Collaboration in the Digital Workplace

By James Brennan, Head Of Education & Nsw State Manager, ELB Pty Ltd

James Brennan, Head Of Education & Nsw State Manager, ELB Pty Ltd

In previous generations, the workplace looked a lot different from today. The old workplace was a physical place. Colleagues worked at desks near each other, during the same hours. Meetings were in conference rooms, gossip at the water-cooler. Sales and customer relationship reps traveled heavily to physical meetings with their clients. When the boss wanted to talk, he gathered everyone together at a physical all-hands meeting. Collaboration is never seamless; people are basically people throughout history and everywhere in the world. But collaboration was easier, being mostly between people who saw each other every day and who worked in basically the same conditions.

Today, for both better and worse, things look a lot different. Today’s workplace is increasingly digital, global, 24/7. Coworkers may never meet face-to-face. They’re working from home, working at different locations, working on the road. A single team might be spread across three or four continents, in half a dozen different time zones. Collaboration is through shared files and digital platforms. Socializing at work is on Slack or through other messengers. Representatives call their clients on Skype. Management communicates through emails and webcasts. Somehow, the modern workforce has to collaborate across boundaries—geographic, cultural, temporal, and technological—that their predecessors never faced.

Looking Truth in the Eye
It’s easy to default to emails and texts, to just make changes to the shared document and conduct conversations in the comments. But just because the technology changed doesn’t mean that we did. Humans still have a deep need to see each other face-to-face. Albert Mehrabian’s research in the 1970s established that audiences base 55 percent of their assessment of a speaker’s credibility on body language and 38 percent to vocal tone; only percent was influenced by the speaker’s words. Text is useful, but full-body experience is what we were built for.

As we continue toward an increasingly digital future, the ability to make meaningful connections between people will make all the difference. A recent McKinsey report found that even as our time shifts towards increasingly technological skills, by 2030 we’ll see a 24 percent increase in time spent on social and emotional skills like managing others.

Taking Advantage of Digital Efficiency…Without Losing What Makes Us Human
While it’s never going to be easy for colleagues in Hong Kong and Paris and New York to grab lunch together, it’s still possible to build personal relationships. We already have many of the tools we need. The secret is going to be video.

As we continue toward an increasingly digital future, the ability to make meaningful connections between people will make all the difference

Video restores a lot of what many digital workplace tools lost. It makes it possible to get familiar with each others’ faces, to see body language, and hear the subtle shadings of voice. It can be both real-time and asynchronous (and even start as one and convert to the other).

It’s why our State of Video in the Enterprise survey found that 92 percent of employees think video makes executives more relatable and personal, while 95 percent believe it connects geographically-dispersed employees. Video brings the human touch back into the digital workplace.

How to Take Advantage of Video in the Digital Workplace
/ Video makes it easier for teams to collaborate across the entire organization. They can build personal relationships instead of communicating with faceless email addresses. When they want to share ad-hoc explanations of how to perform a task or a quick summary of new developments, it’s faster to record a verbal message or a screen share than it is to type out a full document. Video emails are more attention-grabbing in a cluttered inbox.

Some popular ways of incorporating video into the digital workplace include:

- Knowledge sharing videos. Your employees are the best experts in your product. Letting them teach each other best practices can help struggling performers catch up a bit with superstars, and prevents institutional knowledge from getting lost.

- Webcasts. Replacing company conference calls with webcasts helps employees feel a deeper connection with the management and a more personal investment in the company. Being able to watch executives rather than just reading memos or listening to them emphasizes executives’ leadership skills.

- Learning videos. Videos today go well beyond dry lectures. They can include quizzes and interactive elements that can ensure learners engage more deeply— and more cost-effectively—than they could in a classroom.

- Video emails. Whether it’s salespeople reaching out to prospects or executives talking to their teams, adding videos to email makes a bigger impression. And unlike an email, the sender can tell if and when a recipient actually watches the video.

The Tools Needed for Video
One of the big hurdles companies set up for themselves when trying to embrace video is to believe that all video must be highly polished to be useful. But today’s employees have become used to authentic video through platforms like YouTube, Skype, and Weibo. Just like companies would not expect employees to run internal emails by a copyeditor, it’s not necessary for employees to create their videos in a fancy studio. For most internal videos, some simple capture software is all that’s necessary. What companies need to focus on is giving employees a way to share and manage that video content.

Whether through a standalone video portal—a “corporate YouTube”—or by integrating video into the social business platform already used on the company’s intranet, a unified video platform makes it easier for companies to empower their employees to share video without letting things get out of hand. From the employee’s perspective, it’s easy to find relevant videos, share them securely with colleagues, and exchange comments for easy collaboration. From the employer’s perspective, it’s easy to control access and ensure compliance with regulations, while keeping file management organized and bandwidth and storage costs under control.

The Workplace of the Future
We’ve built the current digital workplace by accident. A combination of individual decisions and market forces pushed us into today’s virtual, global, asynchronous workplace. But we can choose to use that technology to build more connections. Video gives us the best of both worlds.