Perspectives – September 2016

Assessing task performance

The challenge in team assessment is in setting a task that prior technical or similar knowledge does not invalidate the outcomes. Butchibabu et al. ¹ used a synthetic task known as Blocks World for Teams in which teams seek to build up sequences of coloured blocks based on the information from each of the participants. The importance of this synthetic task is that it takes the ‘previous experience’ factor out of the equation. The authors set out to classify effective communication strategies that teams can adopt during the conduct of tasks with varying degrees of complexity. The BW4T interface included a large chat window and a set of predetermined communications to facilitate this interaction: ‘Ask’ ‘Question’ ‘Tell’ and ‘Relay’. Participants were able to communicate with all of their teammates simultaneously or with individual team members. The patterns of communication were characterized as being explicit, deliberative and reactive. In essence, these patterns related to the extent to which the overall context of the task was communicated. For example, the reactive end of the spectrum the information being communicated was mainly about the next block in the sequence.

This study identified communication strategies employed by teams that best performed an assigned task, as indicated by task completion time and idle time, and compared them with the strategies employed by the worst performing teams. They found that as task complexity increased, the best-performing teams exhibited higher rates of implicit coordination than explicit coordination. Furthermore, these teams also exhibited higher rates of deliberative communication rather than reactive communication as task complexity increased. The primary outcome for the authors was an insight into the value of deliberative communication by evaluating task structure and observed that as sequencing became increasingly complex, communication related to the team’s next goal became more valuable to teammates who were then better able to plan their subsequent actions.

From my own perspective, I was very interested in the synthetic task approach, which was new to me in its degree of sophistication. The insights into the three categories of information transfer highlighted the importance of not just having teams with the optimum expertise but also paying attention to the channels of communication in briefing a team prior to it undertaking a task, especially one of high complexity.

Team communication platforms

In the study referred to above the communications were short messages rather than the provision of documents or knowledge. In an organization, the challenge is then how to support this type of extended communication. Email is rarely suitable and instant messaging (IM) usually has little additional functionality. Team communication platforms (TCPs) are emergent class of social collaboration technology that combine features of multiple enterprise social media including social networking platforms and IM. The most prominent and widely cited examples of TCPs are the dedicated SaaS offerings Flowdock, Hipchat and Slack. The media capabilities of these platforms, including integrations for diverse information and communication technologies, enable affordances for both highly adaptable and centralized team communication practices.

The difference in IM applications is that conversations are hosted in a shared environment and organized into public groups and channels also called rooms or flows by some services. Groups are used for specific teams and projects, while channels are typically reserved for knowledge sharing and topic-based communication. Although TCPs also support private groups and direct messaging to individuals, as in traditional IM applications, the interface is designed to make communication collaborative and shared by default. Most services also support guest access for adding external partners to specific groups and channels. A second essential component of the messaging functionality is a robust notification system.

Much of this article by Anders ² is about the features of these systems and their role in team communications and is an excellent synthesis of the benefits and challenges of using these devices. The goal of the study was to explore these issues through a qualitative analysis of the perceptions and emergent practices of individual users and organizations that have adopted TCPs, focusing on:

why have users and organization adopted TCPs?

which TCP capabilities and affordances are most valued by early adopter organizations and individual users?

how have communication and collaboration behaviours changed to maximize the benefits and/or minimize the challenges of TCP-based workflows?

A combination of web and social media searches were used to identify blog posts discussing user experiences with the Slack service. Slack was selected for two primary reasons. First, although many Enterprise Social Media (ESM) technologies have begun to integrate more robust team messaging capabilities, Slack is among a smaller group of services, including Hipchat and Flowdock, that are exclusively dedicated and marketed as TCPs. Second, the recent creation, rapid growth and extreme popularity of Slack have generated a large number of practitioner-written blog posts reviewing the service and sharing user experiences. Only posts that reported on specific organizational uses and/or personal experiences were included in the sample. Posts that could be specifically identified as promotional in nature, including case stories hosted on the official Slack website or posts marketing third-party integrations for the Slack service, were excluded from the sample. The search obtained 100 blog posts written by individuals and self-published on personal or organizational blogs between September 2014 and September 2015. The depth of analysis by the author is quite outstanding, with extensive quotations from test participants categorized by theme. There is also an excellent final section looking at some of the wider issues of using TCP applications and a very comprehensive bibliography.

