There is a lot of buzz in the world of buzzwords around the term 'Enterprise 2.0.' Although the term is itself pretty much meaningless (were all businesses from the beginning of human history until now stuck in version 1.0?), the buzziest component of this buzzword is 'enterprise collaboration.'
Ostensibly, enterprise collaboration tools allow and encourage people to communicate more efficiently, and thus improve workflow, innovation, corporate chakra and so on. It seems like electronic collaboration should be a no-brainer; after all, the most successful 'killer apps' of the Internet age are all about communication, from email to Skype™ to Facebook®.
Yet, when businesses introduce new communication tools to the workplace, all too often the same thing happens: Nobody uses them.
How do we account for the wide adoption gap between collaboration tools people use in their personal lives and the tools they neglect in their professional lives? The answers have almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with psychology.
People are cautious about using unfamiliar tools for communication. When we want to express a thought, our main goal is getting the thought across successfully, not the tool used to do so. So we opt for familiar mediums, regardless of their 'efficiency.' Why do people carry on five-way conversations in email with messages growing several generations long? Because they already know how. Inertia is powerful in communication because learning new tools actually gets in the way (at first) of achieving your goal, which is saying what you want to say.
Workers lack incentives to adopt corporate collaboration tools. In their personal lives, there is a powerful incentive to adopt, say, Facebook — your other friends are all on Facebook! In other words, you want to be part of the club rather than left out. Nobody wants to eat lunch alone in the school cafeteria. But in the workplace, 'efficiency' and 'project tracking' are not such powerful incentives for most people, mainly because they are so abstract.
An enterprise that wants employees to use collaboration tools needs to lead by example — the influencers (project managers, executives, even the CEO) need to be the early adopters. They need to put collaboration tools into practice so that people who don’t want to be left out will use them, too.
Collaboration tools need to be tightly focused for people to use them. Introducing a new tool that can slice, dice and peel is too overwhelming. Better is to introduce a collaboration tool for achieving a specific task, even if it is capable of doing more. For example, a wiki can be used for a variety of collaborative exchanges — shared documents, revision tracking and meta discussions. But rather than insist that people use a new wiki platform for all three (which is likely to result in them not using it at all), at first introduce the platform for just one task, such as document sharing. In time, as people become more comfortable with the medium, additional functions like collaborative editing can be introduced.
Finally, and perhaps controversially, consider allowing workers to use consumer-oriented collaboration tools like Google Chat and Facebook. Employers often worry that these behaviors are distractions and time wasters. And it’s true. But there are countless ways to waste time for someone who wants to. More importantly, cultivating a culture of online collaboration will make it easier for users to learn its value and be familiar with the technology when adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools. To put it another way, an employee who is already expert at Facebook and Skype and Twitter will more easily transition to enterprise collaboration environments than someone who has never used any of those and doesn’t understand why they would.
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