The other day I was having a discussion with a colleague around what’s the best way to communicate in a team. He was of the view that people are good as they are so one really shouldn’t go about changing or expecting personality changes and I kept saying one doesn’t have to change just better ourselves in some ways. That’s when he made a profound statement

As the adage goes the only person who likes change is a wet baby .So change is something one is apprehensive and anxious about. But this is true when the change is brought about from outside.As in the locus of control is outside of us .But what if we want and will ourselves to change? Would we still be anxious and apprehensive? No I don’t think so.

My theory is that individuals who are more open to giving and receiving a feedback would generally find the motivation to change within. My second guess is that these people would also be high on the emotional quotient and thus good at understanding what drives them and others. (In case you are interested to know how open you are Johari Window acts a good starting tool. Click here to take the assessment. While answering the questionnaire if you answer the entire set of 20 questions with either the “office you” in mind or the “family and friends you”) .

How does all of this impact the workplace? There’s an excellent post over at the Chief Happiness Officer’s blog on how any kind of motivation that works is the one which is intrinsic and how about how leaders who are successful have understood this. I especially liked this excerpt from Peter Block and Peter Koestenbaum excellent book Freedom and accountability at work:

We currently act as if people are not inherently motivated, rather that they go to work each day and wait for someone else to light their fire.This belief is common among managers and employees alike…

So it all boils down to knowing oneself. As an enlightened soul has once stated -The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself!

What platforms do you offer in your organization, for team members to get to know each other? Is it a once a year annual gathering that you organize with much fanfare and spend huge amounts on? How do you foster a feeling of belonging and ownership amongst the team members? Wait a minute! are these words “belonging “,”ownership” just empty words beaten to death at your workplace? How much time and thought is spared by leaders on trust, transparency, morale? Even before you get to answer those questions… who do you have at the helm of affairs? A leader or a manager?AND

Most importantly do your people have fun on the job?

Phew! what a lot of questions? And why am I even raising these questions?

We have been talking of collaboration all along for the enterprise 2.0 model. Now how would you have collaboration online in your organization, if you don’t have it offline?

If you have been thinking of implementing any of the enterprise 2.0 approaches at your workplace, it would be worthwhile to answer the questions above .

We have a unique approach to Enterprise 2.0 – that of HAPPINESS and I have fun finding unique ways to put a smile on every one’s face. It’s a pretty informal atmosphere that we have built, we pull each other’s leg go out for hikes, lunches, bowling together. We play cricket and or football over the weekend or get together for a pot lunch. At work when we feel the need to unwind we go play Foosball and are right now in the throes of arranging a chess championship – the decision for one was taken by a few of us who stayed back late at work one day and decided over dinner that it would be fun. What was the most fun was the TEAM CHALLENGE activity that we did a few months back to find some use case scenarios for the product we are about to launch soon. See! how we could integrate fun with work. Then we have the Pathshala sessions (Hindi for School) where we have loads of fun and come away with messages worth thinking about. It could be anything like making proper use of resources or how to be creative at the workplace. The point is sooner or later everyone at MangoSpring catches the happiness bug .

The result do I hear you asking?

1. We have fun at work AND with work.
2. We are positive and productive .

The culture that we have built by having one eye on trust, transparency, and fun all along while the other eye focused on building the product and the strategy. Sadly though very few organizations realize this… the focus internally nowhere equals the focus externally.

I would definitely love to know if all of this makes sense to you!

It’s quiet a confusing state of affairs I have just come to realize! As many people those many interpretations and all true!

How long can one keep talking about stuff (read Enterprise 2.0) in abstract. Why it works and why not. How should you approach it and how not… At sometime or the other one has to get down to the practicalities of implementation. There’s no clear guide here on the Enterprise 2.0 tools that are available and which one’s work in which scenario (Guess mostly it is the wiki’s and blogs that people keep going back to). And I wouldn’t be exaggerating here if I say that there are a million products out on the net in the same arena.

Enterprise 2.0 is a passel of separate products today, which helps explain why more than half of companies cite the lack of staff expertise as a major obstacle. “The growing pains are finding a tool that meets the needs,” says Chuck Parris, VP of interactive services at American Tire Distributors. “You’ve got to be expert at going out and looking at all the information that’s out there, and that’s the hard part.”

Enterprise 2.0 applications — Here’s where i found out about quiet a few tools I was unaware of .

As for Taskbin it’s a tool which gel’s well in any scenario including Enterprise 2.0. Taskbin allows you to -

• Manage a Project or company: TaskBin makes it easy for you to manage a team, event, or group project. You can easily add members and keep track of what gets done and when! You can easily see a summary of what was recently added or completed, or see the task lists of all members in your group.
• Share Group Tasks and Responsibility With Others: TaskBin makes it easy for you to work in groups and share tasks with others. With TaskBin, you can assign a task to someone else in your group, or share the responsibility of a task with one or more group members. All of the tasks in a group are visible to all group members, and they can be edited or completed by any member of the group.
• Get Things Done: Many times we have more tasks than we can remember. TaskBin helps us get tasks done! With TaskBin, all tasks are managed with simple priorities creating shared task lists that keep us organized and on track!
• Never lose your tasks again: Your tasks are securely stored on our reliable servers and all of your data is password protected.

