communicate, collaborate, operate -...
TRANSCRIPT
COMMUNICATE, COLLABORATE, OPERATE: How Technology is Changing the Way We Talk, Work and Deliver
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Technology is transforming the way the world works. Market leaders in every industry are under threat from innovative start-ups intent on disrupting the status quo.
Business as usual is not an option. The combined forces of mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies have destroyed barriers to entry, eliminated traditional economies of scale and flattened the business world for good.
Small companies have gained an edge in global business, with imagination outpacing planning and agility outwitting process.
But as each wave of technology becomes more affordable and accessible to all, its potential to drive competitive advantage diminishes.
Technology may have disrupted the workplace. But it’s the workers that are creating new ways to drive value.
Many large companies are now using these transformational technologies to empower their workforce and replace economies of scale with innovation at scale.
They understand that the benefits of scale are no longer about the mass-muscle of a labor force, the conformity of mass-production or mass-media marketing. The benefits of scale in today’s workplace are about the collaborative experience, wisdom and imagination of a diverse workforce, turbo-charged by technology to deliver innovation at scale.
This ability to innovate, at pace and scale, is re-defining success in today’s marketplace. Communications and collaboration are often thwarted by the bottlenecks and bureaucracy of large organizations.
This report looks at the opportunities for Corporate HR and IT teams to work together, and change the way their organization communicates, collaborates and operates, by improving the way their employees talk, work and deliver.
Introduction
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A New Corporate Operating SystemThe nature of work has changed. Collaboration, data analysis, and mobility are now critical levers for labor productivity. Yet, 60% of employees globally believe IT is ineffective at providing these capabilities.
Pervasive technology fundamentally changes how people communicate, discover and connect. With smartphones and tablets serving as digital appendages, we focus on small screens throughout our day, every day and in all we do.
Technology’s biggest impact, however, is not so much on the devices or the apps we use, but on our behavior. Specifically, it affects how we learn, how we buy, how we work, and how we influence and are influenced.
Although our personal activities are radically changed by mobile technology, we still tend to base how we work, market and sell on dated principles designed to optimize tasks from a very different time - a time when IT managed technology; the HR staff led operations; and managers ensured productivity.
With social, mobile, real-time data and cloud now a part of everyday life, how people work in and outside of the office has become radically different.
This is bigger than the bring-your-own-device movement. It’s about changing why and how we choose new technologies, how we roll them out, and how we design new processes for working individually and together to accomplish a work objective.
- Brian Solis, author: The End of Business As Usual
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The Changing Face of Business CommunicationsIt wasn’t that long ago that fax machines and photocopiers were the staple office communications products that no business could survive without. Both are trending toward obscurity as our world is increasingly dominated by screens and a significant amount of our communications are obsolete by the time they make it into print.
In our personal lives, the smartphone revolution has given us instant access to any information we need wherever we are. The social revolution has given us instant connection to all the people that matter to us and big data is helping serve us entertainment matched to our personal tastes, and recommendations based on our past behavior.
We now expect the same in the workplace. The challenge to IT Departments is clear - use this same technology to allow greater collaboration, efficacy and productivity in our jobs.
By 2018, 25% of large organizations will have
a strategy to make their corporate computing more like consumer computing
Almost 1/3 of employees work on-premises, but frequently
collaborate away from their desks. 70% of these
employees are unhappy with their mobility capabilities.
And IT departments are responding: But there is still a long way to go:
Source: Cain, Matthew W., et al. Predicts 2014: consumerization impacts enterprises’ social and collaboration strategies. Gartner, Inc. November 13, 2013
Source: IT Impact Report: Five Key Findings on Driving Employee Productivity. CEB. Q1 2014
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The Conversation EconomyAs technology has transformed the speed, scale and channels of information exchange, our individual communications skills have become more essential than ever.
67% of global CEOs surveyed by IBM ranked communications skills as a key driver of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment (2nd only to collaboration skills).
The ubiquity of mobile access, and the abundance of social channels have placed a premium on those workers who can deliver clear signals among an avalanche of noise. If actions and decisions are now being based on 140 characters, each of those characters needs to be made to count.
64% of organizations have either invested or have plans to invest in big data within 24 months.
Through 2017, 90% of the information assets from big data analytic efforts will be siloed and unleveragable across multiple business processes
The dark side of Big Data is Information Overload, as every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google chairman, Eric Schmidt.
