A study performed by Siemens Enterprise Communications Global Research in sep/oct 2012) showed that:
- 43% of users feel frustrated and overwhelmed by team collaboration and communication technologies that they work with
- 75% find their team members more likely to get distracted during ‘virtual’ meetings
- 34% find remote team members often ‘loafing’ – not doing their share
- 44% find it as productive as face-to-face teamwork
- 72% would find teamwork easier if collaboration included video
If you look closer to Siemens’ survey it’s only understate that companies need to apply one Unified Communication technology which off course Siemens can provide. In my opinion it’s not the essential - it’s just another technology.
The essential is how to work together. But is it the Yahoo solution then? Bring people back to the office and let them spend even 2-3 hours on travel time to the office? I don’t think so. We need to look beyond that because most companies compete on the global market and need to be present on each continent. So that’s a fact your company needs to deal with.
There is a huge difference in how a Mexican, Indian, Chinese, German, Dane and American will work out a task. Though assigning global labels to the people of a particular country is over stereotyping. But while it may be careless to overgeneralize about the people from a single place, it would be naive to deny the existence of significant, overall differences between places and cultures (source: A Geography of Time by Robert Levine).
Deep down each culture represents a set of values which “easily” can be translated into how we work together. Do we then need everyone to understand each culture they work together with? No, it’s not crucial you know everything but basic stuff is important no matter culture you come from - openness and readiness to explore outside your comfort zone. It is usually our own comfort zone and lack of understanding and not our culture history that prevent us to work efficiently together.
Thanx for a great post. I blog about #FUFISM and this post adds value to that.
ReplyDeleteFUFISM is a marketing philosophy where the social media forms the core functional element of the communication factors involved in online marketing and is used to integrate all the different marketing strategies into one coherent and integrated project where each marketing campaign may be worked on in isolation, but remains connected to the whole through its links to the social media as well as the publisher and the author or authors of the various online components of each campaign
The user friendly communication strategy that FUFISM advocates also applies equally to in-house work that relates to production and management issues within any company
Thanks Frank - I'm glad it adds value. It is a topic I'm very interested in and work with every day.
ReplyDelete