Technology for Team Players – how SMART working leads to reduced TCO
> Gary Dixon has twenty years of experience in technology and consulting. Clients have included Ernst and Young, BT, O2, GE, Business Objects, IBM, Orange, TMobile, Caritor. A background in Learning and Development, a consultant with a wealth of experience in client engagements and design/delivery in the context of enterprise technology programmes. Read more from this author
Valuable people come and go within any organisation. Churn is a fact of business life. So you can imagine how surprised I was when one leading organisation reported zero staff turnover over a 2 year period in their sales teams following both the introduction of Collaborative Technology onto their network, and some subtle changes to flexible or SMART working practices amongst the teams.
No doubt that good management played the majority part in this. But let’s take a peek at the technology part and see if it says anything more to us about how to shape our thinking going forwards.
The teams already had video conferencing in place. They used this regularly, every Monday and Friday, for team meetings. They also had extensive license access to conferencing tools – both Webex and LiveMeeting, as well as IBM’s Sametime.
Despite all of this their collaboration was laborious, consisting mainly of one-way broadcasts from Managers. Sure, they got the job done alright. Yet their team collaboration missed an essential component – interaction.
Once implemented at the end points and through software, these teams became transformed into dynamic collaborators. It impacted not only their meetings but also their time in the office and the time spent away from each project. After all, connecting remotely is easy, changing team performance so that remote connections are dynamic contributors to the ongoing project is something else altogether. And that’s what we should be asking from our technology. It should support the team performance, rather than clutter up our collaboration potential as tools for the virtual and physical meeting rooms of our enterprise.
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