Collaboration: your path to Sustainable Competitive Advantage?

Posted on June 14, 2012 @ http://www.saleschannel-europe.com/2012/06/collaboration-your-path-to-a-sustainable-competitive-advantage.html?goback=%2Egde_63688_member_126528319

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“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

Web apps and the internet have changed the way we work and live. Today we live in a world where the creative quality of work improves as we move along the “Hierarchy of Communication” fromConnect to Communicate to Collaborate to Co-create.

Where would you place your organization on the following 4Cs Hierarchy of Communication?

1) Connect: is all about connecting and being able to connect with others. Connecting with those that you know and those you don’t yet know. Today this has never been easier, simply click to connect, without leaving your office and often without leaving your application. A ‘presence’ indicator lets you know who is there on-line and in your virtual neighbourhood right now.

2) Communicate: Once you have connected you want to communicate. Speaking with the other person now includes speaking with many other people through online virtual meetings. Communicating now includes: chatting, speaking, texting, sharing documents and sharing screens to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas.

3) Collaborate: you communicate so that you can collaborate. There are lots of different collaboration tools, applications and platforms available today that enable us to collaborate effectively across multiple boundaries: organisational, geographical and time zones. Examples vary widely: Skype, TeamViewer, Lync, Office365, Google Apps and Webex to name a few. All allowing you to share, review and contribute to a common project and collaborate together with others.

4) Co-create: you collaborate so that you can create. The desired outcome of collaboration is to create new ways to solve old problems and invent new ways to capture future opportunities. We brainstorm using rich media to engage the collective brain of the virtual community. We build ideas based on human interaction. We invent, create, develop new or better ideas and ways to achieve specific goals and objectives. And we build virtual teams that can deliver continuous creativity which will ultimately lead to sustainable competitive advantage.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage: The ultimate goal of co-creating (and therefore collaborating, communicating and connecting) is to maximise the quality and quantity of your business goals. Sustainable competitive advantage is the sum total of your organisation’s current abilities and future capabilities. By enabling your people to connect, communicate, collaborate and co-create they will produce exceptional solutions to today’s problems and create wonderfully innovative ways to develop future opportunities.

Takeaway:

People, Processes or Platform? The challenge isn’t the technology it’s you and your people. The challenge is moving your people along the 4Cs Hierarchy of Communication. So they become more collaborative and adopt and use collaborative applications and tools in their everyday work. You need to set an example by demonstrating an ‘inclusive mindset’ and a bias towards working collaboratively. The cultural change required of your company will be far more difficult than the technological changes.

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shineseki, Retired Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

Are you ready for the new reality?

View: Collaborating in the Cloud: Opportunity or Threat? by David Ednie, posted on slideshare.

7 Approaches to Ace A Video Conferencing Interview

 

Source:http://careerking.net/7-approaches-to-ace-a-video-conferencing-interview/?goback=.gde_719177_member_126260398.gde_719177_member_126401470

Pretty much any interview are nerve-wracking and generally there are wealth of information out there on carrying out a successful interview but it should be known that taking an interview via video conferencing is a bit different to taking a face to face interview. In a video conferencing interview, every the normal guidelines are applicable (good eye contact, research possible questions which you could be asked etc) yet you have an additional element in that the interview is taking place over video conference and therefore you will need to consider the problems that this could lead to.

Think of the video conference in the same way as you would a physical face to face interview and do your preparation accordingly, however there are some subtle differences because of the technology.

Here are 7 top tips to help make your video conferencing interview a success:

1. Use a neutral background

You do not want to have a background that is distracting to the interviewer. Make sure that there are

Credit Image: Getty Images By: Frank Renlie

no distracting posters or items on the wall. If you have no plain walls, make sure that the image behind you is not chaotic or fabulously entertaining. Pictures of landscapes and other neutral paintings will work with an interview when there are no alternatives.

2. Perform research on the interviewer

Find out everything that you can about the interviewer. Search the internet for their LinkedIn page, their Facebook page, or perhaps a Twitter account. As with an in person interview, video conferencing with a recruiter requires research. Your goal is to find something with which you and the interviewer can connect. You want your hiring professional to feel comfortable with you, and having a great conversation about their hobbies might do the trick.

3. Proper grooming

You might be at home, but that does not give you the liberty to dress in any manner you please. You want to provide a great first impression with your interviewer during the video conference, and a t-shirt and shorts does not convey professionalism in a business environment. Remember that the tape may be played and replayed for the interviewer, so it is essential to have your teeth and hair brushed.

