- Kathleen Culver, Greg Lowe (Alcatel Lucent)
- Promises of E20: increased productivity, anywhere/anytime access, better sense of connection, unlock hidden expertise especially in a fluid alive company, everyone can have a voice, acquiring the control about our data, community smarter than individuals, ultimately culture change
- How much of this is real? Is that totally right?
- Flexible access: we now have many tools in the enterprise and much more outside. You can get access to SMEs, get fast answers, connect BUT many more interruptions (presence, multiple sources, many windows), distraction and multitasking that may at the end reduce productivity for switching costs (that take time) and moving from task to task you never get anything accomplished, with multitasking you focus less on the deep meaning of things just touching upon the surface, there isn’t a single flow any longer (positive psychology) and this is impacting our happiness and wellbeing when you can follow and complete of a linear flow of tasks
- Always on: you can always been connected and work anywhere (even in bed!), questions are back in second that’s an instant gratification and you can feel other people around you BUT this flooding our free time. Big desire of being responsive or the sense of aggregation but these updates, needs of respond happens 24/7. Pressure to respond came be ridiculous, completely loosing our downtime invading our playtime (purposeless activities that we choose to do for pleasure) and removing the ability to look at problems from outside, from different perspectives actually impacting innovation and creativity. Another risk is damaging your personal tight connections being only partially there like if you were constantly drunk. Unpredictable call to actions are stressful situations that occur 24/7 (burnout). We are not computers, we cannot stay focus all the day or we are loosing performance
- Always virtual: we are checking emails and working also from the bath bringing you cultural and work perspectives we didn’t have before. Lower real estate and travel expenses, getting more imputes, improving our work/life balance BUT we loose face to face time, increasing the opportunity for misunderstandings, it is not easy to demonstrate emotions. Virtuality is not enough to exchange every kind of information and to create relationships, a sense of camaraderie.Mirror neurons are responsible for empathy, mimicking others, getting engaged in other’s life. Empathy is so important to establish rapport and rapport are fundamental for employees engagement ultimately affecting performance
- New 2.0 venues: you can have broader input and perspectives leveraging crowd-sourcing, pulling information out from boxes and reusing it in projects thus getting more productive, a new culture is emerging BUT all this can backfire exposing biases. Some people like these new venues more than others. Those people controlling the new venues are not necessarily the experts and quite ones risk to be crowded out. We are creating more and more noise affecting popularity and expertise. Certain contributions could be made just to improve your reputation and not to bring value to the discussion. The crowd or employees are very rarely statistical representative. Change doesn’t happen over night even for people with the best intentions
- Information candy store: you feel that more information allows you to take better decisions BUT you get overloaded and again this causes a loss of productivity, too many choices reduce confidence (Paradox of Choice) and increase anxiety. That brings us to analysis paralysis: you may want to consider every kind of information before taking any decision thus don’t taking decisions at all. It’s not easy to correct wrong information when it arise
- The dark side still can’t be quantified but we have to consider and mitigate all this
- Mitigation: avoid alert fatigue (avoiding too much emails from the system turning off notifications), unplug yourself (sometimes), make your smile count in person, when you ask e20 to take decisions carefully evaluate information (and contact owners where needed), filter out the noise (our priority and needs constantly change and we need to refine our filters constantly) BUT we are human animals, some of this stuff gives us some dopamine junkies and we may be worried to become disconnected, invisible, seeming uncommitted when you are not participating enough. It’s extremely hard to handle new channels especially under stress. It takes commitment, focus, effort
- Manage our attention as carefully as time and money
Emanuele Quintarelli
Entrepreneur and Org Emergineer at Cocoon Projects | Associate Partner at Peoplerise | LSP and Holacracy Facilitator
