Building the social future, one conversation at a time
- Summary:
- In the latest in his series of articles, Euan Semple looks at people and their behaviors in the workplace and asks how they impact adoption of social tools in the workplace.
Having looked at technology in the last post, this time I focus on people and behaviors.Getting people to do something different in their busy work lives is difficult. Asking them to go out of their way to share and learn from each other is the biggest single hurdle to the adoption of social tools in the workplace. It is the reason that most have not even got near to reaping the potential benefits. You can have the best designed, most technically impressive tools, perfectly integrated with every other system, but if no one is prepared to say anything, or more importantly anything of any significance, you might as well not have bothered.
So what do I mean by significance. At the lowest level I mean practical stuff. Answering questions and solving problems. It may seem obvious to say that you can't answer a question unless someone has asked it. So obvious that we tend to ignore this simple point. In order for someone to be able to answer your question you have to have had the self awareness and courage to ask it.
Why self awareness? Well, you need to know what you don't know and admit that to yourself. Whether it is a technical solution to a problem, a procedural nicety, or a corporate guideline, you need to be willing to acknowledge to yourself that you don't know the answer. You need to have stopped being busy long enough to realise this, and to understand your work well enough to formulate the question.Why courage? You need to be able and willing to ask this question online, potentially in front of a lot of people. This means being willing to admit that you don't know something in front of your boss, your peers, and probably a lot of people you don't even know. Sure, if what we are talking about is asking what time the canteen opens or what is on the menu, this may seem trivial. But if we are talking about something related to your job it is less so.When we get beyond practical questions and answers, and into bigger more strategic questions, the need for courage increases. Courage both on the part of the individual and the organisation. When you start asking "Why?" questions the consequences increase:
- "Why have we always done things this way?"
- "Why haven't we changed our product line in years?"
- "Why aren't IT adopting new technologies faster than they are?".
These are big questions that in most organisations need answering but they also feel challenging. They challenge the actions of other parts of the organization. They challenge more senior people in the organization. They challenge decisions that have already been made.We are not talking about management by committee here but being attuned to the issues your organisation is facing. Being willing to listen astutely to your people, and to do something about the challenges they encounter, are going to be key skills, especially for senior management. As digital technologies affect more and more of our businesses the pace of change is going to increase. We will need to become more responsive. We will need to adapt quicker to challenges. We will need to realise that we must work on challenges as networks of smart people rather than lone heros.
Altered priorities ahead
Yet where we are now is silo'd organisations, over complicated processes, and over stressed management. We need to get back to basics, simplify the things that matter, talk about them more, and be more willing to change the things that aren't working. We need to be less hung up about status and job titles and more willing to listen and adapt. We need more humility and more courage. These are not skills commonly found in organisational life. This is where social tools help and why we need to work differently in order to get the best out of them.But organisations aren't monocultures. People have differing priorities and motivation. This becomes very clear when talking about the greater transparency and accountability that becomes possible with social tools. It is easy to see that senior people want this greater degree of flexibility and autonomy. It is easy to see why the staff would want it too, with more of a voice and opportunity to have influence. But where does this leave middle managers?These are the people who have until now kept things happening and implemented change. They are often where organisational memory exists. They are also the place where checks and balances happen and as such they can be political with a small p and often conservative with a small c! Certainly, both demographically and temperamentally, they are the least likely as a group to see the benefits of social networked tools. They are the most likely to see chatting as a waste of time and having staff go faster than they are in terms of learning and new capabilities as deeply unsettling.But a manager's job is to make sure the business keeps running smoothly. They do this through communication. The sort of communication that isn't the preserve of internal communications departments but is the day to day communication that gets things done. It is about listening and explaining, sensing and responding. This sort of communication happens most effectively through conversations.Business focussed, distributed conversations are what social in business is all about. Having these conversations "out loud" makes it possible for more people to hear them. This gives managers the chance to explain why things matter, to give context, to ask ever better questions. It gives them the opportunity to add value in a world where the more prosaic elements of their job are likely to be automated in the future. It gives them a chance to survive.