4. Prepare the environment

Make sure that your equipment is working properly, and that the camera is focused on your face and body. It is essential that you provide the best impression possible, and that impression is more readily provided when the microphone and the camera are up to snuff. Have a list of instructions for what to do if something goes wrong within your presentation.

5. Look into the camera

Your interviewer deserves every ounce of your attention. Look into the camera, just as you would look into the hiring professional’s eyes. This might take some practice, as you’re not directly face to face. If necessary, have something behind the camera upon which you can focus. There should be no personal distractions like children, dogs, or loud noises to take you away from your interviewing task.

6. Practice your speech

While you cannot predict what the interviewer will ask you, you can practice the way that you speak. Try to avoid statements like er, uh, and um while you are talking. Remember that this interview can be replayed many times and for many different people. You want to sound as confident and comfortable as possible.

7. Don’t move around

You might fidget quite in person, but attempt to keep your movement and fidgeting to a minimum during video conferencing. Sudden movements, unless you have a high end video camera, do not show up well. You want to provide your interviewer with the best quality available for your interview, and being still is just a facet

Follow these 7 simple steps during your interview and you will find the interview process much easier and less stressful. It will also help to give you the best chance in beating the interview and will give you a competitive advantage over the other candidates who will no doubt approach the interview in the same way as they would approach a face to face interview. Now let the preparation for your video conferencing interview begin and good luck.

Fun: The Key to Better Team Collaboration

 

Remember when collaborating was fun?

The news that Google’s staff bonuses now depend on the success of its new +1 social rank tool — and Mathew’s observation that “you can’t threaten people into being social” — brings to the fore an important but often unacknowledged issue surrounding collaborative business: While businesses focus on choosing tools, prescribing acceptable network policies and measuring ROI, the easiest way to get staff to collaborate is, well, to make it fun.

One organization I worked with last year used an internal social network that was literally devoid of any humor or personality whatsoever. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to use it, and I wasn’t the only one. Who wants to “engage” when there’s nothing but a constructed corporate persona to engage with?

If you want staff to collaborate productively with one another, your suppliers, peers or customers, the simplest way is to make it fun.

You may think that’s unrealistic; a non-essential element in the cut-and-thrust of today’s heady business competition. But the fact remains that it’s the easiest way to get staff to work together.

What makes collaboration fun?

Human Contact

Collaboration is fun because we do it with others. Online collaboration helps us very efficiently avoid the tyranny of distance, which is equally great for making disparate teams feel closer, and for allowing us to learn from people we’ll never get a chance to meet.

We all know the kick that comes from engaging with someone we admire — albeit at a distance — over Twitter or Facebook. That thrill is echoed every day in good collaborative exchanges within teams.

Personalities

Personalities can make or break the collaborative effort. Evolving team member disagreements and friendships all have their impacts on the collaborative fun factor.

Establish your collaborative space as a supportive, open platform on which individuals’ unique aspects are welcome, and your staff will likely have more fun there.

A Shared Goal or Direction

Being part of something bigger than the individual is a key motivator for many collaborators. Most of us want to belong, and belonging involves sharing. Shared experience—especially the overcoming of collective challenges, and the achievement of common goals—strengthens team bonds and supports future collaborative efforts.

Think of the people you love collaborating with on work projects. They’re probably people who share your passion for the work, and who can communicate that enthusiasm equally well through in-person or online exchanges.

Learning, Contribution and Recognition

For most professionals, a key personal motivation for collaboration is the opportunities it provides to learn from peers, contribute to the collaborative effort, and be recognized for the good work we do by people we admire.

That cycle of mutual respect, admiration and knowledge exchange is self-perpetuating. Valuable, rich collaborative relationships usually continue even when team members change employers, and no longer have access to in-house collaborative systems.

The Payoff

If you’re thinking, “that’s fine and all, but it sure sounds like a lot of fun,” you’re right. But remember: more fun means stronger staff engagement, more effective collaboration, and greater productivity.

If your organization is one of those that’s still worried about the potential for staff to “spend all their time on social networks,” it’s way past time to join the age of social business. Engaging with staff about the networks they enjoy, and considering the ways they could be used to enrich workplace collaboration might be a good first step towards making your organization more collaborative and effective.

