Have you worked in a cubicle farm where the people mope around like zombies? A recent Gallup poll confirms that lack of motivation in the workplace continues to be an issue in the U.S:
- Only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs
- Another 63% of employees are not engaged, lacking motivation
- 24% are actively disengaged, unproductive and possibly a negative influence at work
Not disengaged
Engaged
27%
62%
11%
24%
63%
13%
Holy smokes! What causes such rampant disengagement? According to the most recent Kelley Survey of more than 120,000 global employees, the leading causes include micromanagement, lack of progress, job insecurity, lack of confidence in company leadership, lack of recognition for good or poor performance, poor communication, unpleasant coworkers, and ho hum– boredom.
But what are the cures?
Collaboration to the Rescue
Better collaboration at work could solve many of these problems. Working closely with your boss can help set clear expectations and remove the need for micromanagement. Working alone, without teammates or superiors, can make you question your progress at work– and that can impact your sense of job security. Not hearing from company leadership can relieve you of your confidence in their abilities. Seeing your lazy co-workers go unpunished while your own good work goes unrecognized can cause you to go on autopilot. Poor communication and unpleasant coworkers can cause feelings of isolation, and working alone can certainly be boring.
“My leadership team uses Kintone to collaborate on all those topics—sharing data, sharing information, and asking each other questions. It’s all in one place, it’s all centralized, and we find it really easy and fun.” –Mindy Lieberman, Vice President of IT, Zendesk
Yesterday’s cubicle farms are rapidly becoming today’s dispersed cubicle groups and tomorrow’s global cloud connections. Phone calls, emails, texts, video conferences – they all fall short of the consistent collaboration that drives productivity and engagement. So how do you drive a culture of collaboration?
The answer is often in the physical work environment if everyone is in a conventional work environment and can talk face-to-face. A recent Aberdeen research paper revealed these:
- 67% of best-in-class companies enable project team members to update other members about the status of a customer case from with the collaboration portal (43% for others)
- 63% of best-in-class companies provide the ability to view/show conversation history associated with a piece of content or document (38% for others)
- 50% of best-in-class companies make customer feedback details available to multiple organizational stakeholders (22% for others)
But more often, in dispersed environments, the answer comes down to the software platform that provides the work environment.
Choosing a Collaboration Platform
In order for you and your coworkers to feel truly connected, you need to be able to create individual workspaces and conversation threads for individual projects, rather than just following the corporate org chart.
When your project workspaces have too many collaborators, people receive unnecessary notifications and then start tuning them out, a syndrome known as alert fatigue. Eventually it’s likely an important alert will be ignored, which could be problematic.
When your project workspaces have too few collaborators, people get pulled into the project at later stages without understanding the scope, goals or prior work done, resulting in inefficiencies.
A flexible platform like Kintone enables the creation of workspaces to suit any project:
- Invite the collaborators you want but not others, including external collaborators like vendors, partners and customers.
- Add and customize applications as needed to each workspace, from pre-built apps in the marketplace to apps you build yourself to apps created from Excel spreadsheets.
- Hold general conversations, private conversations, share files, anything you like.
Most important is the inherent collaboration that comes with the conversation streams. The engagement that comes from these touch points breeds satisfaction and productivity.
Zendesk uses Kintone in its IT department to manage projects large and small. “My leadership team [uses] Kintone to collaborate on sharing data, sharing information, and asking each other questions” says Mindy. “It’s all in one place, it’s all centralized, and we find it really easy and fun.”
