How Collaboration Drives Network ROI

by Sarah Miller Caldicott     

Are you an ”interaction worker?”  According to a provocative Harvard Business Review blog on the productivity potential of social media, an interaction worker is defined as a manager, sales person, marketer, or leader ”whose work requires frequent interpersonal interactions, independent judgment, and access to knowledge.”

Interaction workers typically include the most expensive folks on the payroll – or the approved consultants list.  Their work is highly valued and sought after.

However, despite the larger salaries they command, blog authors Manyika, Chui, and Serrazin found that interaction workers spend nearly half their time chasing data or responding to requests for information:

          % TIME               ACTIVITY

           28%                 Answering, writing, or responding to email

           19%                 Tracking down information

Sadly, only 14% of time spent by most interaction workers is actually spent collaborating – a paltry sum.  Given that these workers represent the movers and shakers who generate knowledge assets, spur innovative thinking, and drive revenue, larger chunks of their time must be allocated to collaboration.  The authors argue that social networks can be an important part of making that happen.

How can we begin making collaboration a more important part of the work week?  How can we begin expanding the amount of time that highly valued interaction workers spend on collaboration?

Begin Evaluating Return on Network

One step we can take is to begin measuring the impact of the interactive networks these employees access during their collaborative efforts.  As marketers and innovators, we are accustomed to considering factors like ”return on investment” (ROI) or ”return on assets” (ROA) in our project work.  I believe we must now consider a new measure:  ”return on network” – or “RON.”  While return on network is not a metric which exists today, I would argue RON is an important equation marketers can devise over the next several years.

Why? Though many reasons could be cited, let’s focus on two.

First, it’s crucial for organizations to begin encouraging collaboration as a more mainstream, more standard form of workplace interaction.  In fact, collaboration will need to become a ”superskill” for virtually every worker by 2015.  According to a 2011 study by Forrester Consulting, over one-third of US companies now use virtual teams as part of their daily operations, with 40% of total employees involved in some type of virtual team structure.  This percentage is expected to rise to 56% in the next three years, nearing the percentage of folks involved in face-to-face teams.

This means that interaction workers must increasingly operate in virtual environments.  They will need to be sharing ideas and creating influence in settings which are not solely ”live.”  Of necessity, social networks will need to drive a big part of their productivity – and their success.

Second, Nilofer Merchant in her new book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era argues that traditional strategy as practiced in the Industrial Age is dead.  It is being replaced by new structures whose backbone hinges on social networks and technology platforms that will ”redefine our organizations to be inherently more fast, fluid and flexible” by their very design.  Rather than ”doing a little bit more, or slimming down a bit here or there,” the structural shifts that organizations make must be bigger and deeper.

Increased collaboration represents one of these shifts.  Organizations are now forming world sourced pools of resources and capabilities that can be mixed and matched fluidly, solving problems by bringing together folks who don’t know each other well.  Virtual networks are crucial to aiding these fluid groups, accelerating productivity with an ability to drive shared connections and build shared knowledge across large geographic distances.

Two Forms of Pseudo Collaboration:  Compliance and Cooperation

But using social networks and virtual structures are not a panacea for creating true collaboration.  Having a virtual network in place does not automatically mean collaboration is actually present.

Consider the way you spend your own work hours.  Are you using virtual networks to collaborate and build new shared knowledge or simply share existing information? And what about the C-suite?  What does collaboration activity look like for leaders who are actually charged with driving value creation?

Consultant and Forbes contributor Ron Ashkenas notes that an emphasis on collaboration and the use of collaborative networks must start at the very top.  Yet most senior leaders remain hesitant to collaborate in any form – including a reluctance to employ even the most basic social networking tools.   Ashkenas, in his intriguing post ”Why Teams Don’t Collaborate,” identifies the two primary pseudo structures that we often mistake for true collaboration: team compliance and team cooperation.

Compliance:  Team compliance comes into play when each team member independently responds to a challenge by taking action in his or her own area of expertise.  Everyone does something but avoids working together or gathering perspectives from others.  The synergistic effects of real collaboration and knowledge sharing remain untapped.

Cooperation:  Team cooperation is in play when larger groups come together to work jointly on a project, but the emphasis remains on separate approaches for each group – even if their overall strategies are aligned. While there can be agreement on team direction, a lack of discussion, ongoing dialogue, or synergistic sharing of resources leaves more powerful – and more novel – solutions unexamined.

Do these approaches sound hauntingly familiar?  What can we do to foster true collaboration rather than merely giving a head nod to more pseudo structures?  And how is true collaboration different?

Collaboration Teams Build Collegiality and Share a Common Purpose

In the course of researching my upcoming book on collaboration, Midnight Lunch: The Four Phase System of Team Collaboration Success, I examined how Thomas Edison positioned collaboration as a driver of his innovation success.  Collaboration proved crucial to Edison’s ability to pioneer totally new industries and drive billions of dollars in market value.  Collaboration in Edison’s lab moved well beyond pseudo structures like cooperation or compliance.  Rather than building clusters of individuals merely ”doing their part,” Edison’s laboratories fostered collaborative teams that were coherent - a term drawn from the realm of physics.  Coherent teams exhibit the following qualities:

• Create common goals and a common purpose.
• Establish new context for the problems they have been asked to solve.
• Ask new questions rather than repeating old ones.
• Value collegiality as a core bond.
• Foster debate and diverse perspectives.

Rather than dedicating his collaboration teams merely to tasks or information gathering, Edison positioned collaboration as a process of discovery learning and creating collective intelligence.  He organized his teams to navigate complexity and drive new knowledge – not just respond to what already existed.

Collective Intelligence Is One Form of RON

We see in the development of the incandescent electric light, the phonograph, the movies, and the storage battery a reliance on coherent teams that could produce new knowledge through collective intelligence. Though Edison and his teams lacked the computer networks we enjoy today, the market value of Edison’s efforts supersedes any time stamp we may wish to impose.

What we really need to drive value creation today are interaction workers capable of driving collective intelligence through collaborative networks.  Whether in the C-suite or at the grass roots of an organization, the use of social networks must be productively linked to asking new questions, creating new context, and applying new insights.

Are your teams coherent?  Or are they compliant?  Do they have a structural framework which enables them to be collaborative, or are they glorified extensions of a management system that is actually not seeking much change at all? 

As marketers and innovators, we must not only begin modeling true collaboration through the teams we guide but also aim to drive a higher return on network through the development of collective intelligence.  As ”interaction workers,” we need to advocate new methods for more deeply sharing resources, and expanding the productivity potential of social networks.

************

Don’t miss a MENG Blend post.  Sign up now for direct delivery to your email inbox.

**********

MENG is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.

Learn more.Apply for membership.