by Workstreamer on April 29, 2009
…For me, the most interesting of Paul’s points is found in his last sentence – “The tools invented to seize the moment have begun to define the moment”.
We will increasingly be triggered to take action in our personal and work lives by the transactions, conversations and relationships found within our activity streams and the activity streams of others.
The real opportunity for flow-based applications is to evolve from helping us capture and share the moment, to creating triggers for new ones… new transactions, new conversations and new relationships at work and at home that would not have been created otherwise.
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by Workstreamer on April 12, 2009
From Matthew Hodgson, The ROI of Being Social at Work…
Decades of psycho-social research on team work suggests that effective teams have both strong task-based behaviour as well as good social cohesion.
“A high-performance team works together to achieve mutual goals, recognizes that each member is accountable and committed to achieving team goals, communicates effectively with each other, shares the joy of achievement and the pain of not meeting goals, shares information, helps each other, and recognizes that the success of the group is dependent upon each individual” [1].
Without both the factors of task and social cohesion a team tends not to be as effective.
In some cases, though, modern businesses struggle with the idea that being social has a business benefit. Taylorist management practices in particular only focus on those things that are measurable and directly associated with the task rather than understanding whether or not social interaction is of benefit to the task at hand. The result is seen in many modern managers who believe that their employees need to be busy and not wasting time (where wasting time equals socialising). Particularly, this attitude has impacted on the adoption of social media within the enterprise because networking with peers and colleagues through Facebook, for example, is believed to be time-wasting and of very little actual value to “busy work”.
Recent MIT research, however, is challenging this idea [2].
MIT research shows that 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues. Furthermore, those with the most cohesive face-to-face networks are 30% more productive.
**If you have not had a chance to take the Workstreamer Collaboration Survey, you can do so here!