There’s much talk about collaboration networks these days. In truth, collaboration is how work gets done. Very few jobs require people to work in solitude to achieve their goals, and most work is best performed in either team environments or informal groups.
The first problem is that almost nobody is capturing the collaboration network. How do you identify who has influence in the organization? Who has the relationships that facilitate knowledge transfer? Who do people go to for advice? Who gives the most advice that leads to successful projects?
The second problem is that if you can’t capture the collaboration network, you can’t measure performance on it. Performance management is a very linear process. You build measurable goals and you measure them. But its very difficult to measure a person’s overall influence on the organization’s success. Often executives are bonused based on the financial success, but that executive might have relatively little to do with the results. Instead, the executive might have a subordinate who is highly respected and highly involved in projects and contributes through informal participation.
The intersection of the collaboration network and performance management is the ability to identify who your major contributors are and rewarding them appropriately. You’ll need to understand and map your collaboration network, and you’ll need some really good analytics on the projects and work cross-referenced to that collaboration network. No, it’s not easy – and I suppose that’s why nobody is really doing it yet.
The next step is identifying who your high collaborators are and your low collaborators, and identifying performance trends, not of the individuals specifically, but of the project teams and work they perform on. The idea is to understand the roles of high and low collaborators and best align each to specific types of work. You may also find that there are different types of collaborators – those who collaborate internally on a project, those who collaborate with customers, those who are always operating on the margins, but whose ideas provide high value.
Lastly, figure out how to identify the types of collaborators you want and recruit them. This certainly isn’t as smugly simple as I make it sound. In fact, I have no idea how to do it (that what the recruiting blogosphere brain trust is for). But I’m guessing that in today’s world of measurement and technology based talent acquisition, there’s an on-line assessment out there somewhere that can do this.
When someone figures this (all of the above) out in practice, please let me know…
As usual, credit where credit is due. This article was inspired by a report in McKinsey Quarterly. ((Cross, Robert; Martin, Roger; Weiss, Leigh. “Mapping the Value of Employee Collaboration.” McKinsey Quarterly, 2006, Volume 3.))
11 responses to “Capturing Collaboration Networks in HR”
Capturing Collaboration Networks in HR
Capturing Collaboration Networks in HR There’s much talk about collaboration networks these days. In truth, collaboration is how work gets done. Very few jobs require people to work in solitude to achieve their goals, and most work is best performed in either team … [
I have been looking into this idea as a way to better understand the flow of work within an organization so I can help clients find the folks that either accelerate an innovation or stall it – or simply see who has the most connections (not unlike Technorati with blogs.)
You may be interested in this technology from Accenture.
Here’s a link to the page and the presentation.
I saw a great presentation on this at the HCI Conference in Chicago. Sally Colella was the presenter – and I don’t have contact information for her – but I posted about it here:
http://tomob.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/hci-onboarding-conference/
Sally did some breakthrough work mapping social networks within organizations. This revealed who among the management team(s) was the go-to person for information – and also revealed those who restricted thier contact with others. Very interesting work – and it never followed the organization chart. She then uses these results to suggest improved communication patterns to those who are isolated (often Sr. Management) as well as to identify keystone employees. Great stuff.
No application built for “the end user” by itself will be able to track this for two simple reasons….1) It takes too much time to enter the data and that’s “not their job”….2) Too many times the “cube dweller” just doesn’t know what they don’t know when it comes to relating key pieces of info/data together.
It takes a skilled person who has knowledge of the product/team/dept/division/company/industry to pull the info (say…in a phone interview) from the cube dweller and piece it all together.
Take the actions of that person…let’s say that is part of the job description of someone we call a “Talent Manager” assigned to a “specific level/group” inside a company…and give them a piece of technology pie that allows them to enter the data in an organized manner that relates those key pieces of data (even with other data inputted by other Talent Mangers) with information inside their company walls and outside their company walls (like…you know..the industry they’re in)…well…then…you might have something there.
After you do that…than add in a piece where you are not only managing the “collaboration” of internal employees…but also with your external vendors…all in the same application.
Hey…that would be cool.
Side note…this collaboration mapping has been going on as an off line hack in third party recruiting for years…its called org charting. Throw in a little “mind mapping” style to it when it comes to projects/applications that the interviewee participated in…and you got your collaboration network. But, the only person who gets to benefit from it is that specific recruiter…so that sucks.
Its something they can throw in their “hipster pda” but not something that can be shared on the web with all current and future coworkers.
If you don’t org chart in your pre-employment interviews…shame on you. Take your punishment and now go talk to Lou Adler…he teaches how to do it….its not that hard, either.
[…] Systematic HR: Capturing Collaboration Networks in HR “There’s much talk about collaboration networks these days. In truth, collaboration is how work gets done. Very few jobs require people to work in solitude to achieve their goals, and most work is best performed in either team environments or informal groups.” Monday, March 19th, 2007Comments […]
[…] systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Technology » Capturing Collaboration Networks in HR The intersection of the collaboration network and performance management is the ability to identify who your major contributors are and rewarding them appropriately. You’ll need to understand and map your collaboration network, and you’ll need some re (tags: hr strategy value sna social_networking analysts collaboration performance_management) […]
[…] https://systematichr.com/?p=607 […]
[…] this topic map of how scientific paradigms related to each other. Similar to innovation and collaboration networks we’ve been discussing here, this scientific paradigm map directly displays the relative influence […]
[…] I know. But enterprise users have been slow to adopt the technology. I talked about capturing collaboration networks in HR using web 2.0 technologies, but take a look at Sean Rehder’s excellent rebuttal in the […]
Systematic and Sean
read this please
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/working_in_face.html
It is happening whether HR like it or not.