The typical career path for an employee starts in an entry level position in a particular department wherein the employee needs to then ascend the corporate ladder and move up the proverbial food chain to a more senior level role. Most of the time the employee ends up stuck in a particular department or a particular role but occasionally some horizontal pivots are possible. This is a type of pre-determined work because essentially the career path of the employee is set out for them once they join the company. If they get hired in the marketing department then they will typically stay in that area. It’s akin to set-up marriages which used to be common many years ago in some countries. Before the child was even old enough to know what marriage was they were already paired up with someone. Thankfully in most parts of the world this custom is now no longer being practiced but we run our companies in much the same fashion. This is how it has been for many years inside of...
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0 comments 115 readsPosted on 2013-05-16
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0 comments 463 readsPosted on 2013-05-14
One of the things we can’t neglect when thinking about the future of work is for organizations to align on a sense of purpose. Many organizations who are investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies to a good job of messaging and conveying value but where many fall short is on being able to align the organization as a whole on a sense of purpose. Atos Origin does a good example of this but publicly conveying their goal of becoming a zero email company by the end of 2014. Another company that does a great job of this is TELUS which set out an aggressive goal to have 30% of their almost 40,000 workers work full-time from home by 2015. These are organizations who are truly planning and seeking to impact the future of work.
So how does an organization go about aligning on a sense of purpose?
At a very high level there are a few things that need to be done:
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0 comments 178 readsPosted on 2013-05-09
I’m seeing a few trends around how organizations are deploying enterprise collaboration platforms. Typically one of four paths are taken which are: a unified solution, multiple solutions (not connected), an aggregator solution, or multiple solutions which are integrated together. These are explained in more detail in the table below.
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0 comments 198 readsPosted on 2013-05-07
Much of what we are seeing in the enterprise is being fueled by the consumer web. For example if there would have been no Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, chances are there would be no Jive, Yammer, Chatter, or any other enterprise collaboration platform. The behaviors we exhibit on social media channels are also making their way into the enterprise. For example we can easily use social media to: create communities, easily find people or information, share our ideas and insights, ask for help or get advice, create and share content, and get access to people and information anytime, anywhere, and on an device (among other things). The same cannot be said for many enterprises around the world. In fact there is a large gap between the consumer web and the enterprise (which is trying to catch up!).
The image below looks at some of the different characteristics of the consumer web and the enterprise and the gap that exists between the two.
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0 comments 203 readsPosted on 2013-05-03
Some still believe that the whole point of investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies is simply to replace existing systems that organizations are currently using such as Sharepoint and/or email. Let me be clear that it is about far more than that. At the core; we are talking about the future of work. Technology is inevitably a part of that’s but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
For as long as organization’s have existed there have been a set of unwritten principles that we have all followed. Some of them are that employees came into the office at 9 and worked until 5, managers made all the decisions and those who brought in the most money got promoted,work was done on a company assigned computer, the communication was handled through email or some legacy intranet system, fear or getting a paycheck was the primary motivator to work, employees stuck to their own departments, and a sense of palpable hierarchy misted through the office. In short, work was...
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0 comments 245 readsPosted on 2013-04-26
According to a Forbes article by Jeanne Meister:
“The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that. Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years…”
This is obviously a concern for many companies around the world because they invest a lot of time and resources into making sure they can attract and then retain top talent. One of the many benefits of investing in enterprise collaboration is being able to do both of these things. Before I...
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0 comments 483 readsPosted on 2013-04-16
In an ideal scenario the corporate management team at your organization will make the necessary technology and strategy investments around collaboration and the future of work across the enterprise. However, what if you’re a part of a larger organization and corporate is just moving too slow? Oftentimes departments make these investments independent of what corporate is doing. This is actually the case with some of our clients right now, one of them is a 500,000 person global company. In these types of scenarios the business leaders of specific regions or departments shouldn’t feel the need to wait. There are several reasons for why departments shouldn’t wait for corporate:
Corporate can learn from you
There have been several situations where corporate finds out of regional or department deployments and then piggy-backs on top of those for an enterprise wide deployment. Your department can be the pioneering group for the...
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1 comments 706 readsPosted on 2013-04-11
In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research. The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there. Organizations typically fall into one of five types of categories when it comes to collaboration in the enterprise. These are:
- The unaware organization
- The exploratory organization
- The defined organization
- The adoptive organization
- The adaptive organization
Here is a simplified version of the maturity model:
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0 comments 215 readsPosted on 2013-04-08
Getting started with your future of work and collaboration initiative is typically the biggest step that an organization has to make. It’s that commitment to changing and evolving the way you are going to work from here forward. However, some of the organizations I have been speaking with recently are wondering, “when is the best time to get started?” I understand the skepticism and the temptation to put things off but in all honesty the best time is now.
Every organization typically has multiple initiatives going on that are keeping people busy. In these situations management wonders if it’s worth waiting a few months before making the investment so that people can have more time to work on this project. Have you ever heard of that saying, “life gets in the way?” Well the business version of that is “business gets in the way.” Putting off these initiatives will get you nowhere because there is always going to be something that comes up. The reality is that your...
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0 comments 340 readsPosted on 2013-04-04
Thomas Friedman recently wrote an article for the NYT titled, “Need a Job? Invent It” which addresses how our educational institutions are not teaching students the skills that value most. He goes on to point out that in today’s economy there is no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job. Things are changing quickly and by time most students graduate from college the things they studied have evolved. What’s more common is that the jobs people are going to school for haven’t really been invented yet.
I went to school at UCSC and graduated with a double major in business management economics and psychology. When I was in school social media, enterprise social software, emergent collaboration, and anything related to the future of...