Collaboration & COVID-19 – Striking the right collaboration and collaborative technology balance

Great guest post by Simon Haigh.

Unlike prior economic crisis, which were normally caused by financial bubbles, economic or monetary policy mistakes or oil, the current crisis is a global shock exacerbated by health induced supply and demand-side failure. We are experiencing a massive circuit-breaker on the way things operated before. In just seven weeks, working from home has become the new norm for many. Social distancing, Zoom-bombing and cocooning have become common parlance and we are all being forced to operate through new paradigms.

Technology has never been a more essential and utilised resource than now. So many of us are facing video-conferencing screens, shopping online, and consuming huge quantities of digital on-demand media. We are finding new, and sometimes innovative, ways to sell our offerings, support our clients and to collaborate with our colleagues. Structural market shifts are accelerating industry sector changes, with undoubted increases and improvements in innovation, particularly in virtual communications, AI, biotechnology, telemedicine and other digital sectors. Will, or should, we ever return to exactly the way we worked before or will the rise in collaborative technologies feature even more strongly in all our lives?

Globalisation has been under significant assault for much of the last decade or so. Geo-politically, while barriers are a short- term necessity in an attempt to limit the inexorable advance of Covid 19, this crisis has, from a medical research perspective, underlined the huge value of global collaboration. We are witnessing the development, and adaption, of life-saving technologies and massive research into treatments. We are experiencing perhaps not seen before (at least since the AIDS crisis of the 1980s) sharing of scientific journals, genome sequencing data and clinical trials, bringing together thousands of scientists, medics, companies and researchers globally.

Putting aside, for a moment, individualised national political voices, this is a truly inspiring time of global collaboration. It is clear that this crisis underpins the need for an even more cohesive global community with mature lines of pan-border coordination and collaboration. The World Health Organisation makes it clear that humankind’s future is very much dependant upon the entire world coming together to protect its weakest links. Hopefully, the outcome of this imperative will manifest itself when the rollout of vaccine treatment prioritisations require levels of global cooperative decision-making not hitherto seen before scale-wise.

So, what exactly is collaboration?

While there are many definitions of what collaboration is, I like to describe it as being ‘where two or more parties come together to constructively seek solutions for their mutual benefit’. As we are social animals, for human beings collaboration is a core feature of our very human essence. Collaborative tools are clearly contributing, and will only accelerate in contributing, to a massive surge in online productivity. Given innovation through collaboration has always been an essential ‘human’ activity, we must not forget to find ways of human-to-human, social network interaction. Some 93% of all human communication is non-verbal, with 55% found in facial expressions. While working from home on a video-conferencing platform helps us get the job done, we must not overlook that fact that is creating many challenges such as screen fatigue, how to keep up morale and how to allow for innovatively powerful human communication.

There appear to be four main ways for organisations to strengthen collaboration:

• Implementing technological collaboration tools – but be careful to match the tools to what collaboration activities you want to support. Don’t alienate your people. Collaborative technology needs to enhance our social context, not get in its way. The tools must be necessary and liked. Context is essential when choosing your collaborative technology. Is constantly being on video-conferences really what we want or need?
• Setting up communities of practice – examine the indicators of success but don’t always stifle the community by turning these indicators into targets.
• Fostering collaboration leadership and support – very importantly, supporters can recruit and promote collaborative people. A good leader needs good followers.
• Communicating the good results – starting with the success stories, can reduce the human tendency to look for any reason to confirm our preconception- good or bad. Don’t just concentrate on the “what” but also on the “how” as it is relevant to the audience at the time. What I call the “what’s in it for me” factor.

What are some of the main types of collaborative technology on offer?

While there any many examples of collaborative technologies available to us as ‘collaborators’, the following represent a very short flavour of what is on offer at present:

Video-conferencing, chat and messaging technologies

Zoom is massively benefiting from the current forced upon us environment. The fact that there is a reasonable element of experiencing facial expressions must be playing a part in its attractiveness as a social interaction tool, albeit with its inevitable constraints. Other offerings such as Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Cisco WebEx, WhatsApp and Slack are also providing for home working environment video-conferencing, chat and messaging solutions.