Big Data requires smart storytellers to unlock its value, and we are beginning to see the need for new skills such as data visualization. The ability to articulate the meaning behind the data and share it effectively with colleagues is becoming an essential skill. As our ability to generate data grows, so does our need to translate its meaning.
Communication skills are ranked first among a job candidates “must have” skills and qualities, according to a 2010 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers in the USA.
Advances in technology are transforming the nature, reach, speed, and focus of human influence. According to many experts, we’ve moved from the “knowledge economy” to the “conversation economy.
– Rich Karlgaard. “The Soft Edge.”
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Everyone is a Communications ProfessionalThe days when communication skills were the preserve of the specialist corporate communications department are over. In today’s world of social media, cloud computing and mobile platforms, everyone has access to the same tools, but lacks in having the same skills. Therein lies the opportunity if we are to benefit from the combined wisdom, experience and imagination of our entire workforce.
According to an IBM study, 70% of a company’s knowledge resides solely in the minds of their employees.
Forward-looking organizations are equipping their entire workforces with both the tools and the skills to become more effective communicators. Tools and skills to manage the tsunami of data and information they are subjected to every day, as well as tools and skills to clarify their own thinking and share their knowledge with the rest of the organization.
Regular Employees are More Trusted Than Media Spokespeople or CEOs - Edelman 2014 Trust Barometer.
Companies such as General Electric are realizing the benefit of equipping regular employees to be company spokespeople and customer service agents.
GE Aviation sought to build closer connections to customers. To do so, the company focused on first connecting sales and marketing people. Something as small as introducing an enterprise social network such as Salesforce Chatter and empowering employees to interact with one another to answer questions and solve problems streamlines customer engagement and improves relationships overall.
As GE CMO Beth Comstock notes, “What might’ve taken a team—in the best case—a week, can now be done in minutes.”
GE Aviation is also looking to social media to modernize its brand image while showcasing innovation to a new connected generation of consumers. Using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, consumers are given a behind the scenes peek at innovation at work.
The problem many organizations face today is not a shortage of people—it is a shortage of key skills
– Bersin by Deloitte
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Communication Requires a Common LanguageA one-language directive is likely the most important policy that multinationals can institute for their globalizing companies.
The proliferation of integrated organizational systems, the need to tightly coordinate work and to serve clients worldwide has accelerated the move towards the use of English as a lingua franca (common language) no matter where companies are headquartered. SAP and Siemens are based in Germany but have mandated English as their business language; Kone Elevators in Sweden has set English as its sole mode of business communication. Even Microsoft in Beijing has implemented English as its business language for its local Chinese employees. Indeed, the business case for the one global language policy is indisputable.
- Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School
Business English is Increasingly Valuable in a Connected World
Pearson English Business Solutions’ 2013-2014 Globalization of English Data supports the value of a common language, and the growing importance of English in the global workplace.
70% said English was a requirement
for their job - up from 62%
42% said they need to improve
their English skills within 6 months -
up from 31%
60% said they need English every day at work -
up from 52%
74% saved one hour or more
per week due to improved English
skills - up from 69%
In a global customer survey of 27,000 knowledge workers across 133 countries:
Case Study
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Improving Communications, and Profits, at Capgemini ItalyCapgemini Italy employs 2,400 employees in 13 locations who need to communicate with clients and partners around the globe.
Since deploying the Pearson English Business Solutions* Product Suite, the company has achieved productivity gains of nearly 2 hours per employee per week with a program to improve English skills across the organization.
Surveys have shown that 92% of the Pearson English Business Solutions* users at Capgemini Italy are active and that the overall average skill improvement across the board is on track to reach at least 1 level per year (on a scale of 0 to 10).
This increased proficiency is translating to noticeably improved efficiency on the ground, with the company reporting gains of 2,899.8 person-days of productive time due to its investment in Pearson English Business Solutions*.
Capgemini can attribute annual net savings in excess of $1.1 million to this improvement in the communications skills of its workforce.
Capgemini employees in Italy have used their improved Business English skills to:
• Improve the clarity of emails sent to non-Italian colleagues• Reduce the time needed for conference calls and meetings with
German colleagues• Enable productive meetings with international team members• Increase learning from the analysis of documents written in English• Clarify the needs and requests of international clients• Prepare technical documents in English for international audiences
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According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, at the turn of the 20th century, the proportion of workers who had to exercise significant independent judgment and decision-making in their jobs had been just 13%, and the remaining 87% of workers across all job classifications worked in routine-oriented jobs in which their superior determined what they were supposed to do all day and, to a great extent, how they were supposed to do it.
