Business Review, Raj Choudhury , Barbara Z. Larson and Cirrus Foroughi write that an increasingly mobile workforce can present problems for traditional team leaders. Their research indicates that the real productivity boost doesn’t come from digital tools per se, but rather from the increased flexible working options that digital can facilitate.
Their study compared how productive, loyal, and cost-effective employees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office were when they were allowed to work flexibly. They chose that employer because it had recently implemented a wide-scale pilot program allowing people to work from where and when they wanted, while still requiring others to remain in the office.
The results were 4.4% higher productivity among those in the pilot program, from people doing the exact same work as those who were required to come into the office.
However, they note that work-from-anywhere policies could increase costs in work environments that require brainstorming and project-based interaction, adding that more research is needed to fully understand the implications of remote work in more collaborative settings.
So again, the jury is out on whether the digital workplace helps or hinders collaboration.
I’m an eternal optimist so my gut feeling is that mobile working done well, leads to a better connected, more productive workplace.
We recently hosted a hackathon in the Cotswolds. We came together physically with a range of partners and then retreated to synthesise the outputs remotely. The draft report and basic prototypes were distributed less that 36 hours later. There’s no way we could do that without digital tools AND having work from anywhere flexibility.
However, we are an innovation and design team who have the luxury to experiment with digital collaboration tools and we can invest a lot of time in our personal learning. We frequently go ‘off grid’ and use non work sanctioned tools if we can find a better way of doing it.
That probably doesn’t apply to 99% of workers — and it’s these people we need to focus on if we really are to get the benefits of our investment in technology.
Leveraging technology to connect and collaborate with people at scale is the №1 requirement of the 21st-century leader.
It won’t happen on its own. So if you have a digital workplace strategy, you need a collaboration strategy too. Because if we don’t teach, measure, encourage and reward collaboration it doesn’t tend to happen.
Without that support the magical collaborative workplace of the future may be further off than you think.
Photo by Georgie Cobbs on Unsplash
Originally published at http://paulitaylor.com on August 30, 2019.
