Blogs

Dan Keldsen said it best and I’ve quoted him before: "a lot of organizations don’t think they need to improve collaboration because work still gets done, it just doesn’t get done very well."

That is the problem. Work gets done, but it takes a lot of gnashing of teeth and pulling-out-of-own hair, and late hours, and duplicated efforts and just-in-time strokes of creativity to do it. The people in the production roles in your company know. The people in the executive roles in your company probably don’t.

I’m one of the latter. In my role as company president, I am shown finished work. I don’t know the processes by which the work gets finished. I can search that out on a case-by-case basis, and I do. But process analysis is not my primary duty in the company so there’s always going to be a lot I won’t see.

Which means I’m the wrong person to decide whether my company needs Enterprise 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration, efficiencies, knowledge sharing or product quality.

Think about it this way: you never think about solving my commute problem, because you don’t know what I go through to get to work every day. You don’t know about the gridlock on Interstate 405; you don’t know about the construction delays on Juanita Drive; you don’t know about the back-ups on 100^th Avenue NE. Those are my three route options, they all stink. You don’t know. All you know is that I arrive at the office every day. So everything must be fine, right?

No. Everything is not fine. I make it to work every day despite the problems built into that process. Your employees get their work done for you despite the problems they encounter.

Nonetheless, the technology decisions around Enterprise 2.0, the should-we-or-shouldn’t-we decisions, are, too often, owned by either upper management, or IT, or some combination of the two. People like me are always involved somehow.

And we always want to know what our return on investment will be. We demand you quantify in order to justify. It can be done – you can find examples to support the idea that better connections between employees improve the financial position of the company. Rob Cross is a University of Virginia professor who’s made a career out of it judging from the volume of work he’s published about the financial returns of networks and related topics. My favorite story from Dr. Cross’s work has to do with one company that saved $200,000 in one day when an infrastructure architect learned through network chatter that a critical software program was not working and made the critical suggestion for how to fix it -- the fix no one else had thought of -- one day before the company invested $200,000 in the wrong solution.

With all due respect to me, and those in positions like mine: we are the least qualified to decide whether tools are needed, let alone deciding what tools they should be. We should stop pretending like we know. It’s having negative impact on our companies.

Among the most important questions in Gallup’s Q12 (their 12 key questions to measure employee engagement) is this one: “Do I have the materials and equipment to do my work right?” According to Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman who wrote extensively about the Q12 in their book First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, companies that get high marks from employees on this question experience higher retention, better productivity and reduced costs related to turnover. If we business leaders stand in the way of the tools that our employees need to do their work right because we personally don’t see the need, then we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t see the need to stay with us.

We’ve been admonished not to use Enterprise 2.0 as a solution looking for a problem. I agree with that. But I also agree with Howard Behar when he says “the person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom.”