Enterprise Collaboration: It's About the Culture, Stupid

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Aug 3, 2010

Two heads are better than one. That's the given wisdom — and what most of us believe. But if as individuals we understand the importance of collaboration, then why do organizations have such a difficult time fostering it within their own employees?

The Need for Enterprise Collaboration

Depending on who you talk to, the need for enterprise collaboration is different. How and why collaboration is encouraged and implemented depends on the types of problems a business is trying to solve.

Enterprise Collaboration should always happens in the context of some business need, whether it's addressing a crisis or achieving a high-level goal. Here are a few examples of how collaboration can help solve a business problem:

Transmit policies and culture to new employees
Leverage disparate skills easily during projects
Quickly find people with expert knowledge
Knowledge retention during employee transitions
Idea and innovation development/fostering
Reduce travel costs for distributed teams
Build and sustain employee morale

Enterprise Collaboration is Not New

The truth is, most of us have been collaborating within our organizations in some manner for a long time. We've always had teams working on projects, participated in focus groups for HR or other divisions, even started communities of interest and communities of practice.

It's how we collaborate that is changing, with so many new tools and technologies thanks to Web 2.0 and social media to enable enterprise collaboration.

As Sandy Kemsley put it: "Collaboration is already going on in enterprises, and always has: all that Enterprise 2.0 does is give us some nicer tools for doing what we’ve already been doing via word of mouth, email, and other methods."

It's also about how much more important collaboration has become. It is now said that being social (and thus collaborating in some form) is a competitive differentiator if implemented to solve real business problems.

Collaboration is Social

Today, most people's definition of collaboration is fundamentally being social. And the technologies we choose to use in the enterprise are being driven largely by the consumer tools that we use on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, many organizations are pushing hard to implement these new tools and technologies without taking the time to understand how they can be best employed. You can't force the tools on employees. What you can do is make them available, demonstrate their value and incrementally foster a culture of using them.

Kemsley states, "I strongly believe that you first have to make people care about their work before they will engage in creative collaboration, regardless of the shiny tools that you give them." One would expect that if an employee is helping to solve a specific business problem, then they will care about their work. This is certainly part of the equation.

But it's about more than making them care that they are solving real problems and thus contributing to the organization's bottom line. It's also about having an open culture that encourages participation. And this is often where organizations fall short — the top down mentality has deep roots.

Why Won't You Work Together?

It's fun to note that as much as current internet fads are fostering a sharing culture, it can still be a challenge to get your employees to participate in similar internal activities. We see a number of reasons for this resistance.