By 2010, the proportion of creative jobs was up to 33% of the workforce, a proportion that will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
In 1960, just eight of the top 50 companies by market capitalization owed their position to creative talent. By 2013 more than half the top 50 companies were talent-based, including three of the four biggest: Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
The Rise of the Creative Economy has changed the face of conventional business management. Employees can no longer be treated as cogs in a machine under a command and control style management. But instead, as management guru Peter Drucker predicted, top talent needs to be treated more like highly paid volunteers than employees.
The value being created by highly effective teams, supported by transformative technology has never been greater:
The winning companies in today’s Creative Economy understand that instead of hierarchies of command and rules of control, today’s workers will deliver much greater value when armed with the tools to connect and the skills to collaborate.
Everyone is a Communications Professional
Over the past 50 years the U.S. economy has shifted decisively from financing the exploitation of natural resources to making the most of human talent.
Instagram had only 13 employees when
it was purchased by Facebook for
$1 billion.
When Facebook and Google reportedly tried
to buy them for $3 billion, SnapChat
had fewer than 30 full time employees.
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Technology has become a driving force for improving internal operations, with organizations looking to strengthen personal connections, improve communications, and enable collaboration.
In today’s new work environment, with everybody constantly on-the-move, collaborative business apps are also meeting the need for data access whenever and wherever it’s needed.
According to industry analysts at Gartner, the dual forces of mobile and social are fueling the move to a connected and collaborative culture:
By 2016 half of large organizations will have internal collaborative networks, and 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as e-mail and telephones are today. Social networks will become the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to carrying out work.
However, Gartner also estimates that:
Through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.
“Businesses need to realize that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments,” says Carol Rozwell, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Traditional technology rollouts, followed a “push” paradigm. Workers were trained on an app and were then expected to use it. In contrast, social initiatives require a “pull” approach, one that engages workers and offers them a significantly better way to work. In most cases, they can’t be forced to use social apps, they must opt-in.”
This trend of workers choosing to opt-in (or not) to new technologies has been accelerated by the growth in mobile technologies, and the move towards BYOD (bring your own device) - a trend frowned upon in a command and control culture, but actively encouraged in more forward-thinking collaborative organizations.
“Employees are increasingly deciding how they want to work and which tools suit them best regardless of corporate policies,” according to Jane McConnell, author of The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization.
“It started with BYOD and now includes BYOPC (personal computer) and BYOA (apps),” explained McConnell who sees BYOD as “nearly mainstream now” with official policies in place at half of the organizations identified as early adopters in her report.
When it comes to collaborative technologies the message is clear for IT Professionals:
Collaboration and the Role of IT
Applications need to be as easy to use as the consumer apps which now set
the standard for all computing
Applications need to work on the devices that workers prefer using - which increasingly means mobile
Applications need to deliver value at a personal, and business unit level as
well as at corporate level
The digital workplace is much more than technology. It is a blend of capabilities, enablers and above all, mindset
– Jane McConnell, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization
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While technology can enable more collaborative workplaces, corporate culture will likely determine their adoption and sustainability. Most experts agree that technology is often the easy part of the equation, while changing human behavior often presents a much tougher challenge.
“Tools merely offer the potential for collaboration,” argues Evan Rosen, author of The Culture of Collaboration. “Unlocking the value of tools happens only when an organization fits tools into collaborative culture and processes. If the culture is hierarchical and internally competitive, it will take more than tools to shift the culture.”
According to an IBM CEO study, companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness—often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation—as a key influence on their organization.
The report goes on to say that CEOs regard the interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.
Collaboration and the Role of HR
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Dr. Didier Bonnet, Global Practice Leader at Capgemini Consulting, and coauthor of Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation, offers advice on how to ensure your company culture is aligned to capitalize on the potential of collaborative technologies:
Lead by Example: “With executive engagement, you don’t have to mandate activity.”
Engage True Believers: “Drawing on influential employees in the front line is one of the most effective vehicles for promoting change in an organization. Devise a program to nurture your digital champions, as they are key to transformation success and will most likely be your organization’s future digital leaders.”
Engage your HR and Organizational Development People Early: “Take a leadership role in the transformation to ensure new practices get institutionalized.”
Align Rewards and Recognition: “Use all available reward structures to foster adoption, not just financial ones. And consider new forms of employee engagement, such as games, which can also yield positive results.”