Teams that don’t collaborate well should assess their operation on the basis of the elements mentioned here. Certain tools may help you overcome specific collaborative issues, but the astute team leader will consider each possible solution in light of its potential to enhance the collaborative fun factor—knowing that more fun will likely lead to a greater ROI.

Bridging the Gap: How to Improve Communication Between the Office and Remote Workers

Some teams are made up of some members who work on-site and some who work remotely. While most research shows that little difference in performance between the two groups, this kind of team poses a challenge. A study by researcher Nathan Bos and his colleagues from the University of Michigan shows that these mixed groups have a tendency to create a divide between the on-site workers (collocated) and the remote workers (isolates). From the study:

“We found that the collocated people formed an in-group, excluding the isolates. But, surprisingly, the isolates also formed an in-group, mainly because the collocated people ignored them and they responded to each other.”

Note that the on-site workers’ tendency to ignore the remote workers wasn’t intentional. It was just an effect of their physical proximity to each other and the greater inconvenience of contacting the remote workers. As a result, the remote workers were more responsive to each other, even though they couldn’t tell which participants worked on-site or remotely.

An earlier study, looking at Lucent Technologies’ software development department, supports these findings. At the time of the study, Lucent had teams working in the UK, Germany and India. The researchers found that employees interacted with local team members significantly more often than they did with remote team members.

Given the tendency of on site workers to ignore remote workers , how does one encourage unity in a mixed group? One way is to make communication between on-site and remote workers as easy as possible. This will minimize any difficulty for on-site workers to reach remote workers, and vice versa. You can do this by selecting communication channels that are easily accessible to everyone on the team. Whether it’s email, instant messaging, or a collaborative app, make sure that members can send and receive messages without compromising clarity. This is especially true with channels that are dependent on speed and signal quality, such as audio or video chat.

But it’s not just the quality of the tools and the speed of the Internet connection that matters. The speed of the replies and collaborative support among team members is also important. According to the Lucent Technologies study, multi-site groups have a tendency toward “a significant slowdown of work that spans sites, as compared to work involving the same people that does not cross sites.” Your team needs to understand that important remote requests require prompt responses to avoid this slowdown.

There are no shortage of tools to facilitate this kind of efficient communication. There are now hundreds of available communication and collaboration tools for teams to choose from, both in the form of hardware and software. Despite the broad choice of tools, however, it’s still best to stick to using as few of them as possible. This ensures that all the data, discussions, and content will be centralized and accessible in one place. So even if your people are not found in the same site, all the necessary information is.

When it comes to real-time communication, it may also help to establish cues that show whether a person welcomes incoming communication or not. Bos’ paper suggests that the lack of these cues may hinder successful communication, “Without contextual information it is difficult to know when someone is available or interruptible. Furthermore, people worry about appearing rude, so [they] do not initiate contact.” One way to use these cues would be type of presence status notification (the “Available”, “Busy”, and “Away” symbols) featured in most instant messaging apps. Make these cues consistent and enforced throughout the entire team.

But if you want to take a more radical step, why not encourage your entire team to work remotely — even if many of them live in the same city? A few years ago, Om interviewed Jason Fried of 37signals, who said that a distributed workforce was good for his company. Fried said that he believed people are more productive when they’re working apart. Even though (at the time) five members of the team lived in Chicago, they still worked apart. Since that interview, entire teams working remotely has become even more commonplace

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/bridging-the-gap-how-to-improve-communication-between-the-office-and-remote-workers/

What’s Crowdsourcing Useful For?

Defining “crowdsourcing” — like defining “social media” — can be a bit of a challenge. The term not only seems to have multiple meanings depending on who’s using it, but it’s also being used to define a whole new landscape of activities that didn’t exist in their current form a mere five years ago.

In its simplest form, crowdsourcing means turning to the many people outside of your own company, organization or self to do something.

Social technologies, including social networks, make it easier than ever for to bring people together, to communicate with them and to organize them, both as individuals and as a group. New sites now exist that are custom-built to help you manage crowd outreach and the processes of getting something done with many people outside of your organization.

So what is the “something” that you can do — or get done — by tapping into the crowd? Here are some categories and examples of crowdsourcing:

1. WORK

Utilizing the crowd for work sometimes entails “micro-labor:” small, discrete tasks broken out of a bigger project and handled by many distributed workers. Examples of crowdsourcing work sites in this vein include Samasource, CrowdFlower and Mechanical Turk. Or it could be reaching out to the crowd to collaborate on creating something such as a new company logo. Or you could reach out to a crowd to identify a single contractor to do specific work, perhaps through site like Elance.

