Double Edged Sword

I’ve been a flexible worker for a number of years. I have zero dependency on paper or a physical presence and excellent technology which means I can work from just about anywhere. And it has proved quite liberating. One of the main drivers behind the ‘blending’ I have talked about in previous posts. However, it can be a double edged sword from the enterprise perspective.

When we all worked together in an open plan office, one of the key components of knowledge management – people to people conversations – happened naturally. If you learned something useful you could tell your colleagues. If someone in your team needed help, they could raise their head and ask. Chances are, someone in the same office would know the answer. And you would overhear conversations which might not be relevant at the time but which you could store away for when you needed to ‘know’ something.

With flexible working, you lose much of that. You lose much of the context for a piece of knowledge – “Jane did it this way when she was up against a tight deadline” The latter half of the sentence being the context. Because flexible workers are not usually in the same place at the same time, this can drive an increase in the use of asynchronous tools such as email. In their own way, these tools then spawn a set of behaviours which can dilute decision taking and reduce the agility of a business. Things such as copying everyone to cover your back. Or asking ten other people instead of taking the decision yourself.

So, on the one side there are major benefits from flexible working around increases in productivity and motivation amongst flexible workers, and on the other side the same people can become increasingly isolated, disconnected and out of the knowledge loop.

All this is just one of the reasons social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter should be explored enterprise use. They can re-connect people and begin to restore the context. Because they are open for viewing by everyone in your extended network – not just the people on the email distribution list – they can provide that always on stream of context. What I’m doing. Issues I have. Help I need. It’s all out there again.