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OFFICE SOCIAL LIFE IS KEY TO BUSINESS GROWTH! Informal face-to-face exchanges and conversations at work encourage innovation and the potential for business growth.
Responding to intense pressures, organisations are trying to become more agile and responsive to customer demands. This is driving the geographic dispersal of employees, many of whom now work at remote call centres or from home. However, the current trend towards hot desking, virtual teams, outsourcing, email and teleworking is a potential threat to an organisation's ability to produce value and innovation on an ongoing basis. This is because they disrupt traditional face-to-face information exchange and can create 'unconnected islands' of expertise. Indeed research by Xerox [1] has found that when asked about the storage of knowledge, 32 per cent of respondents replied that it was in employees' heads, 26 per cent said on paper and only 19 per cent in company wide shareable electronic formats. Management research [2] has found that to deliver ongoing value an organisation needs to ensure information can be shared and used in 'communities' of practice. Communities are recognised to be the hidden engine that keeps an organisation creative and competitive. However, they are a fragile structure that is based principally on the spontaneous, voluntary and entirely informal efforts of their participants. While new organisational structures such as hot desking and remote working support the short-term need for flexibility, the effect of focusing alone on 'the laptop office' can impact negatively on the informal exchanges of information that are the heart of functioning communities of practice. These informal exchanges ensure that groups within an organisation maintain, perhaps counter intuitively, a healthy level of 'weak' ties. According to research, a wider network of acquaintances is better than knowing a small workgroup very well. Studies [3] examining the relationship between social contacts and an organisation's structure found that better performing groups tended to have a higher proportion of weak ties when compared to poorly performing groups. Essentially, groups with more weak ties had less of a tendency to become insular and were less likely to stereotype other groups negatively. Also, the proportion of weak ties influenced the flow of information across organisational boundaries as well as affected the ability of a group to accept innovation. Clearly an organisation's ability to learn - meaning it can create, produce value, innovate and remain competitive - on a continuous basis is affected by its informal information exchanges. A continuous learning project run by Xerox at the call centres of Italy's recently privatised telephone company, Telecom Italia, has led to the shared knowledge base growing by 20% every second week. Not only are agents now happier with working life, but queries are satisfied 60% faster than before, significantly improving customer service - a key differentiator in any highly competitive market.
The secret to successful knowledge management and facilitating informal information exchange is all about nurturing and sustaining communities of practice. In other words work needs to become more collaborative. Technology is often seen as a panacea but in organisations it still remains highly fragmented, complex and largely user unfriendly. Furthermore, technology itself cannot create communities where they do not exist already - a key aspect of communities is that they are created spontaneously and that they operate on a voluntary basis. A good example of this that many corporate intranet portals remain empty of contributions from users. Furthermore, there too many cases to list where companies have begun huge business transforming IT projects only to have them fail to deliver the business benefits sought. These failures raise serious questions about the suitability of the technology itself and its fit with the social context within which it is used by organisations. To be successful technologies must always be accommodated within some social context - there is a knowledge element in even apparently simple tasks that requires collaboration between humans, most of which will not be documented and are therefore easily discounted by technology developers. Xerox at its European research centre in Grenoble, France, continues to research communities of practice and informal communication looking at how people actually work. In other words, it looks at the social context of work. Xerox has coined the term 'organisational ethnography' to describe the way it is both possible and useful to apply to organisations the kind of immersion methodologies used for studying tribes and cultures. The goal of organisational ethnography is to understand work from the workers' perspective and from the principles they employ to get work done. This is best achieved by carrying out very detailed observational studies of work practices. Only by doing this can an organisation determine how work is actually done, rather than the ways in which formal job specifications, documented business processes and abstract managerial overviews characterise work processes. This approach does not mean that organisations should aim to replicate and enshrine current work practices, however. It means only that by having a deep understanding of how and why work is done can technology be developed that will support and improve the situation. An example of a work process often overlooked is proximity learning: people improve skills by sitting near other skilled workers. This level of peripheral awareness in the workplace can be critical. This was particularly true of call centre studied by Xerox where researchers recommended a redesign rather than new training courses. Skills transfer could be improved by putting less experienced staff in positions to learn from more experienced operators. Furthermore, it required no additional and expensive IT investment. It was concluded that operators simply needed longer telephone cords - an operator taking a call could slide over to the desk and screen of a helpful colleague. Clearly, the resources for learning lie not simply in information, but in the practice that allows people to make sense of and use that information and the practitioners who know how to use that information. Xerox practices what it preaches and has implemented a 'peer-to-peer' knowledge sharing system called Eureka that, in use by over 25,000 technicians worldwide, is saving it about $15 million a year in field service costs. Xerox technicians make approximately a million service calls per month. During these calls, they constantly discover new and innovative solutions to unique problems they encounter. However, these solutions are commonly shared in workgroup meetings in the form of stories, but only among a few immediate people. This can lead to other technicians being unable to find a solution resulting in a call to the technical hotline. Xerox social and computer scientists joined forces with service technicians to create a system that would grow community knowledge through more effective information sharing to improve customer service. A key aspect of the project was to design a system to encourage technicians routinely to share their knowledge. The biggest single challenge Xerox faced was to identify the right social setting to encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing. At first, the team tried financial incentives, but found the best way to foster sharing is to recognise people who contribute and validate the knowledge. Individuals are recognised through recording the contributors and reviewers linking their names with the proposed solutions.
Xerox researchers are designing and building technologies that support the way people actually work unlike many existing IT systems that force people to comply with the technology. This distinction is true especially when the aim is to support informal communication and spontaneous information exchange. However, key to ensuring the successful adoption of technologies and their ability to support the formation and continuation of communities lies in their design. First, technology should make participation costs minimal in terms of time and effort. This can be done by exploiting the functional things people already do by enhancing them with additional but tailored information. For example, Xerox has developed a knowledge sharing system based on a printer that 'remembers' what it has printed previously. It is designed to provide a summary sheet with every print job that lists other documents on the same topic and who has printed them. This allows individuals to collaborate who may not have realised that they were working on the same subject. This type of device also illustrates how technology can make the existence of communities more visible to individuals with common interests. People only spend part of their working day at their desk using at a PC. Xerox is designing technologies that make communities more visible and participation easier by ensuring that they fit the context in which individuals might share information. A TV touch screen, for example, next to the coffee machine designed to 'recognise' people using proximity technologies. The device displays the latest news on a subject that a person has been working on recently. They are able to call up related documents thereby extending their knowledge of the topic. However, in a brainstorming session brief headlines could be delivered to a mobile phone screen to stimulate debate. Another way technology can support the development of communities is to make the interaction between individuals more transparent. Xerox researchers have found that people are motivated to share when they can see clearly that the information they provide is useful to colleagues. Software embedded in applications such as Internet browsers allow documents to be rated by one or more users who give it a score with comments indicating how relevant or interesting they found it. Subsequent users can add their own ratings and reviews of the information. This means that people can literally see the value of their contribution and are rewarded when it receives responses from colleagues.
Knowledge sharing is vital to organisations and the traditional ways that people exchange information are changing. Companies can overcome this with effective knowledge management that nurtures and sustains communities of practice. Only once the way people actually work is understood should technology be introduced to help enhance the ability of all employees to share information efficiently and effectively. Supporting this process is key to enabling the learning organisation to flourish allowing it to produce value and innovation on a sustainable basis. References:
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Introduction
