There’s no shortage of enterprise aptitude for digital collaboration tools.

But in the midst of this digital collaboration arms race, are we helping or hurting overall workplace productivity and effectiveness?

As organizations have placed an ever-increasing focus on adopting new technologies to aid collaboration and engineer a more responsive, real-time business, we’ve now reached a state of communication overload.

Today corporate success hinges on intellectual capability, and productivity is dependent on cultivating a focused workplace that facilitates the synthesis of information, for value creation and innovation. To this end, employers must provide an employee experience that facilitates focused work—one that prioritizes attention management or mindfulness and not just the latest technology that is the “flavor of the month.”

Via people analytics, organizations and work groups capture and study work patterns and analyze it to understand productivity trends and traps, thus eliminating collaboration overkill and improving the employee experience by minimizing stress and improving efficiency.

How come you don’t need to take training before even being allowed near the Reply All button? Other skills that cvan do harm – driving, medical practice, practicing law – involve study before you can even apply for a permit: there is driver’s education, medical school, law school… but email doesn’t have so much as a short course.

This is a big problem. There is every reason for organizations to mandate “Email Ed” classes for all employees, like it does for safety training and other critical skills.

This post takes a look at the effect of smartphones on small children, 10 years and younger. Recent surveys show figures around 25% for children under 10 who have their own device, and these numbers are rising; the risks are severe, and span a wide range from damaged personality development to visual impairment.
The post goes beyond the risks and looks at some solutions, at the country, school, and personal level.

This article promotes the following strategy: inbox infinity. “Adopting inbox infinity means accepting the fact that there will be an endless, growing amount of email in your inbox every day, most of which you will never address or even see. It’s about letting email messages wash over you, responding to the ones you can, but ignoring most.”

Your non-paperless office is costing you more than you think, but the benefits of going paperless can deliver an impressive level of return on investment. Studies show that enterprise content management (ECM) offers some of the highest direct ROI rates ever reported. One study reported nearly 60 percent of ECM users achieved payback in 12 months or less — a single budget cycle — and 28 percent experienced positive returns after just 6 months.

If your organization is just now starting down the paperless path, you can take heart knowing there is tremendous financial growth to be had which will make the transition considerably worthwhile.

As with all transformations, only with truth can you see the light. If organizations are prepared to take on the real work that is needed for process automation, they’ll reap the rewards of cost savings and greater efficiency, giving them the means to support better employee and customer experiences.

News item describes a boundary-breaking collaboration, funded at $1M for 4 years by the National Science Foundation, between Boston University researchers from diverse departments. The collaboration will look at advanced technology to get a handle on media overload.

Quote: While there are a handful of very good digital reading tools (Pocket, Flipboard, Kindle), the next wave of products will be built to deliver a better news consumption experiences.

Rob Cross offers a good description of collaborative overload (ref link included) and a diagnostic test.

During the 1990’s, organizations shifted from a functional-centric structure to a business process-centric structure. After completing difficult change management actions, benefits were harvested, e.g., reduced cycle time, decreased rework and improved customer satisfaction. Information overload can occur from individual actions during and outside of work as well as team activities. The cited references describe some root causes of collaboration overload and suggests remedies. The benefits from a business process-centric structure can be reduced by collaboration overload. It’s worth reading these materials to achieve your expectations from collaboration benefits. Marty B #IORGforum

Humans are too intelligent and adaptive. That’s the problem we’re tackling.

Swingnow Project is quiet, subtle, and disruptive.