When it comes to collaboration, friction is not a good thing either from a behavioral of from a technological standpoint. Imagine your collaboration effort is a equivalent to a skater gliding along the ice, every time you add a point of friction you basically make the gliding motion harder and harder to achieve until you get to a point where you’re trying to skate on concrete. Enough friction will kill even the best and most thought out collaboration initiatives. Here are some ideas to help remove or prevent friction from happening.
Technology
- Implement single sign on
- Make sure the platform emulates common social experiences that people expect (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc)
- Allow for easy integrations
- Consider employee feedback in future feature roll-out
- Make sure it’s easy to use and understand
- Import profiles from Active Directory or other existing database
- Implement suggestive features such as “people to follow,” “groups to join,” or “conversations to participate in”
- Provide easy alerts and notifications when relevant
- Allow employees to get access to daily or weekly email digests
Behavior
- Provide educational resources and training along with community management
- Make sure the physical and digital work environments both emulate and support each other
- Understand use cases and pain points
- Speak the language of the business
- Focus on conveying individual value to employees instead of just corporate value to the organization
- Make sure business and technical teams are both involved in the collaboration deployment
- Have an internal marketing plan and make it fun
- Reach out to the exemplars and the managers
I’m sure you can think of plenty of other things to add to this list but the point is that organization’s need to be thinking about how they can remove friction and not add it. Take a look at some of the rules, policies, or approaches that your organization is taking to collaboration and ask yourself if they are adding and removing friction. Do whatever you can to make sure that your collaboration efforts are as smooth as blades on ice, because nobody wants to or can skate on concrete.
