9 April 2008

Virtual collaboration on the increase

But face-to-face employee-to-employee communication still preferred.

A new report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) suggests that collaboration, while an increasing facet of corporate life, is still unsatisfying and unproductive for most workers.

Entitled The role of trust in business collaboration, and based on the responses of more than 450 executives, the report includes in-depth survey data that looks at the level of trust necessary for effective collaboration, the problems faced by increased virtual collabortation and the reasons why face-to-face meetings are usually preferable.

Its key findings and statements include:

• Success is most often achieved in collaborations focused on increasing efficiency, improving customer service and enhancing internal processes.
• Trust, as well as project success, seems to rise as projects become less virtual.
• Most collaboration is taking place internally, but the survey results suggest companies are poorly positioned to deal with the onslaught of globalization, where the need to collaborate virtually will only increase.
• The survey also shows virtual collaboration is on the radar at almost every company in some form, but actually very few have embraced "next generation" collaborative tools, such as wikis, blogs and social networking tools.
• No single segment (industry, size, region and so on), is more prone to one approach than another, rallying against calls that technology companies, for example, might be more attuned to working this way.

The necessity of trust
The report suggests that while it's beneficial to do so, engendering trust among employees and within teams is barely on the agenda of many organizations. Standardized codes of governance and ethics are seen as baseline requirements when working with colleagues.

Integrity is the first and foremost desire for colleagues entering collaborative projects, while certain tasks require different levels of, and towards, trust, for example:

People who co-ordinate on an internal cost-cutting initiative are unlikely to need to trust each other in the same way as collaborators in two separate companies, working together to develop a new product. The cost-cutting project will be helped by teamwork, but is essentially a “get-it-done” directive that is likely to be achieved regardless of who trusts whom.

Product R&D with outsiders, however, requires each party to contribute (upfront and on an ongoing basis) time, money and proprietary information to fulfill the question, “I wonder if we could…?” These partners must trust
each other.

The EIU's survey data also suggests that among the various collaborative environments it's face-to-face working that's most likely to yield success, with the level of face-to-face interaction greatly affecting trust.

Why is face to face better?
There are numerous reasons and theories on why face-to-face collaboration is preferable. These include Albert Mehrabian's often-quoted but widely misused figures of body language:

• Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking – (but only when talking about dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes, i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable (source: http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html); and
  
• more modern writing from the likes of Carol Kinsey Goman, whose recently published book The Nonverbal Advantage, goes into detail:
  "In face-to-face encounters, our brains process a continual cascade of nonverbal cues that we use as the basis for building trust and professional intimacy – both of which are critical to high-level collaboration, negotiation, persuasion and communication."

Contributors to the EIU report giver further insight into the benefits of face-to-face meetings:

John Dean of Enterprise Connect maintains, "I really need to know who it is I’m dealing with – and whether I want to engage with them or not. There are a lot of things [such as shared values] that I couldn’t assess without in-person contact."

Email etiquette
Paul Saunders, director of enterprise collaboration at multi-industry firm Textron and quoted in the EIU report, says his company “recommends that there are face-to-face meetings, initially or very early on, in which the collaborative group can set goals and make sure everyone is on the same page,” and he provides some obvious but worth-repeating advice.

“At Textron, we say, ‘If you can walk over to someone’s desk first, do that; if you can’t, give them a call; if you can’t do that, send them an instant message; and only then email them’. There are some wonderful technologies out there, but basic human interactions have been developed over a far longer period”.

Too much technology?
In spite of a clear preference for face-to-face collaboration, virtual collaboration, teams and virtual working are all set to increase in the next decade and technology has a vital role to play – be it in companywide discussion or simply conversations between employees.

For internal communications teams and management as a whole, faced with these rapidly increasing levels of virtual working, but a human preference for pressing the flesh, it's a case of improving on employee-to-employee communications, education on this matter and providing high levels of substitution when "real" meetings aren't possible. For example:

Paul Saunders feels the new technologies can be very supportive. “For example, telepresence is a live medium, so it can help collaborators to feel more like they are interacting in a human sense, and goes a long way toward keeping a group together once the collaboration is under way.”

Instant messaging is another effective tool, he says: “IM is invaluable, as it enables a quick, effective conversation. You can just ping someone and get an immediate response.”

"In short," concludes the EUI report, "Companies positioning themselves to deal with globalization and virtualization should keep in mind the benefits of face-to-face interaction and the potential pitfalls of virtual interaction."

Have your say
Is virtual collaboration giving you a very real headache? Tell us all about it on the Internal Comms Hub members' group on the Communicators' Network.

Other recommendations:
Internal communicators assist collaboration

Successful communication across virtual teams

Melcrum Blog: Email overload vs. email education

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