The Collaboration Puzzle: Adding the Missing Pieces

Improving collaboration across the enterprise has been among my top priorities for many years at work. It played a part in why I was a SharePoint consultant for several years. Since 2010, it has been a major part of what I hope to accomplish through leading our 65,000-person Yammer enterprise social network which we call Buzz. There are many facets to collaboration, however, and it takes a host of tools, people, processes, values, behaviors, attitudes, resources, and constant change to continually improve.

I’ve witnessed many new initiatives through the years where part of their reason for being was to “improve collaboration.” Usually there is some degree of positive impact from such initiatives – rolling out an improved version of SharePoint, upgrading to a newer, more capable virtual meeting tool, or even launching my beloved Buzz. However, there always seems to have been some important missing elements to the initiative that resulted in us still feeling somewhat short of reaching the collaboration target.

It is with great interest, therefore, that I have joined a host of others very actively involved in our company’s larger rollout of Office 365 over the past year – a process still underway with much yet to be done into 2021. So what is different this time? How can we be sure that we won’t go through all the trouble of rolling out a host of new tools and then find ourselves asking a year or two from now, “What can we do to improve collaboration?”

Two significant things are different this time that already show promise of transforming the way we work for the better. One is a more concentrated, intentional focus on the people side of change. The other is having the right tools to actually measure what is important to us as we evaluate the success of our efforts.

For the people side of change, our Office of Change Management (OCM) heads up these efforts. Its capable and driven people help us stay focused on the people side of change just as IT is focused on the software side. A phenomenal Office 365 Transformation Champions group of 175 associates (and growing) exists to lead the effort throughout the organization in their spheres of influence. Regular virtual meetings of this group and daily sharing in their Microsoft Teams team is key to their success. A growing collection of excellent, helpful resources developed by OCM and by our friends in IT Learning Services as well as our own team in Corporate Communications puts substantive learning and engagement tools in the hands of champions and early adopters. Multiple groups are set up on Buzz to be used for community support of the various Office 365 tools, and they are very popular and active. Successes are shared, obstacles are overcome, and the vision and roadmap are adjusted as needed to take from what we’ve learned to date and keep moving in a positive direction.

In no previous major effort I recall related to improved collaboration has such an investment of people, time, and resources been given this much attention. People are talking about the changes, encouraging one another through them, and helping each other as needed. For these reasons alone, I am far more confident in the long-term impact of this effort to positively transform the way we work compared to previous mere rollouts of individual tools.

Related to that expanded people focus, however, is the accompanying and equally vital need to properly measure the effectiveness of this initiative. How do we measure better collaboration? It certainly can’t be done by the easy activity metrics that platforms have forever provided. So what if we know how many licenses have been enabled and how many have logged in during the past month? What does that prove? Only use – not collaboration. So what if we can report “X” number of posts and “Y” comments and “Z” files uploaded or other such metrics? How does any of that prove better collaboration? It doesn’t. It just proves activity which may be good or bad, effective or ineffective.

That is why I’m excited to use SWOOP Analytics for a host of helpful dashboards for both Buzz and Microsoft Teams. The dashboards go far beyond the activity metrics and allow us to dive much deeper into the behaviors of those using the platforms. We’re able to identify a persona for each individual that ranks them either as an observer, broadcaster, responder, catalyst, or engager. We can acknowledge and reward the desirable personas and coach people how to move away from the less desirable ones. We’re able to see connections between individuals and teams, identify top influencers, gauge sentiment, see which business units are most or least engaged, measure how curious and diverse individuals and teams are, identify two-way relationships, and much, much more. These are metrics related to behaviors we care about and want to encourage.

Add to the dashboards the thorough benchmarking reports from SWOOP such as the new Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report 2020 recently released, and we not only have our own data, but we have the ability to compare our behaviors with those from other companies around the globe who also use SWOOP with either Yammer or Teams. I’ve previously shared that the Benchmarking of Yammer Networks 2019 report is the single best document about online community metrics I’ve ever read. Now that the Teams benchmarking report is available, this same detail allows me to compare our use of Teams with more than 5,000 other teams around the world. We can learn where we shine and where we have more work to do.

One thing I especially appreciate about the SWOOP benchmarking is that it doesn’t just report numbers - it interprets them meaningfully and adds significant meat to the collaboration discussion through the excellent industry research and writing of Co-founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Laurence Lock Lee. The report provides specific recommended targets on the various metrics with explanations of why those are suggested. The appendix to the Teams benchmarking report with a generous list of further reading is more than enough to significantly lift the knowledge level of readers on topics such as benchmarking, collaboration, teams, the Network Performance Framework, communities and forums, organizational culture, social capital, and more.

I’m enthusiastic about the future of collaboration in my company for a number of reasons. At the core is the presence of incredibly wonderful, smart, insightful, hard-working people who want to succeed not just for the business, but for the millions of people we serve. The collaboration puzzle required to reach our targets has missed a few pieces through the years. Now that the missing pieces of (1) a solid focus on the people side of change and (2) using meaningful metrics to measure desired behavior change are in place, I’m excited to see what the future holds. I’m confident that it’s very, very good! In fact, we're already seeing some positive results that will be the subject of future articles.

I’d love to hear more about your collaboration journey in the comments. What critical pieces of the puzzle did it take you or your organization a while to find and put in place? What pieces are still missing?