Cloud storage and file-sharing technologies

With the massive amount of data storage requirements, Google Drive is a hugely successful platform for organising and secure storage. Other leading examples, of course, include Dropbox, OneDrive.

Project management & productivity tools

Leading offerings that allow for time management, task assignment, brainstorming and other collaborative activities include Evernote, Trello and of course Google Sheets & Excel.

What about doing business online?

While the empathy that is required to build lasting exchange-based sales and deal-making relationships will unlikely be made redundant by technology for some time yet, technology can certainly help maintain sales and deal-closing activity. However, there are significant challenges for online sales-people. In uncertain times it is easier to feel anxious and misunderstood. The comparative lack of verbal, visual cues online can exacerbate this (emojis must be used very carefully!).

Online, it is harder to read silence cues and it is perhaps even more important not to immediately react if messaging appears abrupt. Those online deal-makers who operate through the prism of collaboration and mutual gain are more likely to outperform those who work to win-lose. It is important to use empathy to elicit the deeper interests and requirements of the other side. Being human is not incompatible with making honest money. Expand rather than slice the deal pie.

It is interesting to see how different collaborative technologies can be used at different stages in a sale or deal process. Online deals can float between different communication media. Early on, the focus is on building rapport, assessing the other party’s interest in a deal. Here, videoconferencing offers verbal and non-verbal cues – eye contact, body language, tone of voice and so on. Where a quick point is needed to be made in a deal process, WhatsApp, social media or text can be used. Later on, file- sharing apps and emails may be best for exchanging detail and document collaboration. If things go wrong there is always the old-fashioned collaboration tool – the phone.

How should our leaders grasp technology and innovation?

Resilient leadership is open to allowing innovation and collaboration. It is so important for resilient leaders today to be as honest as corporately possible about their current situation, including in relation to current state collaborative technology knowns and unknowns. At these times, those leaders who are able to balance current state corporate care with future state-corporate direction should be best placed to survive and or thrive.

Proficient CEOs demonstrate good corporate culture by, amongst other things, building a genuinely unified team culture through collaboration (combined skill base and knowledge) and cooperation (aligned attitudes). They also create a culture of “what if” and accept that mistakes happen- permission for all staff to “play the innovation game”, yet within an environment of accountability – safe fail, rather than fail-safe.

Through the innovation and collaboration process, new knowledge, ideas and perspectives are generated. This, in turn, requires a strategy for their capture, implementation, and review – a strategic approach to collaboration and innovation. This strategic approach then creates an environment of “strategic serendipity”- the ability to notice opportunity or, as it were to ‘make your own luck’. Truly collaborative leaders get this. It is important to embed innovation into the context of the organisation’s overall strategic direction, with flexibility. Then to follow this clarity of purpose with a coordinated and transparent process. Finally, it is important to ensure execution and commercialisation of innovative ideas are structured and managed effectively.

If done well, knowledge sharing and innovation can create more imaginative ways of doing business and organising for business. What is needed is a culture that enables managed risk and learning. Best practice companies generate more ideas from a wider pool- more ideas upfront in what I call the wider funnel of innovation, and then focus on assessing ideas upfront. They then send fewer, higher quality ideas into feasibility and production; thereby ultimately saving resources. In a competitive world, it can be easy to ignore the benefits of working together. However, changes in the world today mean we will just have to learn to work better together. Good leaders paint a picture of the future and allow employees to make it happen.

Conclusion

There has perhaps never been a time when collaboration to facilitate interaction and innovation has been so important. The challenges wrought by this current health and economic crisis, combined with climate change and an ageing population in the developed world clearly require some well thought through collaborative outcomes.

We are humans so we must find a way to leverage our collaborative technologies to enable us to both innovate for productivity’s sake, whilst also allowing for as much human interaction and innovation as possible. What is clear is that this period in time will go a long way to demonstrating the scope for even more improvement of most current technologies. How much more they can be improved and how we go about crystallising the delicate balance between what it means to be human and what we need, as humans, to progress and further improve our social context collaborative tools remains to be seen.

A podcast interview with Simon will be published tomorrow.