In 2002 I was part of a group of researchers at the R&D department of Océ that got inspired by the book The Myth of the Paperless Office by Sellen & Harper. As a result, we started a project to study how paper supports knowledge workers in their task management. Today the project is a Ph.D. project carried out by Olha Bondarenko at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in close cooperation with Samuël Driessen from Océ and myself. Over the years we uncovered many mechanisms by which paper supports knowledge work, and we were able to learn valuable lessons for the design of digital document management systems.

Last Tuesday I was asked to present our research for a group of students at the University of Twente. It was a good reason to summarize six years of “desk research” in a presentation. The presentation is available here.

Projective is a department of Rabobank Netherlands. Its 80 employees are professional project managers responsible for complex projects within the Rabobank organization. For the duration of their projects they are stationed elsewhere, for example at the Utrecht or Eindhoven headquarters, at affiliate organizations, or at local banks throughout The Netherlands. As such, they form a group of nomadic workers that is scattered throughout the organization and the country. As a consequence, and due to the constant influx and outflux of employees, Projective is facing the challenge of how to effectively organize knowledge sharing within the department. In this pilot case, we quickly discovered that social connectedness is a key prerequisite for informal knowledge sharing.

Purpose

• Help Rabobank Projective to improve knowledge sharing between its employees.
• Investigate instruments and conditions that will stimulate Projective employees to share knowledge with their colleagues.
• Use a living lab approach to (1) generate and validate a set of instruments and (2) create active involvement of Projective employees

Key lessons learned

• Individual freedom and autonomy in new ways of working come at a price: colleagues can become alienated (socially disconnected) all to easily.
• Lack of social connectedness can be a powerful factor limiting knowledge sharing between colleagues.
• To improve social connectedness between colleagues a coherent approach is needed in the mental world, physical world, and virtual world.
• Measures in the mental world stimulate; measures in the physical and virtual worlds facilitate.

Improving social connectedness

The model of the “three worlds” can be used to come up with a set of coherent and mutually strengthening measures that improve social connectedness and knowledge sharing.

• Create the motivation and culture for mutual contact (mental world). Define common ambitions that unite employees. Stimulate informal contacts; consider them a valuable investment. Explicitly allow time for informal meetings during working hours.
• Use your office space to facilitate mutual contact (physical world). Create a home base where colleagues can be sure to ‘bump into’ one another. Make your home base a place where employees like to be, with good coffee and a pleasant atmosphere.
• Make colleagues curious about one another (virtual world). Help employees to create and maintain a personal home page (MySite) with photo, interests, working experience, and contact details. Create a team website (OurSite) with department news, facebook, expertise finder, and proper access to frequently used information.

Virtual instruments to facilitate social connectedness

In a workshop with several Projective volunteers, a range of virtual instruments and social media was presented and discussed to assess their potential to facilitate social connectedness and knowledge sharing.

Instruments were then evaluated by letting the volunteers individually assign 10 bonus points and 10 penalty points among the presented instruments. Bonus points represent perceived benefits, whereas penalty points represent perceived costs such as required time & effort.

MySites (personal homepages on Sharepoint) and OurSite (department website) were evaluated best. Learning points from the discussion were (1) the individual perspective (‘what’s in it for me’) cannot be ignored, (2) employees focus on the efficiency of an instrument (‘it shouldn’t cost extra time’); and (3) conservative instruments are favored over untraditional ones because the latter have not yet clearly demonstrated their value.

Next steps

A small team of early adopters will soon start experimenting with social media to gain practical experience and to share lessons learned in moderated sessions. Their experiences will then be translated to the department: what are the drawbacks and benefits, what is the business case. More on this soon.