Ingredients of Trust

Economist Intelligence Unit published a "recommended reading" survey on business collaboration and the role of trust. Some predictable outcomes:

• Trust is seen as a key factor in collaboration, but the reality is often disappointing (classic difference between the ideal world and reality)
• Face to face collaboration is superior to virtual collaboration
• Good collaborators view their co-collaborators or partner organizations more positive – which underlines that positive attitude makes a good collaborator, and a happier one at that.
  

What I found interesting are the qualities that were used to break down trust:
Honesty, Willingness to exchange information, Ethical behavior, Shared objectives, Motivation, Respectfulness towards others, Positive Attitude, Ability to do a job well and Consideration of others were the most important factors, in this order. Less important according to the survey are expertise, communication skills, intelligence, experience, and whether someone works for a reputable organization. Experts in an organization are not necessarily trustworthy collaborators…
– These factors, especially the high-ranking ones, are interesting because if you want to improve trust, these are qualities you need to work on.

What is missing in the listing (because it is even more elusive!) is body language. Body language tells more about relations between two people than they may be consciously aware. Good collaborators intuitively will embody (in the true sense) openness and empathy. Unfortunately, most of this gets lost in virtual collaboration. This might be the main reason why virtual will never equal face to face collaboration.

...but with a little help, at least some of the body language finds its way back into virtual communication - emoticons may not be considered good style in business communication, but I am sure it helps. :P

Thanks for alerting me to the EIU survey to knowledgefutures

Communicate less

Communication, communication, communication. That seems to be the mantra when it comes to good team management, successful organizational change and the much sought-after collaboration. Tools from emails to wikis, Skype to Twitter are enabling communication everywhere, anytime at low cost. – But if you get the idea that communication should flow continuously, you are in danger of receiving perpetual, ubiquitous chatter (i.e. noise) instead of high-quality interaction. Communication should come in small, efficient dosages. And just as “slow food” or “slow transport” are supposed to bring quality back into our eating and travel habits, “slow communication” could raise the productivity at work - and even the indulgence in work!

Slow communication – some fragments

• Switch out: 37signals, the web2.0 company behind popular collaboration tools like basecamp and campfire advises “alone time” of uninterrupted work as the means to safeguard productivity (see their publication Getting Real). E.g. no telephone and email between 9.00 and 14.00. Some companies like U.S. Cellular try to solve the problem by introducing zero-email-days (see this article at USAToday.)
• Opportunities: Michael Arrington, famous Techcrunch blogger complained he received more than 2000 emails a day – and he saw this as a business opportunity: “The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it.” Yes, there is money to be made and some already do it – like Timothy Ferris, whose book The 4-Hour-Workweek became a hot selling item at Amazon – he also advised to radically cut down inefficient communication.
• Meetings: One way to achieve this is spending less time with meetings. The FT recently gave the anti-meeting movement some space: “If three people meet in a corridor and discuss a project for five minutes, they have had a meeting, and probably an effective one. But most meetings are seen as immovable blocks in diaries.” Bill Daniels, chief executive of American Consulting & Training is quoted with views on the cost-side of meetings: "[Some] meetings are very expensive. Not only do you have all the people in the room, but for every hour you spend in the meeting, there's five to 10 hours getting ready.” Nevertheless, he also says that meetings are needed to build teamwork.

Helping employees avoid inefficient communication should be in the interest of every company (inefficient meetings are not just expensive and unproductive but also never climate friendly!) and therefore a management topic. But still, everyone probably needs to find their own individual balance between too much and too little. I personally find lack of communication much more frustrating than communication overkill, which at least gives me a chance to pull the plug.

Collaboration Incentives

Forrester Research predicts that Enterprise 2.0 applications will be a market worth $4.6 billion globally by 2013. Which basically says that it is a hype in 2008.
Anyway, there will be an added $$$ market for training & consulting: Even though web2.0 applications are pretty common nowadays– e.g. 73% of internet users globally are reading blogs according to a UniversalMcCann survey – that still does not make web2.0 users good collaborators. While sharing and working together may come natural to the “net generation” who grew up with internet and mobile phone, the same cannot be said of older employees.

But how do you teach collaboration? One way seem to be multiplayer online games: A recent HBR article described how online multiplayer games can be used for leadership training and for simulating team structures. The authors concluded that “nonmonetary incentives built into a game economy strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.”

What’s wrong with monetary incentives? Research - e.g. by Adrian Furnham, a Behavioral Psychologist , author of “The Psychology of Money” - found that that the concept that better paid people are more productive and happy does not tie in with the evidence found in the workplace. In fact, money is more likely to be a cause of dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction. (see here).
Money may also not be the best motivation to get high quality contributions in an enterprise wiki or team workspace. Niko Nyman describes two ways to motivate people towards collaboration with money– and why they have their limits:

“The $1 million challenge” — The real incentive here is not direct
monetary reward, but the opportunity of winning a significant reward.
What kind of people take part in such lottery? Are these the people whose contribution you really want? How much effort are people willing to put into the slim chances of winning?

Paid content production — Paying people by contribution. It will get very expensive to pay any significant reward to content producers. If the reward is not significant, money is not the real incentive to contribute. One way to make the rewards bigger is to reward only the best. But how do you rank the content and decide who should be paid more? Squidoo and Mechanical Turk come to mind, both of which have not been that great successes.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to intrinsic motivation again, the type of motivation that is hardest to influence from the outside. Nevertheless, intrinsic motivation is getting increasing attention because not only collaboration but also creativity thrives when people are passionate about what they do. And even though intrinsic motivation basically is a personal decision (Is the glass half full or half empty?), it can well be taught (uncovered, encouraged, trained,...)

So, when that enterprise2.0 software is implemented, don't just offer manuals.
And, to get back to the HBR article, subscribe to a "multiplayer online role-playing game perspective" on team work: Players advance by collaborating with other characters, using each other's individual strengths for the common goal.