By Business & Finance 
The right mix of culture and technology can unlock collaboration and drive productivity for any organisation, writes Mike Hughes.
Collaboration is often seen as a magic bullet for success by business leaders and a McKinsey study in 2012 found that 66% of chief information officers from top performing organisations saw collaboration as critical to innovation.
The truth, however, is that while organisations and employees see collaboration as important, they are struggling to collaborate effectively.
As we embrace mobile technology to free us from the confines of the traditional office, we can run the risk of attenuating those connections to our colleagues that make us effective collaborators.
In addition, outmoded organisational structures can reinforce siloed thinking and create unintentional barriers in how we work together and share information.
In fact, we spend up to 20% of the working week looking for information, which can result in organisations losing 21.3% in productivity. Recent Irish research conducted by Microsoft found that old communication habits impact on collaboration.
- 81% use face to face interactions to exchange information, but only 48% felt it was effective
- 69% use email to share information, but only 30% believed that it was the most effective
- 60% use the phone to exchange information, but only 4% felt it was an effective way of sharing information
- 57% of those surveyed felt their colleagues used information for personal advantage
Many organisations know this is a problem.
In fact, 41% of Irish employees wanted a centralised system for storing information, particularly within large organisations with over 48% of employees from larger companies.
Connecting and networking
Similarly, the rest of the world outside of work has become more interconnected, thanks to social networking technologies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
In our personal lives, we exchange information naturally and without friction. This has demonstrated that we instinctively collaborate on activities in our private lives, given the right technologies.
Adopting a similar approach in our work lives could see collaboration and productivity transformed. Increasingly, productivity is no longer defined as how quickly one employee can deliver output, it is becoming about how effectively teams can collaborate to maximise the benefits of the work and insights of others, be they in the same organisation or beyond to reach a common goal.
Creating the right space and technological environment could reap huge rewards for your organisation. McKinsey & Company have highlighted that companies using social technologies see a 20-25% increase in productivity when collaborative technology is used well.
But success needs organisational change, not just collaboration. Firms that have deployed social enterprise technologies in a ‘provide and pray’ way, saw mixed results. Research showed that of the 50% of respondents that have tried various types of shared drives and networks, only 8% said they found these useful, mainly due to lack of training or encouragement by their organisation.
Creating a collaborative environment means providing the right mix of leadership, cultural change and technology to enable employees to naturally work together beyond silos.
The Microsoft Enterprise Social solution delivers seamless social experiences across Yammer and Office 365 – including Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Lync Online services.
Microsoft’s approach to enterprise social is to enable the organisation to behave like a network that can share information and make decisions in an agile and responsive manner. This enables the organisation to stay competitive and relevant in a world of accelerating change.
With enterprise social technologies, organisations can see a 37% improvement in project collaboration (Gartner); this is because they enable all players in often complex projects to easily stay up-to-date with developments and keep communications alive and functional, resulting in quick and effective decisions that drive the project forward.
Information exchange
With the new Groups function in Office 365, information shared across all elements of the platform according to individual work preferences – for example, the conversations that happen in Yammer – can also be accessed in Outlook or in SharePoint.
This means that team members who prefer to work in email can still participate in social conversations happening inside a Yammer Group. Additionally, individuals who are part of the same group have access to a group calendar in Outlook and a document library in SharePoint.
Powered by OneDrive for Business, groups are also open by default to enhance discoverability and sharing. However, they can be made private as necessary to ensure that you have the privacy and access control you need.
In addition to helping companies collaborate better internally, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social solutions can help teams work better together with external partners, suppliers, and even customers.
When working with partners and suppliers, teams typically exchange numerous emails and phone calls. Important messages and attachments can easily get buried or lost in your email inbox or voicemail.
But with Yammer External Networks, teams can create a dedicated online workspace for collaborating with people outside of their organisation, allowing teams to quickly get feedback from partners, suppliers, and customers in real-time.
Collaboration is often seen as a magic bullet for success by business leaders.”
With a single workspace for easily communicating with people outside of your company, teams are better equipped to respond and adapt quickly to change.
Of course, no external collaboration project would be complete without the exchange of files and source materials. For instance, when working with a research firm or creative agency, project teams typically need to share reference materials to loop in vendors. Meanwhile, vendors need an easy way to share drafts and work in progress, many of which can be large files.
OneDrive for Business enables team members to share online files securely with other people – both inside and outside their organisation.
Along with Yammer External Networks, teams can shorten the feedback loop from partners and suppliers using Lync. Team members can call, IM, or set up a video conference in one click to meet with external collaborators and discuss the latest updates, without incurring the travel costs of meeting in person.
Microsoft has also worked hard to integrate Skype technology so that any collaborator with a Skype account can easily be introduced into the work group for a similar communication experience.
Smarter decisions
Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions enable teams to make smarter decisions and take action based on what’s happening across their company.
According to the McKinsey study, business leaders report a 71% increase in the speed of access to knowledge with enterprise social tools. With the speed and volume of information available today, it’s harder to stay on top of the latest changes and updates. Yammer enables teams to follow people, conversations and content from across the organisation. This helps teams build relationships with experts in other groups or departments, stay in the loop with discussions and leverage the work of others.
For instance, one cross-functional team might be working on a product launch. By following individuals in relevant departments such as marketing, research or finance, team members can see conversations that could impact their launch, such as news regarding a competitor. Because conversations are open by default in Yammer, teams are able to see and act on information that would otherwise be hidden in information silos.
Social solutions
With over eight million users worldwide, Yammer is an enterprise social phenomenon. Increasingly, Irish businesses are also catching on to using Yammer to collaborate successfully.
These include small organisations of less than 20 people to large indigenous companies and multinationals in the financial services, public sector, manufacturing and pharma sectors, to name but a few.
Creating a collaborative environment means providing the right mix of leadership, cultural change and technology.”
These Irish organisations are among the first to recognise the benefits that they can reap by working like a network and not like a fossilised hierarchy.
Recently, Gartner made Microsoft the number one in its magic quadrant for ‘social in the workplace’ – in short, Microsoft has the best mix of tools and vision for enabling social networking in the workplace. Microsoft’s ability to recognise and enable its customers to collaborate with each other, share information and influence decision-making is highly regarded too.
When social information becomes embedded in your tools and processes, you become a fully connected, collaborative and productive enterprise, one that is productive and efficient.
