Sharing social experience is key to better teams and awareness
Smokers developed an informal employee social network. They spent nearly an hour a day chatting with other smokers in other groups about all sorts of shared interests. Eric was pretty junior, but he hung out with some of the more senior managers too - those who smoked, that is. Eric knew about people and initiatives that we never heard of. He was our eyes and ears, and was invaluable to the team.
…a colleague of mine in the health-care industry found that the most important element to preventing a particular type of accidental death in a hospital setting is tied directly to how effectively the floor-staff has gelled. The better they are as a team, the higher the likelihood that someone will notice and correct a common procedural mistake that one of their co-nurses made. The hospitals who commissioned this study are now trying to figure out how to get their floor staff to feel like a team. Who would have thought that a weekly pizza lunch and a bulletin board with family pictures could save lives?
- Gil Yehuda
Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people.
People who identify with one another are more likely to share information proactively, without waiting for others to ask for it, because they understand how their own work relates to that of other people and see the flow of work from multiple points of view, spanning silos. Too many social computing experts view collaboration from within a command and control prism, assuming people collaborate because coordination and communication are part of their job description.
Effective collaboration really requires proactively sharing information with those it affects, not simply reacting to information requests. It means anticipating the future impact of actions you take on the responsibilities of other employees or business partners, or the needs of customers. People really don’t do this well unless they see other employees, and customers, as people too. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons that social networks increase in importance as collaboration decreases as a face to face activity.
- Larry Irons
Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.”
One simple intervention is to give workers more opportunities to socialize in groups. Currently we are implementing a strategy at a call center for a national bank chain where we are changing the break structure of the employees. Previously each employee on a team of around 20 people had a separate 15 minute break in order to reduce the need to shift call loads to other teams, although in practice this issue is not terribly important. This makes it very difficult for cohesive relationships to develop, since groups of friends will by design have limited opportunities for shared interactions.
To create more of these opportunities we changed the break structure of two of the four teams that we had studied previously so that all of the employees on a team are given a break at the exact same time.
The patterns of social interaction changed dramatically after the intervention, and Bank of America reported productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.
- Larry Irons
……shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and community…comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience where trust increases the likelihood that needed information is shared, or that the need itself is anticipated.
- Larry Irons
that when two people enter into a deep discussion, they create shared meaning of the world, strengthening their connections and bonds and interdependence, making them happy.
“It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”
- Venessa Miemis
There is plenty of research out there supporting the value of having close friends at work. Higher satisfaction, stronger engagement. Intuitively it makes sense: if you like the people you work with everyday, you’ll be happier and more involved.
If friendships can drive engagement, then visualizing a companies social network should tell you a thing or two about the health of an organization.
- USA Today
Related
Real enterprise 2.0 is about service
Social sensitivity is crucial for group performance
Cooperative conversations boost performance
(Source: libraryclips.blogsome.com)