I would love to hear your feedback/comments on the 2.0 tools that you would have used. The scenarios in which they worked or did not work.And yes in case you happen to try out Taskbin ,your experience of it.

Almost immediately after my last post a colleague happened to read it and stopped by to ask if I wasn’t over-simplifying the whole thing and since I hadn’t sorted out that comment in my head maybe I found an excuse of being busy and thus no posts for an entire week!!

Now let’s try and dissect the whole thing a bit further, in a workplace generally/mostly knowledge (of any kind ) is power .

• If you know which is the next big project coming in, it’s power since now that you know about it, you would also know the right people to reserve yourself a berth in that project
• If you know what the manager has rated other’s as in an appraisal you obviously are in the inner circle .The circle with the ability to influence things.
• If you have the right skills, it definitely is power over your colleagues and seniors .

So it does happen that a lot of people hoard information/knowledge. This is the challenge that knowledge management guru’s struggle with , finding the right guys with the right information and then convincing them to disseminate it meaningfully across the organization.

Now let’s see what happens in an online model? Let’s say blogging -because of the inherent nature of the model, the more you share the more powerful you become are perceived to be. The more powerful you become the more you attract the other powerful people thus forming a community. I don’t think I would need to argue the power of communities.

So guess, for any organization wanting to implement the Enterprise 2.0 model would have to make the paradigm shift from hoarding to sharing. What could help is incentivisation of sharing to give it a push .

Now about trust… how do you build trust? It would be there if the management makes a concentrated effort for being fair and consistent. It helps if there is transparency. We at MangoSpring use TaskBin to achieve transparency, a tool which helps us achieve just that. It started with our quest in the early days for a light weight team management tool. Since we weren’t satisfied with the one’s available we just went ahead and built one from scratch!! With TaskBin all the tasks in a team are shared and visible to everyone bottom up and top down both ways. Does away the need for status meetings and also suited to the needs of teams working across locations.

Finally when you have trust and you have sharing you have a team!!

There’s another interesting perspective on the fastforward blog read here.

There’s an idea and there’s an implementation of the idea and there’s a bottom line truth/inference for the whole scenario that each one familiar with the scenario comes to.

What am I talking of here ? You’ll find out in a minute .

Enterprise 2.0 is an idea.There are going to be loads of ways big and small organizations can implement it read An Introduction to Enterprise 2.0 and Implementing social technologies inside organizations. All these implementations would obviously be based on each of those organizations interpretations of the idea and the need of the hour for them.

What’s my truth from this whole scenario… may be this has got to do with the fact that I am the “communicator types” with a very high I (as in the DISC profile). If you ask me everything in this world can be solved, only if people would talk honestly to each other and lay down/state their thoughts openly. What’s important is that there is an open process of communication with people understanding each others needs.
In this whole Enterprise thing also isn’t that what we are talking about over and over and over again.Enterprise 2.0 is all about collaboration. It’s just that enterprise 2.0 tools maybe help you a little bit to collaborate, and no doubt being a collective effort it is set to kind of succeed. But you can’t deny the fact that ultimately it’s you as a person who has to decide to collaborate and so is it for the next person and the next and so on. SO what it means basically is that all those inter-personal issues of trust and sharing and team still hold water. You haven’t taken them away by enterprise 2.0 and therefore we come back the whole circle !!
And yes for those who look for an ROI in everything they invest time in , here’s the excerpt from the McKinsey’s report on Aastha’s Blog.

• McKinsey research shows that initiatives to address “soft” management issues- such as talent, culture, and values- may have a direct financial payoff
• There seems to be an especially strong link between the bottom line and efforts to invest in skills, improve reporting relationships, increase the flow of ideas, and measure performance and risk.

Time for the non-believers to pay some attention ?

That was then, today I subscribe fully to the concept of happiness @ work and take my job as Happiness Manager very seriously at MangoSpring.(We were inspired by Alexander Kjerulf).

Happiness@work happens when – There is enough meaningful work for everyone to do .

1. Because there is enough and more meaningful work for everyone, there is a lesser sense of insecurity amongst employees.
2. It helps to have a strong and clear vision for the team/organization. It makes everyone feel more aligned and gives a direction.
3. Of course there has to be an open culture. What it means is that everyone feels free to say what they want without the fear of any repercussions. The management encourages everyone to think and doesn’t frown when a few employees have opinions other than theirs. This just helps fine tune the solution and also ensures that everyone is on the same page and agrees to the course of action.
4. Because there is an open culture and loads to do with a clear direction defined, everyone feels more charged and energetic on the job.
5. As a result each individual makes a difference, and there is no office politics.
6. Organized fun times, brings the team together and well ensures that everyone has fun. Who wouldn’t want fun??

We at MangoSpring have been lucky in the sense that we are a startup, so the team was entirely new and we could decide on the road we wanted to take without any baggage whatsoever. But no reason why other teams can’t reach this state of nirvana.

All of it boils down to one thing I guess, HR making a concentrated effort across the board.

