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Right tools + right contexts + right support = effective workflows
Right tools + right contexts + right support = effective workflows 1024 343 Catherine Shinners

Two recent Harvard Business Review articles highlight the ongoing challenges with using collaboration and digital tools. According to the authors, leaders and knowledge workers are left scrambling through an array of tools often with little guidance and support on how best to incorporate them in their daily work life. I’ve worked on digital transformation initiatives…

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A digital workplace connects people and work – no matter the location
A digital workplace connects people and work – no matter the location 1024 683 Catherine Shinners

There is currently a tsunami of business articles about the post-pandemic work location of employees – full return-to-office mandates, hybrid models with in-office days each week, and some remaining fully remote. Equally there is a swirl of rationales – suggesting employees benefit most from in-person coaching and mentoring, experience better collaboration in office, and that…

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Business Value Models in the Digital Workplace
Business Value Models in the Digital Workplace 1024 429 Catherine Shinners

Digital workplace projects like enterprise social network (ESN) implementations or large scale social collaboration tools often move ahead, understandably, as an IT-lead project, with perhaps HR or internal communications partnership to help improve employee engagement.  Upfront planning and alignment on broader strategic business objectives are often missing, however. As projects roll out organizations and digital transformation teams…

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Communities to accelerate change
Communities to accelerate change 1024 525 Catherine Shinners

Companies continue to use traditional change management approaches to move important initiatives across their organizations – initiatives such as Agile development, data science or overarching digital transformation efforts.    Such initiatives not only involve getting stakeholder support and orientation and baseline executive buy-in, but means moving major cohorts of the workforce, if not the entire…

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The Future of Work is Now
The Future of Work is Now 1024 766 Catherine Shinners

In the last two weeks of June 2016, four major technology companies entered into watershed relationships that harken the arrival of the Future of Work.   On June 13 Microsoft announced it’s intent to acquire LinkedIn.This acquisition signals the driving of the value of the network into organizations.   The fundamental message – the network…

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Something’s on overload – but it’s not collaboration
Something’s on overload – but it’s not collaboration 788 521 Catherine Shinners

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant just published an intriguing article in the Harvard Business Review, decrying Collaborative Overload in the workplace. It seemed to me that much of the challenges and issues they called out did not have much to do with collaboration, per se, but with poor interaction and knowledge management practices,…

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Social collaboration – the dynamics of ‘working-out-loud’
Social collaboration – the dynamics of ‘working-out-loud’ 762 753 Catherine Shinners

A significant benefit for users and organizations who employ social collaboration solutions such as enterprise social networking (ESN) is that it supports a more transparent, conversational way of working, enables more visible communication flows, and asynchronous yet interactive problem solving. Organizations and workers struggle to address burgeoning workloads, to be able to create group cohesion…

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