Sophia, Annemiek, Aljosha, and Dirk: congratulations and good luck in Edinburgh!

De komende tien jaar kan de Nederlandse overheid 7,5 miljard euro besparen als ambtenaren een kwart van hun werktijd vanuit huis werken. Dat berekent ict-dienstenbedrijf Capgemini. De onderzoekers verwachten dat de met thuiswerk gepaarde investeringen na ongeveer twee jaar zijn terugverdiend. Het gaat daarbij om kosten voor de infrastructuur en de (her)inrichting van werkplekken.”

Aldus dit artikel in Computable op 26 maart j.l.

Ik ben altijd een beetje skeptisch wanneer een ICT dienstverlener berekent hoeveel thuiswerken aan besparingen oplevert, een flink deel van de investeringen vloeit tenslotte naar de ICT sector, maar goed. De berekeningen zullen vast wel goed onderbouwd zijn en de bedragen die eruit rollen, laten zien hoe groot het belang is.

Onlangs hebben we in een persbericht gerapporteerd over de resultaten van een telewerken-survey die wij in samenwerking met Rijkswaterstaat en in opdracht van het TelewerkForum hebben uitgevoerd. Mensen blijken thuis het contact met hun collega’s te missen en de informele kennisuitwisseling in de wandelgangen, en ze voelen zich minder zichtbaar op de werkplek. Dit soort ‘zachte obstakels’ blijkt voor veel mensen een grote belemmering te zijn om (meer) te gaan telewerken. Dus zelfs als je alle benodigde ICT middelen ter beschikking stelt, een comfortabele thuiswerkplek vergoedt, en het management opnieuw ‘opvoedt’ dan heb je als overheid die 7,5 miljard nog niet zomaar binnen. Het is een mooi voorbeeld van de weerbarstigheid van de praktijk en van een uitdagende onderzoeksvraag voor consultants en onderzoekers die zich bezighouden met Het Nieuwe Werken.

Sociale media zoals Twitter en Yammer kunnen een rol spelen in contact houden, informele kennisuitwisseling en (virtuele) zichtbaarheid op het werk.  Maar ook na enkele pilots met sociale media, onder andere binnen de Rabobank en Novay, blijft voor mij de vraag bestaan in hoeverre dit middelen zijn waarmee uiteindelijk een meerderheid van kenniswerkers uit de voeten zal kunnen. In het persbericht suggereren we daarom ook een wekelijkse ’terugkomdag’ zoals die in sommige bedrijven (met name in de consultancy sector) al is ingevoerd. Daarnaast kan ook de inrichting van het kantoor slim worden gebruikt om zichtbaarheid, contact, samenwerking en kennisuitwisseling te stimuleren.

Hoe dan ook, het is zaak dat iedereen die zich met de invoering van telewerken bezighoudt beseft dat er aan de kostenbesparing ook weer een prijskaartje hangt. Er is expliciete aandacht nodig om de interactie tussen telewerkers te bevorderen en te voorkomen dat het sociale contact – en het daarmee samengaande delen van kennis – teveel in het gedrang komt.

• de baas zien te blijven over een overvolle agenda
• geen tijd hebben voor reflectie of zelfontwikkeling
• eigen doelen moeten stellen, zelf de verantwoordelijkheid moeten nemen
• een gezonde balans zien te houden tussen werk en privé
• moeten samenwerken op afstand
• niet goed weten wat er speelt in je team
• je collega’s weten te vinden, verbonden blijven met je collega’s
• geen eigen werkplek meer hebben, moeten werken op meerdere locaties
• moeten werken met steeds meer applicaties en devices
• je weg zien te vinden in een versnipperd aanbod aan informatie

In een tweede ronde konden de deelnemers brainstormen over de vaardigheden die nodig zijn om deze uitdagingen goed het hoofd te kunnen bieden. Na een inventarisatie en een stemmingsronde kwamen we tot de volgende lijst:

1. Duidelijke prioriteiten kunnen stellen
2. Grenzen kunnen stellen
3. Goed verbindingen kunnen leggen
4. Zelfstandig kunnen werken
5. Gericht zijn op relaties
6. Goed kunnen netwerken
7. “Mindful” kunnen werken, jezelf goed kennen, bewuste keuzes maken

Opvallend was de grote afstand tussen Duidelijk prioriteiten kunnen stellen (de nummer 1 in deze lijst) en alle overige vaardigheden die werden genoemd. Dus wat deze groep deelnemers betreft, met veel vertegenwoordigers uit de HRM wereld, is dit dé vaardigheid van de moderne kenniswerker.

