Wednesday, January 21, 2015

The Future of Work.

Last week Coca-Cola announced it was shutting down its office voice mail to “simplify the way we work and increase productivity”.  Facebook announced a new platform called “Work”, a social solution for office communication. And recently IBM came to market with Verse, its new social collaboration tool that helps “prioritize your inbox”. Powered by IBM”s analytics and advanced search, IBM Verse delivers a cloud based tool to manage your workday. Less clutter, more clarity.

The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28% of the work week managing email. And up to 30% of email time could be repurposed by adopting social collaborations tools for communication (McKinsey, July 2012).

Collaboration has been a buzzword in the social business realm for a while.  Social business technology pioneers touted the productivity benefits of collaboration. And while these early adopters worked hard to prove it, the platforms and the new behaviors they demanded disrupted the entire enterprise - from organizational structures and systems, to skills and culture. “How do we manage information flow?” “We’re not ready for this, we have an approved system for all corporate communications.” “We built it but no one is coming to it.” “We have an intranet.” “We don’t need this. We communicate fine by email.” “It doesn’t fit into our Information Architecture” “What does this do to my org structure?” “This is going to create a lot of chaos” “How do we control this?”

However, companies are figuring it out. 
They have to. Productivity is on the line. Collaboration, cloud, data/analytics, alternative work arrangements, the crowd, talent-sharing, networked organizations vs organizational structures, work/life balance, and a culture of sharing are the #NewWayToWork.

The Career Executive Board recently shared that to achieve breakthrough performance, organizations need to recruit and reward employees that demonstrate what they call “Enterprise Contribution.”. Enterprise contributors are defined as people that are successful in managing individual tasks as well as executing work in collaboration with others. And, according to CEB, increasing enterprise contribution can have a 2x greater impact on profitability over individual task execution alone.


The future has arrived. .

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