Another example of a crowd doing “work” for you is by leveraging the knowledge of your more avid customers to provide peer-to-peer support for your new customers, with some guidance from you. A product like BearHug can help you to manage your customer service crowd. (We wrote about Bearhug in July.) Another example of getting a crowd to do work is Wikipedia where people write, edit and police the site without pay.

2. INPUT

Polls and surveys are commonly used ways to use the crowd for input. Formal tools for getting input from the crowd include question-and-answer tools like LinkedIn Answers andFacebook Questions. These tools are similar to Yahoo! Answers, but they reach out to your own community, instead of the web population at large.

You can also turn to crowds to beta-test a website or software application, or to troubleshoot a problem. Sites such as uTest and TopCoder offer two different models of tapping into crowds of programmers. The former provides a managed community of professional programmers to run test cycles on other companies’ software products and sites, while the latter works more like a bidding site for managing online programming competitions and competitive software development. In testing situations, input becomes work and in some cases, there is compensation for that work. In other cases, programmers or others provide their input or work at no charge, often to build their portfolios and reputations.

3. ORGANIZING

While gathering crowds for social action is a centuries-old activity, in today’s technological interconnected world, the tools we can use to gather and manage crowds are more powerful and efficient than older ways, such as letter-writing or phone calls. Examples of such tools include SeeClickFix, or on a more global scale, One Billion Minds.

Fundraising is also an activity that has benefited from advances in technology. An application such as Facebook Causes provides individuals with a compact set of tools for reaching out to one’s Facebook friends (and their friends) for organizing, action, and fundraising. Kickstarter provides a funding platform to help individuals raise money for creative projects from others from both within and outside of their communities.

The flipside of getting something done through crowdsourcing is to be part of the crowd and doing the work or providing the input. I’ll cover that in my next post.

I’m currently writing a book about crowdsourcing, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing” (Penguin, Spring 2011), so you can expect to see a few more posts on the subject here on WebWorkerDaily.

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/3-uses-for-crowdsourcing/

18 Tasks You Can Crowdsource

A few weeks ago I wrote about what crowdsourcing is useful for, breaking it down into three main categories: Work, Input and Organizing. Crowdsourcing is a way of getting work done that can help you save time, money and free you up to get to other work at hand.

Here are some ideas for tasks that can be crowdsourced, and links to sites that can help you with those tasks. Note that some of the sites mentioned can be used for several different types of crowdsourcing, and not just the tasks mentioned here.

TECHNICAL TASKS

• Translation. Need something translated, without having to rely on Google Translation to do the trick? Try MyGenGo.
• Transcription. Have audio files that need transcribing, such as a podcast? TryCastingWords.
• Photo tagging. Looking to get photographs tagged or classified and support a good cause? Try the nonprofit crowdsourced labor site Samasource.
• Keyword optimization. Looking for SEO help? Try Trada.
• Data verification. Have a long list of business information, like a contact list or URLs, and need that content verified? Try the CrowdFlower self-service site (CrowdFlower CEOLukas Biewald will be speaking about the future of work and crowdsourcing at ourNet:Work conference in San Francisco next month).
• Website testing. Looking for usability testing for your site? Try Usertesting.com.
• Beta testing software. Need some skilled beta testers to test your software or go through your code? Try TopCoder.
• Article writing. Need some content for your website or blog? Try SquadHelp.

CREATIVE TASKS

• Logo design. Looking for a logo for your company? Try Prova.com.
• Business card design. Need a new business card layout? Try Guerra-Creativa.
• Print and online ads. Want a print ad or an online banner ad? Try 99designs.
• Website design. Need a new website interface design? Try crowdSPRING.
• Product development. Want to see if your cool product concept can become a real product? Try Quirky.com.
• Brand names and taglines. Looking for a new name for a company, product or service or a clever tagline? Try NamingForce.
• Video. Need a video produced? Try Tongal.
• Packaging. Need packaging for a new product? Try BootB.
• Creative campaign. Running a campaign and need a winning idea? Try IdeaBounty.
• Quick ideas. Need some fast, inexpensive input? Try IdeaOffer.

Whatever your need, crowdsourcing can help you get work done and tap into crowds of talented and skilled workers willing to perform work in new ways. Keep in mind that the work can vary in terms of quality. Most sites that charge for services have some kind of refund policy if you are not 100 percent satisfied, but read the fine print.