While I came with the communication egg model to talk about things missing in distributed teams I feel that it could be useful in more contexts. In particularly to talk about the differences between different types of social constructions in the knowledge management context.

[At this point it makes sense to go and read Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication ]

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

Team communication is heavily shaped by the shared goals and agreed communication formats/processes. It’s very much about getting things done together and strong ties that needed for it.

Communication in communities is a bit further from actual work, but still has lots of connection with it (e.g. Q&A mode, where one uses an opportunity of being together with other experts to ask for solutions for a problem). It’s usually a mix of stronger and weaker ties that help to open up and share local practices. There is enough commonality and trust to hold people together and enough diversity to support learning.

Network communication is more opportunity-based and informal. There is not much in terms of shared goals and recurrent conversations, the ties are weak or latent. However, there is enough connectivity and opportunities to communicate that result in cross-fertilisation and emergent ideas and practices.

I guess the things on the diagonal could be also about the types of communication that is supported by specific managerial practices (performance – knowledge management/professional development – informal learning/innovation) or social tools (groupware – community tools – social media).

You can also use this framework to think on what is needed in terms of moving between different types of social constructions: e.g. moving from network to community by picking shared interests and adding a bit of structure (rhyhm, roles) or community-born projects, where shared goals and even more structures (e.g. deadlines appear to make sure that things get done. In the opposite direction you might think of “usual” KM practice of spotting overlaps between teams and establishing semi-structured community spaces and processes to make sure that practices are shared across and going to networking events or sharing one’s traces online to create opportunities for informal interaction that brings new contacts and new ideas.

***

Does it make any sense? I’m actually more happy with the picture than we the text around it, but anyway all of this stuff is thinking in progress, so hopefully will eventually evolve into something more understandable.

With the holidays I somewhat took a break from blogging on our work on the distributed Agile case, but there are still quite a few things there that I wanted to share to hear what do you think. This one is a bit scary since I picked up some ideas from linguistics without having a proper reading of the work behind it, but at times this is the price to pay* for sitting between research and practice.

So, the picture on the right is a simplified version of the work of Herbert H. Clark:

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this “common ground” from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. [This is from a back of Clark's book "Arenas of language use"]

In my terms: communication is enabled by the common ground between the participants and, in turn, contributes to building more common ground over time. Taking it a bit further, it is useful to distinguish between two components of the common ground:

• information that the participants share (not necessarily explicitly, as it is often assumed that others know about X because of shared cultural, educational or work background) – I talk about shared knowledge and awareness of the bigger picture here
• relationships between the participants – knowledge about each other and trust

Now to the distributed Agile teams. At a starting point there is a big distance between the team members:

• different locations that make it difficult to rely on team-building and ad-hoc interaction that naturally happens in a co-located team;
• time differences that in some cases provide only a small window of opportunity for interactions;
• different cultures, organisations and levels of technical expertise create difficulties of getting a team “on one page” needed for seamless work.

Distance between team members across different locations creates a vicious circle:

• lack of common ground, the need for using technology and addressing time issues make communication challenging
• challenges in communication make it difficult to overcome initial differences between teams, to build relationships and shared understanding of the bigger picture behind work

This picture is not that far from what you can learn by reading about the challenges of distributed Agile and solutions to address them, but hopefully it can help to address the problems in a more systematic way: spending time on establishing shared understanding and relationships in the team (especially in the beginning) and finding ways to shape communication processes and tools that not only allow to get things done, but also contribute to growing awareness and relationships over time.

My personal “hobby horse” is around the last point. From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

* The ideas behind this post are grounded in insights coming from research on computer-mediated communication and distributed teams, but I need more time to read papers and to integrate research ideas in a systematic way. Hope to blog about it soon.

“On assignment for Future Workspaces we have looked into how to improve collaborative moments for knowledge workers using multi-touch technology. One of the most promising collaborative activities that could be improved was brainstorming. An interactive system already offers many advantages, and especially during the idea clustering phase the advantages of multi-touch can be leveraged. We have developed such a brainstorming application in collaboration with knowledge workers and validated the concept using focus groups.

