How do you motivate team members to action? There are many obvious tools – from monetary incentives to process guidance. But one of the most powerful ways is through peer recognition. When a professional is identified for her expertise, or one of her peers is recognized for a job well done, there is a strong motivation to act.
Recognition is tightly linked with an interesting concept in the enterprise, turning business actions into ‘games’ that professionals play. This ‘gamification’, when connected to a desired outcome, can drive real changes in behavior. Gamification is valuable. But how should it be implemented in the enterprise to make it effective? Teams should look at these elements:
What Do You Want to Reward?
Gamification is about rewarding specific actions. So, what do you want to reward? For instance, in document management it is critical that new and interesting content is shared across an organization. KnowledgeTree promotes this outcome using gamification. So, KnowledgeTree’s dashboard presents a ranking of top contributors – recognizing those that produce and share valuable information.
Big news today. Microsoft agreed to buy Yammer, the enterprise social platform. Yammer has been at the vanguard of the massive trend toward increasing business collaboration. Enterprise social helps companies work more effectively by increasing communication around key business activities.
But as Yammer integrates into the Microsoft stack there will be a temptation to broaden the solution too much and make roll-out part of long runaway SharePoint implementations. Don’t do it! Keep Yammer easy to adopt.
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston it's clear how the ‘social enterprise’ is transforming the way we all do business. By increasing connections between coworkers and peers, teams access information and insight that previously had been hidden. And by boosting collaboration, teams get work done faster with more quality.
Yet collaboration needs to be structured. Have you ever been in a brainstorming meeting that never had a solid outcome? Pure collaboration can often lead to lots of great ideas without a clear idea of what was agreed to or go-forward plan.
Business needs to keep moving forward. To ensure that it does, we need to make sure that social is structured. How? By building social around tangible deliverables and providing lightweight processes that keep things advancing. Let’s look at each of these aspects.
Document Management Makes Social Tangible
The first challenge of pure collaboration is durability. How do you make the ideas that were discussed ‘real’? Collaboration centered on a discussion or idea can be very fruitful. But to make the ideas durable, they must be gathered together and fixed. So, what’s the medium that turns a discussion into something concrete?
Every day your team works with thousands of documents. You create a new client proposal with your sales management team. You discover new finance templates that you can use for your proposal. And you manage the approval process for your proposal’s contract.
At each stage in your process you want to get on with business. You want tools that make you and your team more productive. More productive does not just mean more features. It means tools that work the way business people do. And it means tools that can be adapted by business people.
What does simple look like? Let’s take at the three primary use cases that relate to document management.
Simple Ways to Create Documents
When you want feedback from colleagues the standard way to get comments via email. Send a document as an attachment and wait for comments – via email. That means dozens of emails, with many versions, and comments scattered throughout.
That’s no way to manage document creation. You should have a centralized location where all document feedback is collected and used to update new versions. Looking for the latest version? The simple approach is to keep colleagues returning to the same – most current – version in an easily accessible cloud-based repository.
At the heart of your business are thousands of contracts, budgets, and proposals. These business documents are how your teams get work done. So, it is essential that you create, organize, and manage these assets efficiently.
But with teams spread around the world and only complex tools at hand, how do you take control? Document management software helps global teams collaborate on, discover, and manage the business documents they depend on every day.
Documents like contracts, budgets, and sales materials are important to your business. You need to make sure that they are reviewed, approved, and controlled by the right people in your organization.
Did legal OK the contract? Did finance add their information? Did the partner approve the agreement?
These questions can’t be managed if approvals are simply sent around via email. And they can’t be controlled by simple ‘to-do’ tasks – your business is probably more sophisticated than that.
You need workflows that are structured, social, and simple.
Document Management Workflows in Action
That’s where workflows come into play. They are a critical part of document management because they help to guide approvals and other changes to a document status. Other changes might be archiving a compliance document, putting a ‘legal lock’ on an agreement, or changing who can modify a budget.
Let’s take a look at a sample scenario and how a structured, social, and simple approach to document management can help. In this example, an energy company wants to process an invoice that is received from a channel partner.
How many times do you work on an important business document that requires no feedback from colleagues, is never shared with another team, and is not meant to be used by other team members? Not too often I bet. Documents are generally created in the context of other teams and co-workers. So, your approach to document management should be similarly collaborative.
When creating a new document, you want to gather opinions from your colleagues. But if you email a document as an attachment to 10 people, you’ll get 10 emails back with 10 attachments, and comments embedded within the attachments. A more efficient way is to centralize comments in one place. A central location lets colleagues view and react to comments from others and helps improve the quality of the discussion.
KnowledgeTree lets teams add comments to their document pages. These comments are visible to all users that have permissions to view that specific document. That makes for a genuine community around the document, enhances discussions, and leads to a higher quality document.
Capgemini released a study that looks at CXO thoughts on process agility. The results were clear. Business people need to control processes and, just as key, to adjust processes as business conditions change. Let’s look at this in more detail and how it relates to document management.
Legal, finance, and other business teams are process-centric. And it’s no wonder. If errors creep into these activities, they can have potentially serious repercussions. Plus, they often are highly regulated by securities and privacy laws like HIPAA, or standard accounting practices.
A process may involve repeated steps like getting a sales manager to approve a customer-facing document. For instance, a customer contract may be OK’d by sales management, before moving to the corporate counsel’s desk for finalization. A process may be more sophisticated by allowing for rejections or redirections of documents to other parties. It could even involve changing permission levels to retain privacy early in the process and open the process up later in the cycle.
Last week we took a look at how recommendation engines are reshaping the way consumer products are bought. And we saw how this same effect was impacting the way information is surfaced to users in a business context. Now let’s look at how recommendations can make you more productive when working with business documents.
Legal, finance, and other teams work closely with all types of documents – budgets, invoices, proposals, and other business documents. If you know exactly which invoice you are looking for, it should be trivial to find what you need by browsing or searching your documents. That’s what document management traditionally has done well.
But the challenge that we’re looking at here is how to find documents that you didn’t know you needed. That great proposal that your colleagues are using. That new contract that your peers are working on. If you don’t know to look for the document, you won’t.
I want a new book. I know the title and the author, so finding it is a snap. A quick search on my e-reader, and I’m reading it. But what if I’m looking for something new? Maybe a book that will help me with the work I am doing? What about a book that my friends and coworkers have gotten value out of?
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other media players like Netflix and Hulu have focused on this challenge with great results. They assess what my friends and I watch and ‘like’, and recommend new and relevant content based on that analysis. The results are generally excellent, and get better with each interaction. For me, that means I get relevant content that I’ll enjoy.
Recommendations Matter
How effective are these recommendations? According to some sources, 60% of YouTube clicks are based on suggestions. 75% of Netflix streams come from recommendations based on prior consumption. And 35% of Amazon’s sales come from recommendations made to purchasers.
At work, we’re all faced with a similar challenge. We need to find information that helps us do our work better. That could be a new budgeting template, an important proposal, or a contract that my colleagues are working on. But if I didn’t know the content existed, how would I know to search for it in the first place?
How Does that Apply to Me at Work?
What can we learn from the consumer world? Recommendation engines play an important role in how team members can collaborate. Let’s look at what parameters in the book buying scenario can be mapped to the enterprise space:
