Is your company busy becoming more agile but is reality that most people are still dominated by emails and meetings? We see most successful teams having adopted social technology to communicate and collaborate.
This article describes the maturity phases teams go through when adopting social technology to help them collaborate.
Teams are the engine of the success of social networks just as they are the engine of the company. If your teams are smart and fast your company will be smart and fast.
We see a lot of teams stuck in their emails and entangled in a web of document libraries but still hesitant to innovate their collaboration methods. Their willingness to let go of the old methods often determines what maturity level a team reaches.
Reaching people
At the lowest maturity level teams use social networking technology for ad hoc communication. The share:
Team news
Successes
Articles they come across
Documents they created
Social content like pictures of team off sites
During this phase we often see that social content is a large portion of the content on the team group, content is often shared by a small number of individuals, the content is not of much value to get things done, and the business value of the content is low.
Becoming smarter
As teams become more mature using social networks they start to facilitate or run some of the ‘generic’ team processes -like meetings, document review cycles, voting, or simple brainstorming, on the social network. Many of these activities have a big impact when it comes to reduction of emails, time spent in meetings, using the teams collective intelligence.
Teams also start connecting their document libraries to their social networks and start having conversations around documents. Doing this ensures that vital ‘tacit knowledge’ relating to documents is started to be captured and the team is capable to create a better collective memory.
Faster and more agile
Teams in the most mature stage master a concept called working in the narrative (WIN). WIN means that you share updates on the important things that you are working on. The individual topics or deliverables are structured in a threaded conversation that is updated if the status of that topic changes.
The concept is focused around the idea that most things that happen in a company can be treated as stories that are update over time creating a narrative. The benefits of WIN is that you capture the context of why things happened in the company. It’s also far easier for people to align with you and help you if you share what you are doing and what you are going to do. Below is an image of the concept and a list of examples of processes that actually are narrative and should be treated as such.
Teams co-create deliverables and capture the dialogue around the creation process in on the platform. Not just the deliverable is captured but also the process to create it. This is a great asset to capture knowledge but also to create more organisational transparency.
Teams use bots to automate and simplify processes running in a team. These can be generic processes like travel approvals, purchasing requests, or some teams even create some fun bots that determine who’s turn it is to get coffee.
The most mature level of teams is reached as they start to interact with other teams in the way described above. They use innovative collaboration techniques and break down organisational silos to make sure processes run smoothly.
This article is the 3rd in a series of articles about maturity levels organisations see when using social communication and collaboration technology. Previous articles:
Communication