With our application we try to bring a good deal more fun to the brainstorming process by providing brainstorm participants with interactive games. These games bring participants to the multi touch wall, and also release some of the tensions associated with selecting ‘winning’ ideas. Next to that, we also made large improvements on the clustering process. We feel it is important to be able to freely try different clusterings, and be able to play around during this phase. Using intuitive gestures, and using a ’bubble’ metaphor, brainstorm participants are able to create, move, remove, resize, rearrange, undo and relate clusters and ideas. During the entire brainstorm we support structuring the discussion with a ‘compare idea’ tool so participants can backtrack decisions and their rationale.

Are you curious to see how this all works together to support an entire brainstorming session, from creation of ideas to the selection of them? Then please, check out our movie prototype below. We welcome any comments you might have.”

Onderstaande presentatie vat de aanleiding, uitvoering, en geleerde lessen van de experimenten samen. Enkele interessante uitkomsten zijn:

• sociale media versterken de informele kant van een organisatie;
• sociale media faciliteren het leggen van contact en het elkaar weten te vinden (oftewel het versterken en verrijken van je netwerk);
• sociale media versnellen het op zoek gaan naar informatie ten opzichte van het omslachtige via-via doorverwezen worden naar anderen.

Twitter en discussiefora blijken complementaire meerwaarde te bieden voor kennisdelen. Twitter is georiënteerd  op personen; het faciliteert daardoor het leggen van contact en het versterkt de onderlinge verbondenheid. Discussiefora zijn daarentegen georiënteerd  op onderwerpen, ze faciliteren het elkaar informeren en het terugvinden van informatie over een specifiek onderwerp. Een hechte en gebruiksvriendelijke integratie van Twitter en discussiefora, zoals deze bijvoorbeeld in Yammer te vinden is, lijkt daarom voor het bevorderen van verbondenheid en kennisdelen een zeer geschikte optie.

As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams. One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else. I drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is.

You can look at communication in a team across two axes. The first one (horizontal) is about what triggers it. I find it useful to distinguish between goal-oriented and opportunity-driven communication:

• Goal-oriented communication is about work-related problem solving and coordination. It’s the task at hand that forces you to approach others to sort out things with them. This is the case where you wouldn’t hesitate to plan a meeting, send an email or pick up the phone to call.
• Opportunity-driven communication is about things not 100% necessary, but potentially useful, or, even, not very useful, but just said at the moment (“good morning everyone!”). Think of the cases where you wonder if your email is ’spamming’, add “by the way, do you also know…” or most of the conversations at the coffee corner. In this case communication is triggered by an opportunity – bumping into people, interesting things happening, ideas floating by or just an awkward silence that forces you to look for a topic to continue. This type of communication is piggybacking on something else: either happening around goal-oriented communication (e.g. side conversations at a meeting), other activities (having a coffee together) or observing others (e.g. seeing a colleague and remembering to ask them about something).

Vertical axis is about the ‘pre-arrangeness’ of communication (I’m not sure with the terms here, so any suggestions are welcome):

• Structured communication is expected and, to an extend, formalised. Planned meetings, promised memos and status reports are here. In this case there is time, space and resources needed to communicate (or, at least, nobody questions that they should be there).
• Informal communication is about everything else. It’s also expected, but in a more fuzzy sense (“let me know if there is a problem”). It’s not likely to be known in advance when and how it will happen, so it’s more difficult to allocate the resources for it.

In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg . There are enough triggers for an opportunity-based communication and being in front of someone makes negotiating about time, space and channels for informal communication easy (you rather make a minute to talk about the thing, say “no” or make an arrangement about communicating later on).

In a distributed team communication shrinks to the basics (egg yellow . From one side, when there is no “easyness” of face-to-face settings, we are likely to rely on structured communication, since negotiating time and resources for informal communication is more challenging (e.g. email might be not read for a while, phone is interruptive and costly, etc.). Informal communication is still happens, especially in the goal-oriented space, but the chances for it are lower, because it’s extra taxing (e.g. questions that would be asked in a meeting may not get get asked in email or IM chat). For opportunity-driven communication it’s even worse: lack of shared physical space results in far less triggers that might turn into a conversation: there are not many non-essential activities (no drinking coffee online , it’s more difficult to observe others and even goal-oriented communication mediated by technology tends to be more “on topic” (from my experience “social talk” at a face-to-face meeting happens much easier than in a phone conference or email exchange).

There are quite a few more things to add here (in particularly about the negative effects of shrunken communication and ways to extend it), but nobody likes very long blogposts