In a Down Economy, Businesses Are "Searching" For Something They've Lost. Productivity!
Since late 2008 we've all been suffering, and by "all" I mean everyone who participates in the global economy, through hard economic times in one way or another. That is true for us as individuals and also true for the businesses people own themselves or work for as an employee/contractor. Many businesses have naturally been reluctant to buy new equipment given their economic worries. In times like this both consumers and businesses stop spending and "batten down the hatches" in the hope of "riding out the storm below decks" hoping they don't get "blown into the rocks".
It's been over 18 months now with hatches battened down tight and at last it seems the equity markets are relatively stable. But unemployment is at 20 year highs and business revenues continue to be soft and shaky. The workers who still have jobs are being asked to do more with less resources and less staff. One result of this "do more with less" state of business operations is recent data showing that productivity "per worker" is up.
But, counterintuitively, this increase in worker productivity does not seem to be turning into improved efficiency and success for businesses on an aggregate basis. The "per person" productivity numbers may be up but that is not translating into improved business productivity and equivalent increases in top line growth or bottom line results. What's going on here?
Human psychology is what is going on here. Despite the recent focus by company boards on trimming waste, excess and fat, an undeniable reality of business success is the human psychology of collaboration. When we create collaborative work teams the total productivity of the team tends to be greater than the sum of the work each individual in that team could produce working alone. It's considered common knowledge that when we work together in collaborative teams in the context of high morale we become more powerful and productive than when we work as separated individuals and/or in low morale environments. Every generation it seems we go through a cycle of rediscovering the multiplicative power of team-based collaboration.
The reason I think this realization is happening again, or about to happen, again is something I saw when I started doing some investigating this week into what people were searching for related to "business collaboration". In using Google's ad-words keyword suggestion tool I saw some very intriguing keyword phrases suggested for me when I entered "business collaboration" as a set of seed keywords. Here is what popped out as the top 25 most searched for keyword phrases related to "business collaboration". This list and the search rankings tell a very interesting story.
The thing that immediately jumps out of this data for me is it looks like businesses are struggling with managing information and workflow in team contexts and are searching for solutions specific to team environments. I believe much of this is a result of a ramp up in use of highly distributed teams and the deep cuts in staff size.
In the past a lot of information would get processed and problems solved by having face to face interactions in a common office location where communication fidelity was high. Even more important than face-to-face planned meetings it was the random "chance" meetings that are now fully lost and had something to do with a big part of business productivity. These chance meetings often were the most important meetings that allowed work teams and individuals to address issues before they even emerged as problems. Now we have globally distributed teams spanning continents and cultures, all that sorting through info that was done in these face to face encounters has been lost.
So how does the above table tell this story?
The first 4 entries in the above table tell a story of people hoping to find innovative and free "open source" collaboration technology solutions to their "distributed and smaller workforces" productivity problems. The next 6 or 8 entries tell the story of where the problems are showing up, "supply chain, document management, procurement, workflow, team building, teamwork, content management". It's clear businesses are struggling with teaming and process topics in the workplace. They are looking hard for technology to solve these productivity problems for them in the context of the new "globally distributed workplace".
Is the only solution a return to the days of large office buildings full of hundreds or thousands of centrally located workers? I don't think so. I think globally distributed and "virtual" workforces can work.
But we need some new types of collaboration solutions for the enterprise worker and also some new "best practices" in using the collaboration technologies we already have. I'm convinced the teaming benefits of regular chance encounters, and the organic productivity those encounters delivered, can be recaptured.
How do we do that given the economic and cultural challenges we face with the globally distributed workforce? I have some ideas I will blog about in a follow-on post with a working title "Planning for Unplanned Collaboration".
What's your take on this topic? Is your business suffering a loss of productivity due to loss of teamwork dynamics? Do the technologies you have at your fingertips today actually address the problems? Or do they perhaps even make them worse? How do you think we can "think differently" about how we design, deploy, use and support collaboration technologies so we can "resolve" this age old problem?
Looking forward to your comments.
Posted 19 Mar 2010 at 03:12 PM
Comments
I believe the best practice is to have skill sets virtualized into vanilla appliances, we do this in hardware now with virtual machines. Using vanilla hardware and getting rid of the silo or fixed structures altogether. We are moving to living breathing fluid flows of content, information and design. The very nature of business service level agreements (SLAs) need to be rethinked to adapt for virtual office and virtual communications we can take this concept further into virtual business where by media and communication needs to be broken down by network theory into nodes. Here we allow the nodes to contain information about relationships, skill sets, trend data and social networking tie ins. With all this context mediated knowledge we can establish better inter communication between the nodes. Like all networks, you have to build relationships to build business and to maintain the relationships you need support infrastructure, in the old days we had roads bridges, new days, converged cyberspace domains over a backbone, networking over the internet has become more reliable vs traditional PSTN and we are moving towards peer to peer presence aware human nodes able to collectively able to decision make as a cohesive force with the help of voice data video and mobility. So to make business more productive in this scenario you need appliances or nodes that are able to bridge resources effectively via some infrastructure and adaptable skill sets within this resource pool to bridge with tasks at hand the links will be diverse with many individuals being able to time share on tasks but the end result is higher efficiency. Diversity gains achieved between the many to many and multiple path relationships can be realized in many fields not just for business development. Two heads are better than 1 but everyones head timeshared on the blackplane of a knowledge based resource engine is better than what we could ever do before.
Posted 7 May 2010 at 03:14 PM