Creating a collaborative organization is not just about implementing new technology. If you want to see true and lasting value from your technology investments, people need to change their mindsets and behaviors, and HR needs to lead that change.
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Technology-Driven A-TeamsOne of the biggest benefits of a collaborative culture is the opportunity to raise the standard of workforces and project teams by recruiting beyond the traditional geographic and location-based boundaries.
When new recruits had to be in the same location as your offices, and project teams were more effective when they could share a meeting room, the potential talent pool for both was clearly limited. But with transformative technologies, and a culture of collaboration, those limitations can be removed. The best person for the job can be hired, no matter where they are in the world, and the perfect team assembled based on complimentary skills not proximity of offices.
In their book, Remote, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of online software company Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) explain the benefits of their collaborative culture when it comes to recruitment:
“Great talent is everywhere, and not everyone wants to move to San Francisco (or New York or Hollywood, or wherever you’re headquartered).
“Thinking internationally when it comes to worker recruitment doesn’t just drastically increase the size of the talent pool; it also makes you a better fit for tackling global markets. In software, for example, it helps you catch all those little things—like the calendar week starting on Sunday in the United States, but on Monday in much of the rest of the world. That’s pretty important if you’re designing a digital calendar.”
International exposure can also serve as a selling point with clients. Alex Carabi, founder of Carabi + Co., a web design studio, lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Stockholm, Sweden, but purposely hires remote workers in other parts of the world because he feels having an international team helps him win clients. Having input from Texas, London, and Auckland, New Zealand, contributes to a wider range of ideas and perspectives.
Fried and Hansson do have one cast-iron rule when it comes to remote teams - the need for a strong command of a common language:
“With remote work, most communication is written. Many people who can get by with so-so language skills in the spoken realm fall flat when it comes to the written word. There simply isn’t much room for weak communication on teams with tight collaboration. You need solid writers to make remote work work, and a solid command of your home language is key.”
Case Study
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Driving Global Innovation at MarvellMarvell Technology Group Ltd. is a global leader in providing complete silicon solutions, shipping over one billion chips a year for products in mobile communications, storage, cloud infrastructure, digital entertainment and in-home content delivery.
The company supplied the wi-fi chips to the first iPhone, and was named one of Thomson Reuters’ top 100 global innovators in 2012 and 2013.
Marvell’s business is driven by innovation and speed-to-market, requiring effective collaboration across design centers and production facilities in China, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S.A, with a significant number of its 7,000 employees being non-native English speakers.
96% of Marvell’s workforce said they used English daily, or a few times a week, for internal and external communication.
Marvell’s Talent Development & Organization Effectiveness team identified a lack of Business English competency as an opportunity to target a critical talent gap while supporting organizational agility through improved communication Working with Pearson English Business Solutions they deployed high impact, on-demand Business English learning solutions to employees in seven countries, including mobile apps for both iPhone and Android operating systems.
A cloud-based solution easily scaled across the globe to increase the speed and accuracy of implementation, and reach employees when and where they had the opportunity to learn, practice and apply their skills. High-performing employees with the greatest number of study hours or activities completed were positively recognized at formal events, and they became role models for other subscribers.
Marvell’s goal was for employees not only to improve their skills over time, but also to apply their new skills to their jobs immediately for measurable productivity gains:
They have saved up to 2.4 hours a week with better Business English skills on conference calls, in emails,
presentations and more
The projected productivity gain shows a company- wide savings of 32,076 hours per year, assuming 297 employees
are working 45 weeks per year
Conservatively assuming that the employee cost per hour is $10, the total estimated productivity gain through
improved communication and collaboration in Business English is $320,760 per year
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The transformational trends of technology highlighted in this report, are also impacting both centralized HR and IT departments at an operational level.
As organizations innovate to better serve the customer with more personalized, relevant and delightful experiences. HR and IT must take a similar approach in serving their own customers - the business units and employees within their organizations.
A one-size fits all approach no longer works, and technologies have removed the cost-saving arguments used to defend it.
Forward-thinking HR and IT departments are taking a more collaborative approach with their customers, and using technology to transform the business from the inside out.
Technology Driving Operational Change
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IT Operations and the Customer Experience “In 2012 the research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that by 2017, a company’s chief marketing officer would be spending more on technology than its chief information officer was. That oft-quoted claim seems more credible every day.”
- Harvard Business Review July-August 2014.
