O
ON TOPIC
The platforms
risk not only
fuelling
surveillance
culture,
but tying
people up in
enjoyable-
but-pointless
chatter
ability to work in an environment
that’s appropriate for the work that
the are doing. If someone actually
needs to be collaborating with their
colleagues, perhaps they should
be sitting in the same room. But if
they need to be creating something,
maybe they need to be in a quiet
space, alone.”
Warrick Beaver, global head
of human resources for Thomson
Reuters global growth operations,
recognises this issue. A digital
collaboration tool is “a poor
substitute for ideation, conversation,
challenge,” he says. “In the very
early stages of team formation for
a particular project, I think there
needs to be a lot more face time
and there needs to be a lot more
iteration in terms of goals, roles,
processes and interactions so that
expectation-setting is clear from
the get-go.”
He adds that, on a collaboration
platform, groupthink is at risk of
taking over because people cannot
pick up on the non-verbal cues that
might indicate dissent. “It’s not easy
to challenge on a collaboration tool
in a way where you don’t feel you’re
the voice in the wilderness.”
Expectation-setting is the key,
according to many. One director
of consulting at a start-up brand
consultancy explained that, worried
about some of the Slack behaviours
in her team, she “banned” them from
using the tool to send messages
when they are ill or on holiday.
She has worked in businesses
where people made themselves
available on Slack even when
unwell, presumably out of a sense
of obligation. She argues that strict
usage rules therefore have to be
implemented, for everyone’s sake.
Beaver disagrees. “One of the
greatest advantages of these
collaboration tools is the minimisation
of downtime. So people can work
when they need to, when it suits
them,” he says. “You would be doing
the tool a disservice if you started to
create some fast rules around that.”
Similarly, Katherine Hutchins, senior
manager of talent acquisition and
culture at AvePoint, uses Microsoft
Teams and believes that “mutual
trust”, rather than directives from
on high, ought to govern this area
of communication.
f you want your staff to
work well together,
investing in a slick
collaboration tool isn’t
going to be sufficient. And choosing
which tool to implement ought not
be a decision made in isolation by a
senior technical member of the
company. It shouldn’t be left to every
potentially intersecting team to
choose their own platform either: all
employees should be consulted
about which collaboration tool
would best suit the way that they
themselves work.
As users attest, the platforms
can risk not only fuelling surveillance
culture, but tying people up in
enjoyable-but-pointless chatter.
Serious thought must therefore be
allocated to the type of work people
are carrying out, and whether the
tools are genuinely making this
work easier. Employers interested
in eliciting deep productivity in their
workforce would do well not just to
give them space to think, but also
to embrace the rich variety of ways
in which people function. FT
I
March – May 2019
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