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What makes a collaboration champion? The secrets revealed
At SWOOP Analytics, our goal is to help organisations become better and faster at collaborating.
Nothing makes us happier than seeing organisations achieve better collaboration and, ultimately, innovation in their workplace.
This year we are honouring these collaboration champions and sharing with you their best practices. We have introduced the inaugural SWOOP Awards for Outstanding Collaborative Performance in SWOOP’s 2018 Benchmarking of Yammer networks. We trawled through 12 million interactions between 1.4 million people from 74 different organisations to find these star performers.
Building Online Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice, or CoP, are a centrepiece of Knowledge Management programs world-wide. But it is vital these groups are not formed purely because it is easy to do so. They must be generating value, be sustainable and align with an organisation’s core competencies.
Are People Analytics the Answer to Your Employee Engagement Woes?
Deloitte's Human Capital Trends 2017 report identified "Organization of the Future" as its leading trend. The report went on to note a big shift in the way employees engage with each other, from hierarchies to networks. This social theme was reinforced in the company's 2018 report, which highlighted the rise of the “social enterprise.” The report placed an organization’s social capital as an enterprise asset on par with traditional physical and intellectual property assets. Deloitte emphasized the importance of a harmonized leadership team in building the social enterprise, with collaboration needed at all levels.
20 Questions That Could Change Your Company
One of the things we uncovered in our research into what generates conversation was that asking questions is particularly impactful (discussion threads are 250% longer), and I previously posted a summary of our findings; ‘The power of the question mark.
Building High Performance Online Teams
What does a high performing team online look like? What measures should leaders adopt when monitoring and guiding their team’s performance? We’re about to take you on a deep dive into analysing what “good looks like” for high performing teams. This article builds on our introductory post on “Building Better Online groups” where we identified that not all online groups are formed equal and that a more bespoke analytics approach is required for the different types of online groups. The ‘Team’ was one such grouping identified.
Getting the Best out of Online Groups at Work
The digital workplace has spawned a limitless opportunity to form online groups. Today, organisations can have staff participating in groups emerging through enterprise social, team messaging, online conferencing and a plethora of external groups like LinkedIn and Facebook. No matter the source of their formation, there are some common needs that must be articulated if an online group is to be a success or not. The first step is to be mindful of the type, and therefore, purpose of the online group you are forming. There are vast differences between a group established to share news, to one to support a project team, to one to develop new work practices.
Nothing’s new – yet it’s all new: Reflections from SWOOP Chat ’18 (APAC)
Last week we held our inaugural SWOOP Chat ’18 in Sydney which brought together expert practitioners, researchers and thought leaders from across Australia to further nurture and build the community of people who are wanting to drive business performance, employee engagement, conversation and collaboration within our organisations.
Productivity = Effectiveness + Efficiency: Measuring Effectiveness with SWOOP
Today the technical and business press is filled with stories about the productivity gains available through a digitally disrupted workplace. ‘Bots’ have replaced ‘Apps’ as the ‘must have’ technology gadget. We like Bots because they promise to take away the drudgery of dealing with mindless bureaucratic work processes, freeing our time for tasks that can employ our full intellectual selves. But we always have to remember that productivity has two parts; Effectiveness and Efficiency, or as I like to frame them: ‘Doing the Right Thing’ and ‘Doing it Right’. And of course being extremely efficient doing the ‘wrong’ thing is just a waste!
You’ve created a Team on Microsoft Teams: Now What?
You created a team on Microsoft Teams and you probably found the ‘Create Team’ experience was as simple as can be. Hopefully you spent a bit of reflection time before you completed the ‘Description’ field, as it just might end up being the most important entry you will make for this team.
Are today’s boards ill-equipped to deal with modern workplaces?
As scalps continue to fall in the banking Royal Commission, it’s become clear board members need tools to give insights and transparency into company culture. Boards need to be better technically equipped to deal with non-financial indicators like a poor or ineffective corporate culture.
Peace Data Standard: A Practical and Theoretical Framework for Using Technology to Examine Intergroup Interactions
The current paper presents a theoretical framework for standardizing Peace Data as a means of understanding the conditions under which people’s technology use results in positive engagement and peace.
Now that You @Mention It…
Being ‘mentioned’ publicly has long been considered a most worthy form of praise. In war times being “Mentioned in Despatches” was a common form of recognising exceptional performance or behaviour and the term has since migrated into mainstream business. With the advent of Social Media/Networking and the @ mention popularised by Twitter, we have seen the ‘mention’ evolve to more than an instrument of praise, but also one for tagging people into an online conversation. While perhaps not as gratifying, it does send a signal from the ‘tagger’ that I am thinking of you, and vice versa.
Your Workplace is Like a Box of Chocolates: Unwrapping with AI Sentiment Analytics and Social Networking Analytics
We extracted some departmental sentiment results from a typical organisation of some 6,000 staff using Workplace by Facebook as their Enterprise Social Network, over a period of about 12 months. We looked at the average sentiment expressed between members of their own department and plotted this against the average sentiment expressed externally to other departments
Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Tell Fact From Fiction?
It sounds paradoxical: can something artificial help us understand what's real and what isn't? Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are pinning their hopes on this possibility in their fight against "fake news”.
How Enterprise Social Systems Can Help Build Diversity & Inclusion
Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Digital Business Initiative recently identified that digital platforms can indeed enjoy the benefits from connecting a diverse workforce; though purposeful intervention would be required. If left to its own, digital platforms will simply reinforce the formal structure and ‘group think’ behaviours. Kane also reported “that while only about 30% of employees from companies at an early stage of digital development say that their company is collaborative, more than 70% of employees from digitally mature companies do.” In summary, the research indicates that collaborative performance is tied to digital maturity. Specific advantages from digital interventions, like increased employee diversification in decision making, required purposeful interventions and cannot be left to organic self-management.
What Real-Time Collaboration Data Can Tell Us About Gender Diversity
Do men show an unconscious bias against women at work? Are men slower to respond to women in the workplace? Are women quick to respond because they feel they need to advance their own agendas, given that men still dominate senior management levels? The answers to those questions could reveal a dynamic in the workplace that could disadvantage women.
The power of the question mark
At SWOOP Analytics we examine interaction patterns between people on enterprise social networks Yammer by Microsoft and Workplace by Facebook. One of the things I have always wanted to uncover is how many questions are being asked, and what – if any – impact is made by asking questions.
How AI's Answer to Cyberbullying Can Help in the Workplace
Just as social media platforms use artificial intelligence to flag bullying, businesses can use AI to analyze discussions and improve negotiating tactics.
From Friends to Work Colleagues to Friends at Work: The Great Facebook Circle of Life
Do you have a core network at work? Do your colleagues have core networks at work? How dense are the networks across your whole organisation? Dense, reciprocated networks may not guarantee friendship, but friendships cannot exist without them. You will need SWOOP to find out.