According to Gartner, Digital marketing budgets are expanding annually at double-digit rates, and CEOs say that digital marketing is now the most important technology-powered investment their firms can make. And in a recent study they found that:
In The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist, Gartner describes a new environment, where collaboration between the CMO and the CIO continues to deepen with a supporting organizational structure of technologists embedded in the marketing function.
This movement away from centralized IT departments is not confined to marketing, as Jane McConnell, author of The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization explains: “Business functions are active in the digital workplace and operational managers are key to driving change.”
McConnell’s research shows that while communications and IT are the primary decision-makers for the digital workplace, early adopters are nearly twice as likely to have operational management and CEO-level management “very involved” in strategic decision-making, with lines of business such as engineering, operations and legal being more active in social collaborative initiatives.
IT departments are facing a future where business units, and the employees within them, will all have specific requirements, often with support from the C-suite, for technologies to transform internal performance, in service of an improved customer experience.
Smart IT managers are already building bridges, and spending as much time learning about their internal customers, as the CMO spends learning about their external customers.
67% of marketing departments plan to increase their spending on technology-related activities over
the next two years
61% are increasing capital expenditures on technology
65% are increasing budgets for service providers that have technology-related offerings
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HR Operations and Employee AdvocacyProgressive HR Managers have long seen themselves as strategic partners, supporting company-wide business plans and objectives.
The combined forces of mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies have placed a greater emphasis on communication and collaboration skills across the workforce which HR can take a leading role in helping develop and deploy.
In 2013, 43% of companies identified internal social media education as a top social business priority, while only 38% indicate having such a program in place, or in progress.
- Altimer Group
Social media tools and mobile technologies enable every employee to play an active role in sales, marketing, market research and customer service.
Done well, this can be a tremendous asset to the organization, humanizing its offering as part of an employee advocacy program as companies like Radio Shack have done.
RadioShack’s goal is to give associates enough social media skills to advocate on behalf of the brand. Cosmin Ghiurau, Director, Social Media & Digital Strategy at RadioShack, shared:
“We’re a 90-plus-year-old company. We have some employees who have been here 40 years. The end result is that we want more associates to use social media, know how to work with the social media team to create content, and share our content on their personal social channels with the right guard rails in place. If only 1% of our current 34,000 employees participated and became ambassadors, we’d have an extended social team of 340.”
But without the right skills, training and policies in place the results can be disastrous.
52% of organizations surveyed reported that they had experienced at least one social media incident or violation of the corporate social media policy in the past 12 months.
- Altimer Group
Effective employee advocacy campaigns require a combination of:
• Access to, and training across, the latest social technologies
• Clear and simple corporate policies and guidelines
• Effective communications skills training• Leadership participation• Incentive and reward programs
for desired behaviors
Case Study
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Personalized Global Training for Deutsche Post DHLDeutsche Post DHL (DP DHL) offers a one-of-a-kind portfolio of logistics and communications services via 450,000 employees in 220 countries and territories.
With so many competing native tongues, being able to communicate effectively enough to conduct efficient business on this scale is a challenge. In response, DP DHL mandated English as its corporate language—but English proficiency was in short supply.
In 2009, an internal audit conducted by Pearson English Business Solutions revealed that 90% of employees fell short of organization’s effective communication requirement.
With such a large and varied class of potential students, DP DHL and Pearson English Business Solutions set about using the latest technologies to offer high-impact on-demand services that could both scale globally, and offer personalized training to meet the needs of employees at many different levels, in vastly different roles, across a wide range of cultures.
Employees took placement tests to create their personal learning path. They also had access to performance support tools like customized email templates, text-to-speech technology and DP DHL–specific word lists tailored to their specific needs.
Daily program administrator reports, monthly usage reports and DP DHL leadership Business Impact Survey results have allowed Pearson English Business Solutions* and DP DHL to continually optimize the program.
DP DHL has closely tracked cost- and profit-related KPIs, but knew the success of these metrics would be directly tied to employee satisfaction and engagement, which in the latest survey was measured at 91%.
Employees averaged 48 requests of performance support tools over the past 12 months, demonstrating both a continual interest in skills improvement and the need for additional language support while on the job.
In 2012, the anytime, anywhere, any-device accessibility of the cloud-based solution led to annual productivity gains of £2.06 million through improved Business English across the DP DHL workforce.
90% of employees say the program has helped them improve their English at work
95% agree that the program is relevant to their job
92% indicate that they have been able to use what they have learned in the program, on the job
Case Study