Terms like Happiness Manager and Chief Entertainment Manager are gaining more acceptance these days. Just like families that eat together stay together, teams that have fun together stay together. Not a bad analogy

Yes, how productive we are on a particular day somewhere boils down to how sunny we are feeling. However if you ask me I wouldn’t say it’s entirely true. I have bad days when I have to literally force myself to work and bad days when I have wanted to immerse myself at work. But in both the cases what has helped is a supportive work environment, a place where I feel like going back to and where I don’t have any Monday morning blues . So I don’t buy into Happiness at work :A myth to be punctured.

A good quote I would want to sign off with – There is no key to happiness, the door is always open…

Companies are filled with alienated employees who feel underutilized and ignored, and are either coasting or searching for new jobs elsewhere. A whopping 70% of U.S. employees say they feel either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work , according to a recent survey by the Gallup Organization.

As the number of employees grows and their specialization increases it creates a high degree of alienation (because people feel under-utilized). The trend is of organizations to be moving away from directive and authoritarian management styles, towards a more participative approach.

This is where I feel the 2.0 approach could help in a big way. The more the employees collaborate and “discover” each other the more the chances of them finding out new avenues for exploration and contribution. Which would in turn help them feel more engaged at work and more involved. This would be more true in large organizations with big teams , split into smaller units spread across the globe. In the case of small to mid size organizations it would help in making the team more cohesive and more transparent.2.0 technologies would help start the process of community building .

Kai Kraemer though in his blog on web 2.0 for the enterprise (Web 2.0 for the Enterprise ) is of a different opinion though. He says -

“It is redundant to state that Web 2.0 applications, based on user contribution and collaboration, network effects and user communities, can only be realized if users actively participate. Cooperation and involvement are furthered by links between the members of a project. Therefore, Web 2.0 applications stand a good chance of succeeding in a company if they are a sequel to existing communication processes within the company itself and between the company and its customers.

Because any Web 2.0 application will be a highly dynamic project, flexibility is the most important criterion when deciding on the technology platform. In order to increase the safety of the investment, scalability should also be carefully considered. It is essential that the software is able to grow with the needs of the users – in terms of both quality and quantity.”

The interesting point here is that humans have mostly always stayed in communities and groups. However individualistic we all might turn a group and community is still what we crave at some level or the other of our existence and the virtual world is not going to be an exception here.

I regularly go back to Gautam’s blog and generally like what I read there. Read somewhere that the most successful bloggers are those who meet the following criteria.

• who write/comment with an air of authority and

• who are passionate about what they write

Gautam fulfills both these criterias.
On a recent post on innovation, Gautam mentions that we usually underestimate our ability to be creative and innovative.How very true!

At MangoSpring I really haven’t been able to put my finger on it , but there’s something in the air that get’s all kind of whacky ideas to the table.

Like recently we have launched this email campaign for recruiting. Mail goes like this…
Isn’t that cool
Have tried something out of the box at your workplace , would love to hear from you about it .

So that’s why one shouldn’t really be surprised with this overlap of collaborative technologies and social networking.

On a different note – I am just a newbie is this web 2.0 space – my induction to web 2.0 tools started about a year back. It sure has been an interesting and fascinating journey. If you ask me web 2.0 just HAD to happen .The writing was all over the walls.

With internet and then Google (that one word has changed our lives!!) there was so much information available on just about everything under the sun. At times it was overwhelming and at times it was exasperating to use a cliché here like searching for a needle in haystack.

Ask yourself what do you do when in doubt? It could be anything at work or at home or elsewhere. I bet the answer is you look for authority figures/subject matter experts/leaders call them what you may . But that’s what you do. This scenario was no different (not to mention the fact that we were taking just about anything online), with so much information available somebody had to make sense out of it .Blogs and wiki’s came to the rescue and made a meaningful whole out of the World Wide Web.

Moving to another scenario altogether , the world by and large has become a more demanding place .And so have

people inhabiting it .We demand more from just about everything and the most from our lives. Just about everyday the primer to being happy is being updated and more and more people are subscribing to it.

With so much happening on the outside, how could the workplaces continue with walls drawn outside its boundaries and set patterns inside of those walls? Though there are some workplaces that are already there …
Next post we start dissecting the “organization”.

Jargons tend to reflect the following –

* It’s not really rocket science but almost there (know what I mean J )
* I am a part of a movement, one that’s taking the world by storm right now !
* I know more than you and I think I know

The one that’s caught by fancy last few months has been Organization 2.0(some also call it Enterprise 2.0. There’s a lot of debate out there on the net about what is Organization 2.0 and what is not .Will it work or will it not .

• Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations
• The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and their Leaders
• Davenport vs. McAfee on Enterprise 2.0

There’s another wave splashing over the workplaces .The happiness culture is here to stay and rightly too. Check out at http://positivesharing.com/.

Now if you take the two and stir those around to form a culture at the workplace .I would say you have a potent mix.The purpose of this blog is exactly that , to capture my thoughts and experiences with both of them.

Happy Reading ! and yes look forward to comments/thoughts/anecdotes and experiences of all those readers who stop by at my blog