New Way 2 Work » Jagdish

Employee motivation. Stop and think differently!

Jagdish — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:27:06 +0000

We have heard of the “carrot and stick” mode of management and we believe in it. Whether it is a school, government or business everyone employs carrot and stick model in some way or another. What if this hypothesis was wrong? What if it’s applicability had weakened in the current times? Dan Pink analyzes this question and argues his case that businesses should go beyond “carrot and stick” for motivating employees in this TED talk. I agree with Dan and have personally seen how many of the policies in large organizations failed to make any impact due to this mindset.

Firstly what motivates people to come to office is the quality of work. Give them substandard work and you will not get them motivated with any amount of incentives.
What we really need in to empower employees to take decisions and not treat them with kid gloves.
Lastly and most importantly keep the communication channels open and transparent. People are far more technologically networked than almost a decade ago and there is no way companies can afford to create silos.

Watch the TED video below and share your views.

Cognitive surplus in Businesses

Jagdish — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:56:03 +0000

While listening the talk delivered by Clay Shirky at TED what stuck me was that the same phenomenon he is indicating in the open world also exists in Enterprises & businesses. People do have time on hand which when tapped effectively could prove a game changer for Enterprises especially in these tough times. So what is Cognitive surplus? Clay roughly estimates that there is around trillion hours a year spare time available with people in the world which could be used for community activity whether it be social or creative in nature. He explains how products are created in the open source world, the Wiki model, etc. So are companies doing anything about this? Yes, the leading organizations have recognized this fact and coded it in their DNA. For e.g. Google give close 20% time off to employees to work on pet projects and have shown that some of these projects have come out as new company products (ex. Google news). Watch this interesting video and share your views.

Email on its way out?

Jagdish — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:13:11 +0000

I attended the recent concluded cloudforce conference in Bangalore and where the discussion was around email on it’s way out in the consumer space and how the same trend will follow inside corporate walls. This is a theme which we have been continuously discussing on our blogs in the last two years and have seen many organizations using social tools like Injoos reduce their email dependency considerably. In our case inside Injoos it is zero. Here is a video of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at Nielsen Consumer 360 where she talks on the same theme. Email on its way out !

Don’t limit knowledge flow with Wikis

Jagdish — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:02:26 +0000

Wiki introduced the paradigm of collective intelligence “that many people can contribute to topic thus enriching the same”. Was popularized by the publicly built encyclopedia the “Wikipedia“. Wikis have become popular as new way of organizing content and sharing knowledge inside enterprises and business. One of the main attraction is that there are many free (Read open source) Wiki applications available e.g Twiki. MediaWiki, PbWiki, etc. But as we found with our own experience and with experience of many of our customers these applications are not user friendly and requires effort to maintain. Wikis have many drawbacks for effective adoption and I am listing a few:

1. Editing content is tricky. The editor has been designed keeping more tech savvy uses (I would say coders) in mind. For e.g. who will remember to use markups like “bold” just to highlight few characters.

2. Firstly you will need an in house IT team (or a outsourced vendor) to configure and setup. Also wikis cannot be customized or I would customization is not for the faint hearted.

3. Very textual and cannot mix multiple type of media. Though some versions do provide plugins to social media sites like Youtube etc.

4. Lacks the social nature popularized by networking applications like twitter and facebook (Web 2.0). As we have seen by experience that recognition and instant gratification are key to success of sharing and collaboration in teams.

So what are the alternatives? Social collaboration platforms (Enterprise 2.0) provide as great alternative to Wikis and solve all the problems listed above while being an effective platform for knowledge sharing. Only few platforms like Injoos provide a way to capture both structured (Read Blog, Documents etc.) and Unstructured (Read discussions, Micro Blogs etc.) in an integrated and seamless manner.

New Way to Work - Live in the Cloud

Jagdish — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:58:46 +0000

In this video Injoos team discusses how the working model has changed with the Social collaboration tools like Injoos, Twitter, facebook etc. The members provide comparison of how work was conducted a few years back in organization and how it has taken a dramatic turn. The advantages of this new way to work include:

* Helping employees work form Anytime-Anywhere (Telecommuting is now a common phenomenon among knowledge workers)

* How purchase of Software and Hardware is now eliminated with models like SAAS & Cloud Computing

* How startups can cope with lack of funds by using these new technologies. Basically live in the cloud.

Watch the video and let me know your story.

For 30 Day Free trial of Injoos. Click Here.

Directory of Social Learning Tools

Jagdish — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:44:38 +0000

Injoos got listed on this excellent Directory maintained by Jane Hart (Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies) which lists down various Social Media, Social Collaboration and Social Learning tool. These tools include:

Blogging Tools
Bookmarking Tools
Wiki Tools
Productivity Tools
Team/Group Collaboration Tools

As you will see in the list various tools have different functionalities and user should make his or her choice based on the needs.

For more: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/

Save the endangered Indian Tiger

Jagdish — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:24:43 +0000

I liked email campaign being run on selecting a new national animal for India. Got me engaged. It is a wake up call for the fact that India now has been left with 1000+ tigers in the wild and that will diminish very soon if nothing is done. I was talking to some of my colleagues who are more knowledgeable in this field and they tell me that this is due to lack of awareness combined with absence of laws against poaching and lack of funds. Definitely need for a community action and we should bring passion for Tiger conservation to the level say cricket in India. I would want my kids to enjoy the tiger reserves in India as I have and not just visit the zoos in future.

