3 Functions Bots Can Perform to Orchestrate Collaboration at Scale

The following is adapted from Adaptive.

Thanks to new technology—particularly, automated processes that free up humans to perform less-robotic work—businesses can collaborate at a scale never seen before. But what can we do with our shiny new collaboration platform and our army of bots? 

Bots will streamline how we collaborate across teams in three key ways: managing time and workload, scaling trust and empathy and sharpening strategic alignment. 

Using Bots to Manage Time and Workload

No employee likes to be micromanaged by their managers. And yet, that’s what so many managers spend their time doing—hounding team members for updates. I know this from firsthand experience. No matter how talented my direct reports were, I constantly found myself looking over their shoulders. It was my least favorite part of my job, and it set a sour tone for my relationship with every member of my team. They knew me as the overbearing boss.

One day, I realized that I no longer had to be the boss that everyone disliked. I decided to automate away as much of this function as I could. After six weeks of coding, I had created an automated project administration bot that was a taskmaster in a way I could never muster.

Every day, without fail, this bot would review everyone’s work, apply my heuristics and the heuristics of the team project managers, and then pester the team to better manage their work through the messaging platform we were using.

The effects were nothing short of astonishing. The first thing that happened was that the bot found an unsettling number of issues with the way people were managing their work. Even with a pack of project managers and myself overseeing the work, it still found things that had been left to languish, the metaphorical equivalent of a basement filled with deferred decisions.

The bot did not care what the excuse was, and its philosophy was always the same: fix it or I’ll be back to pester you tomorrow. Whereas human managers don’t have the robotic capacity to review everything and the constitution to chase down every problem, bots do. 

Using Bots to Scale Trust and Empathy

Remember when you were a kid and had a crush on someone? Of course, you couldn’t just walk right up to that person and tell them you had a crush on them. That would be insanity! What if they rejected you? What if they laughed at you? No, the social judgment would be too great. Better to write a note and have a trusted friend deliver it.

It turns out we are all still in grade school because giving someone critical feedback is still socially awkward and socially risky. What if the person gets angry or you hurt their feelings? What if they don’t see your point of view? No, the potential social humiliation is too great.

Better to write a note and have a trusted chatbot deliver it. Even better if that bot has artificially intelligent tips for you to improve the likelihood that your message will be well received.

So, the next bot I built fanned out across the company every quarter to ask people to provide feedback to their colleagues. It would collect that feedback, anonymize it, perform some analysis on it, then deliver the results to everyone, including the coaching team, which used an aggregate analysis to identify areas that needed improvement and target their efforts. 

When I launched the coaching bot, I discovered that people were far more willing to tell the bot their feedback and let it handle the social interaction than they were to give verbal or more traditionally written feedback—let alone face-to-face feedback! In fact, the change-management team I worked with initially insisted that we instead do only face-to-face for a quarter as a warm-up exercise. It was a disaster. When faced with mandatory meetings to share uncomfortable feedback, the people involved reverted to chatting about more comfortable topics like their kids, the weather, or the insanity of this crazy face-to-face idea.

I later enhanced the bot to coach people on how to give great feedback. By this point, I had collected a massive amount of written feedback and was able to search for correlations between features in the feedback and stronger individual improvement. Because this was a chatbot operating in the same messaging system everyone was using to get work done, the bot could interact naturally with each person to help them craft the most productive feedback possible based on its earlier language analysis. The result was an amazing amount of high-quality feedback that we could then mine for ways to improve both the relationships and the individuals who formed the social fabric of the team. 

If your employees need a lesson in giving good feedback, adding a bot to the mix could provide the much-needed guidance that takes their responses from lackluster to actionable. 

Using Bots for Strategic Alignment

Finally, I decided to go for a moonshot—using a bot to align each person with the overall company strategy. Do you know what your company strategy is? What are you doing as an individual to drive it forward? 

Most employees want to be part of something greater than themselves. Meanwhile, most companies have a tough time driving strategic vision down to individual execution. How can you align thousands of employees, each with their own agenda, with the company strategy?

Psssst…bots!

A bot can reach out to every employee, get them to identify how they personally align with the strategy and follow up with them regularly to see how things are going. The bot can even give them coaching advice along the way.

When I used a strategic-alignment bot with my own team, it had an incredible impact. Even though the first implementation of this strategy alignment bot was rudimentary, the impact on team cohesiveness and engagement was powerful. I have since expanded on this early work to cultivate and leverage collaboration to drive continuous, sustainable, strategic execution at scale with every employee. Doing this manually would require an army of project managers and strategy consultants, and it still would have been too much. 

With collaboration technologies and bots, you can augment every single employee to be a strategy execution expert. The result is every executive’s dream—the bot will ensure that every employee has an answer to the question, “What are you doing to drive the company strategy?”

Build on the Basics to Meet Your Team’s Needs  

The possible uses for bots go far beyond the functions explored in this article, but starting with even one or two can dramatically enhance how your employees collaborate. Consider your team’s unique needs, find bots that supplement your human talent, and build your bot task force from there. Like an employee who never gets distracted, a bot on your team will likely result in fewer tasks slipping through the cracks, more honest feedback, and total alignment throughout the company around strategy. 

For more advice on building collaborative companies, you can find Adaptive on Amazon.

Christopher Creel has spent more than twenty years building and leading research and development teams at major companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Perot Systems, and CSC. During this time, he realized that trends in education, technology, and globalization had broken the traditional organizational model, and he began to devise a system that could improve business results, increase employee productivity and engagement, promote collective and individual growth, and raise the general level of happiness in the workplace. He refined this model through fifteen years of applied R&D, and three independent studies over the last five years showed dramatic improvements in engagement, productivity, operational efficiencies, and risk mitigation.