How about that for a headline, eh? Sensational, but true, I'm afraid to say. This year I’ve been working with Google on some research
about the role of collaboration tools in the workplace. This has just been
published in six European markets (English version here). It even made it into Italian Wired!
To whet your appetites, I thought it’d be good to summarise
what we found from interviewing 3,600 employees of large businesses and 30 of
their bosses. Convention means that I should have three points. But I don’t. I
have two. Better make them good, then…
One. The average European business is un-innovative and
un-collaborative
This was the major finding: just under sixty percent of
employees in major European employers feel that they work in an environment
where they are discouraged from innovating and rarely collaborate effectively
with each other outside of basic team interactions. I wish I could say I was
surprised by this, but I’m afraid most large businesses remain obsessed with
hierarchical management structures with little responsibility for or ownership
of outcomes devolved down to those at the coal face.
The trouble is that innovation is regarded as a must-have
capability in the global economy. Although it’s easy to fixate on silver bullet
innovation (jet engine, microprocessor, iPad) in truth, most innovation is
incremental improvements to processes that collectively deliver improved
efficiency over time. If most employees are discouraged from that kind of
innovation then most organisations will stagnate or become dependent on huge
process improvement initiatives, employing such “proven” techniques as
activity-based costing and “change management”…
…which doesn’t work in a low collaboration environment
because most employees respond best to change when they are supporting each
other rather than being told about it by an organisation’s propaganda… sorry –
internal comms – team. Oh, and innovation is usually a group activity as well,
so lack of collaboration is a double problem.
Two. Many European organisations are stuck in 1998
Despite the majority of people using social media, mobile
devices and IM instinctively in their everyday lives, most organisations are
firmly stuck in a 1990’s world of big process systems and email as a
communications medium. And that’s the situation in pushed “Enterprise” apps. Two
thirds of employees are unable to use their own applications and devices at
work – most of the other one third do so without the permission of their
bosses. This is shambolic. All businesses should have Wi-Fi in the office for
the use of their employees and partners; firewalls should have looser
permissions to enable use of productivity and collaboration tools that are not
made by MS, Oracle or SAP.
The barrier here is lack of trust in employees, which is
principally due to the fact that most businesses equate a given amount of input
effort (person-hours) to a given output, rather than actually measuring the
output volume and quality in the right way. If they did the latter then it’d be
up to the employee to take ownership of their task – there is considerable
evidence to suggest that working without periodic distractions makes people
less productive and the odd check of Facebook or a bit of casual Buzzfeed/
YouTube is a low impact distraction.
My analogy (and I like it, so I’m using it as much as I can J) is that the modern
European workplace is the digital equivalent of a library. You can hear a pin
drop. And who wants to work like that?
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