Impact of online media on the elections, democracy and giving power to the people

Jagdish — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:29:13 +0000

As I watching the debate of US Presidential candidates on CNN one thing which amazed me was the complimentary support which the online channels like Blogs, Online Polls, Emails, Chats etc, were provided to the TV anchors and the analysts, ultimately making the program much more richer and enjoyable. I thought of collecting various articles and interesting stuff on this subject and posting on this blog. My belief is the that collective action by various groups for their candidates online will cause a major shift on how elections are run and won in future in the various democracies of the world. Here are some interesting articles:

Groups and their impact on Individuals and Society

Jagdish — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:45:45 +0000

There has been considerable research on how formal organizations and informal groups have helped in growth of countries like USA. The impact of these organizations have been in not just support the democratic process but also the economic and social development of the american society.

Example of highly formal groups are e.g. a PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) organisation or a national organization of any sort, or a labour union, formally organised with a chairman and a president, and membership dues and so on. Some informal groups could be for e.g. the group of people who gather at the bar every Thursday evening.

Both of those constitute networks in which there can easily develop reciprocity, and in which there can be gains. One of the concept which tries to capture and measure these aspects is termed as “Social Capital”.

The dimensions of Social Capital are:

Informal Formal

Objective Social Networks Organizations membership

Subjective Trust in People Confidence in Institutions

Some essential reading:

How group norms are formed ?

Jagdish — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:10:42 +0000

Each group has a set of values or norms that are shared among members that permit them to cooperate with one another. These norms can be generated spontaneously in small and stable groups. Research has shown that some of key group characteristics that impact this are:

Size: System begins to break down as free riders increase in large groups.

Boundaries: For spontaneous order to occur it is important to put boundaries on group membership. If people can enter and exit at will and it is not clear who the member is then the individuals will have less incentive to worry about their reputation.

Repeated interaction: People worry about their reputation only if they know they will have to deal with one another for an extended periods of time.

Prior norms establishing a common culture: The establishment of cooperative norms often presupposes the existence of a set of prior norms held in common by individuals making up the group.

Power and Justice: Informal social norm can frequently reflect the ability of one group over another

Persistence of bad choices: Unjust and counterproductive norms can disappear spontaneously if is did not serve the interest of the group.

Ref: Extracts of article by Francis Fukuyama (Culture Matters)

How groups are formed?

Jagdish — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:45:01 +0000

A group can be defined as two or more people that interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. There has been good amount of research on this aspect and here are some of the well known models.

1. Cogs Ladder:

Polite Stage

Why We’re Here Stage

Power Stage

Cooperation Stage

Esprit Stage

http://www.unh.edu/sal/groups.html

2. Tuckman’s Stages:

The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forming-storming-norming-performing

Social Communications with purpose

Jagdish — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:08:34 +0000

In a recent post on GigaOm Daniel Berninger discusses the decline of Yellow & White pages and how a possible internet replacement could be built for these legacy tools which could serve a plethora of communication channels we use today like Landline, Mobile, Messengers, Mails, Messages etc. One possible way he suggests is merging of Social networking models with the old phone directory paradigm. The challenge however is the lack of a purpose built social network.

This is one such real world valuable solution which could be possibly built on the social communications platform provided people could trust each other and the platform provider company with their personal data. You don’t see this as a big challenge in say a corporate intranet communications directory as you implicitly trust all the folks and there are corporate rules governing the data usage. So what can be done?

Firstly create a platform where personal data is secure and is shared only after proper approvals.
Then focus on creating real world communities online as opposed to loosely coupled interest groups. The group should follow all real world rules of moderation and data sanity.

This will make people comfortable in storing and sharing information. Then this composite communications directory application could be possibly realized.

Are you too old for Social networking sites ?

Jagdish — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:11:59 +0000

In a recent interview with BBC News Tim Berners Lee who is considered as the father of internet answered a question, Are you too old for things like MySpace and Facebook?. For which he responded that “I’ve seen no evidence - either from my point of view or anybody else - that social networking and generally using the net to interact with other people is something that’s restricted to young people. In fact it’s very popular with older people. Young people can get on their bikes and visit each other, older people can’t. It may turn out to be more important for seniors than for young people.” I agree with Mr. Berners Lee and feel that the value of online social networking tools to a productive adult is immense, whether it is getting ahead in his career, keeping his hobbies alive and kicking, touch base with his school or college mates, Increasing participation in real world social communities etc.. In a broad sense being more productive in what he or she is doing today and achieve goals. But all the sites which exist today have been designed keeping mostly the entertainment value in mind with notable exceptions like Linked-in. Also the real world communities which a productive adult participates in, is either not online or are fragmented across various sites or applications spread on the internet. Then there is a clear lack of seamless experience for the user. It is quite a challenging task to keep up with the flood of information and trying to find the relevant one. The idea of getting the most relevant information pushed to me when I need it would be the holy grail. All this will require first to create a solution which looks at a person’s real world identities and then give him/her the tools to manage those.