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The End of Rational Economics
Your company has been operating on the premise that people—customers, employees, managers—make logical decisions. It’s time to abandon that assumption.
Take the e-mail test: Can collaboration tools save time and money?
You will find that close to half of the emails in our inbox don’t have much to do with “communication” at all, and fall in one of the above categories. Ironically, email is supposed to be a tool for “asynchronous communication”. A majority of emails are about teams and groups coordinating activities, discussing work related matters, or actually working on tasks like editing documents and sending them back and forth as attachments.
How Email Inefficiency Reduces the Quality of Group Input
Using tools which provide you with central hub for communication (such as a wiki), instead of directly contacting each individual person, allows you to reduce the number of connections involved. This, in turn, reduces the number of interruptions and the number versions of the document that are generated, making the discussion much more manageable. Furthermore, if the article is in a wiki, then it becomes search-able by all the users of the wiki too, so other people can find it again in the future. This is not the case if it’s stuck in someone’s inbox.
Enabling communities
A push for it was when the company assembled a team for a project but failed to have the most optimal people in that project, as we didn’t know they existed, and most would not be aware of the talent of these people as their job title does not give it away.
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The fact that we now have online social tools that allow bottom-up grass roots effort to emerge is very enabling. These guys can now create a space and say look at us, come join us. If you create conditions by giving people the tools, the talent will surface, people will do the main aims of KM without you asking them.
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A middle manager may say they don’t want their people wasting time on other things, but allowing this may just help the business be more progressive and adaptive. I think senior managers and middle managers need to be on par that it’s OK for people to spend some time on stuff that is non team related or better still even complementary to team work.
The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams' Knowledge Use and Performance
With so many experts on a team, why does the result sometimes prove disappointing? New research by HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner probes the social dynamics of teamwork in knowledge-intensive settings, such as professional service firms, and the accompanying pressure to perform at the highest caliber. Her findings suggest that teams may yield right-of-way to colleagues with higher authority and thus miss out on the potential contributions of lower-status team members who know more about the client's needs.
Changement: Intelligent Microsoft
N’est-ce pas le principe même de l’équipe : chacun y fait ce qu’il aime le mieux faire, et profite de ce qu’il serait incapable d’obtenir seul ?
Down with the performance review?!
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- Two parties with misaligned goals. When walking into a performance review the boss’ goal of discussing areas of improvement don’t match up with the employee’s goal of promotion and compensation.
- The false belief that performance affects pay. Culbert argues that pay is primarily determined by market forces (which makes sense - just look at our current economic situation - are many people expecting big raises/bonuses this year?) and most jobs are placed in a pay range even before the employee is hired.
- As objective as we try to be - there are always personal biases. This is a fundamental conflict. Depending on one’s position, their opinion and view will differ. This is where Culbert also brings up the “360-degree feedback”. When feedback is anonymized that creates more opportunity for various parties to further their personal agenda since there is no accountability associated with their review.
- Everyone is different - “once size does not fit all”. Performance reviews often revolve around a predetermined checklist. This is why people may focus more on pleasing their boss than doing a good job. Since a happy boss will (theoretically) leave you with a higher score.
- Employees are reluctant to go to their bosses for help (for fear that it will reflect badly on their performance review). It makes sense that employees would go to their bosses for help, guidance and improvement. But, “thanks to the performance review, the boss is often the last person an employee would turn to”.
- Disrupts teamwork. The most important type of teamwork is the one-on-one relationship between a boss and their subordinates. But in performance reviews, as opposed to taking the stance “how will we work together as a team”, it’s “how are you performing for me”.
- At the end of the day… performance reviews don’t improve corporate performance.
Get Rid of the Performance Review! - WSJ.com
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Another bogus element is the idea that pay is a function of performance, and that the words being spoken in a performance review will affect pay. But usually they don't. I believe pay is primarily determined by market forces, with most jobs placed in a pay range prior to an employee's hiring.
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Most performance reviews are staged as "objective" commentary, as if any two supervisors would reach the same conclusions about the merits and faults of the subordinate. But consider the well-observed fact that when people switch bosses, they often receive sharply different evaluations from the new bosses to whom they now report.
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The Content Economy: The digital company 2013 - key points
# The “millennials” will expect to use technology at work as freely as they do in their personal lives. They will also be ready to collaborate.
# Senior management will have a clearer understanding of IT capabilities than is the case today.
# Social networks will be a fixture in the 2013 workplace, despite executives’ ambivalence on their role.
# The use of collaborative technologies will help cut through geographical and organisational barriers, and will give wings to virtual team-working.
# Digital tools will give employees greater control over the information they can access, which means less control for managers.
Something about Team Work
There is something about team work which is important in the society today. I glanced through the other day, on a newspaper article, regarding how workers nowadays do not need to be micro-managed. Instead the managers is suppose to provide room and space for the worker to enable them to demonstrate their ability and facilitate their creative thinking to be brought into an organization. Often time, the idea provided by this empowered workers may turn out to be one of those that has the most impact to the organization.
The Leader With 7 Faces: Net-work, not more teamwork (1)
But in these days of inter-dependence between roles and jobs, many collaboration solutions can be found in informal networks, not in designed, cohesive teams.
Let me inject another contrarian idea: you don’t need any more teams.
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