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.

Communicators in Business

I was presenting and taking part in a panel session at the Communicators in Business conference at the Metropole in Brighton last week. It was quite an entertaining session and I was sharing the platform with Julie Howell from Fortune Cookie who presented a well argued case for renewing the focus on accessibility for social media tools, and David Burden of Daden Ltd who specialises in helping businesses with virtual worlds. I was particularly taken with David's arguments that virtual worlds may have a powerful role to play inside an organisation as they provide the 'experience' to complement the 'information' provided by the traditional and emerging web. I think I'll be following this up with him. The whole session was chaired by Louisa Preston, who did a great job.

What was most disappointing however was the level of engagement with social media amongst this group of people. It was a large room - over a hundred people I guess - all directly involved in the communications business. However, only about five in the room claimed to write a blog, and only two or three people had even heard of Twitter. I was very surprised! My conclusion is that traditional comms people are being marginalised - a very real danger for the discipline. Or maybe it's just that people in the social media world are still only talking to each other and haven't really broken into mainstream yet. Either way, I was surprised and disappointed!

Feeling down...

Where I work we conduct regular research to find out how people are feeling and how ‘engaged’ they are. I recently got the results for my team. They were very disappointing. They’re still well above average for the company, but they have taken a dip compared to last year. The odd thing is there doesn’t seem to be any particular area which has declined. It’s just right across the board. So, I’ve been thinking about what to do.

Most of my team works remotely and flexibly. Sometimes it can be weeks before I see someone in person I work with regularly. Also, over the past year quite a few new people joined the team as part of a re-organisation. They also work remotely. So we’re now quite a big team, but we hardly ever see each other. When we were small, we all knew each other well and there was an intimate atmosphere. That intimacy sustained us when we were remote. I think over the past year we’ve lost that.

One of the things I’m going to do is encourage everyone to join up to Twitter – and have created a closed user group for that purpose. Although most of the team work in the technology space, we’re not all early adopters so it’ll be really interesting to see what happens. The danger is that a few take to the technology and get really well connected – better connected than now, but others don’t get on with it all and become even more remote from the group and end up being almost outsiders. I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The other thing is to make sure that we use these social tools to facilitate face to face interactions, not replace them. I think that’s another key thing that has been missing over the past year.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Yet more blending

A while back I blogged about how we're blending and blurring lots of things these days. This is the original post. Another example cropped up today - Twitter. I've signed up to Twitter which is a very easy way of your friends and colleagues keeping up with what you're doing. In fact, you can see my latest 'tweets' on the right hand side of this page. What's interesting though, is that if someone sends me a direct message via Twitter it comes through as a text message on my personal phone. I don't mind this as over time my Twitter network to be a mix of business contacts and private friends. But will everyone be as confortable with this blending as I am?

Now I need to figure out how to 'tweet' to my network that I've posted this blog entry.....