Usability of social network applications

A significant amount of work has been carried out on the features of information systems that are essential if users are not going to experience difficulty in using the system. I am often surprised by how few managers are aware of ISO Standard 9241 on good practice in ergonomics of human–computer interaction. In general, websites are reasonably usable because they have been developed by external design teams with considerable experience in usability good practice. Intranets rarely receive the same level of attention. I suspect that this is also the case for social network applications. The hype around these applications is such that all the normal due diligence on usability is pushed to the side in the rush to roll out the application.

I was therefore delighted to come across an article by a team from Georgia Institute of Technology ³ in which the usability of 30 social networking applications had been evaluated. The evaluation was based on the heuristic principles developed by Nielsen and Molich in 1990, which is entirely appropriate for an initial assessment of such a large collection of applications. The team developed a scoring approach that enabled a reasonable degree of consistency in the scoring to be achieved using quite a large team of testers across multiple applications. The functionality of the applications could not be consistent across all the applications, as Google Calendar and DropBox (for example) are used for quite different purposes.

Nevertheless, this is an important article because as far as I am aware, it is the first to highlight the importance of social network applications and provide a framework for their evaluation. However, it does show the signs of being a graduate student project that ran for a set period of time, and so some of the analysis is a little perfunctory. I do recognize that the aim of the project was not to come up with a ‘best bet’ but to highlight the usability elements that needed to be taken into consideration for these applications. Although I doubt that usability would be a selection criterion for these applications, the issues raised in this article would usefully inform what needed to be addressed during training and user adoption of the applications. My experience from consulting assignments is that there is rarely attention paid to the usability of social applications. The assumption seems to be made that because users are familiar with consumer social applications they will have no problems with getting the best from enterprise applications. Being able to drive a car does not help much when driving a bus!

The added value from web accessibility conformance

To stay on the usability track for a moment I was interested to read an article by Schmutz et al. ⁴ at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, in which they assess the impact of Web Accessibility Initiative WCAG 2.0 guidance on website usability. The authors point out that although there are web accessibility guidelines for people with disabilities available, they are rarely used in practice, partly due to the fact that practitioners believe that such guidelines provide no benefits, or even have negative consequences, for nondisabled people, who represent the main user group of websites. Despite these concerns, there is a lack of empirical research on the effects of current web accessibility guidelines on nondisabled users.

The goal of this experiment was to examine the consequences of implementing recommendations from current accessibility guidelines (i.e. WCAG 2.0) for nondisabled users. As an independent variable, accessibility was manipulated by modifying 13 WCAG 2.0 recommendations in an existing municipal website, resulting in three versions of the website with different levels of accessibility: Levels AA, A and NA. Apart from WCAG 2.0 conformance, the websites were identical (e.g. same content and same number of menu items). The websites were evaluated by means of a usability test, taking a range of performance measures (task completion time and task completion rate) and subjective ratings (usability, aesthetics, trustworthiness, affect and workload).

The present results support the assumption that a website’s higher WCAG 2.0 conformance would lead to higher task completion rates and lower task completion time. Participants using the AA website were more successful in solving tasks and were faster in doing so than participants who used websites with an A or NA rating.

First, WCAG 2.0 should be considered not only as an aid for designing websites according to the needs of users with disabilities but also as a helpful tool for designing more usable websites for nondisabled users. This different framing may motivate practitioners to apply these guidelines more often (because of the benefits to nondisabled users) while alleviating the financial concerns of practitioners about website accessibility. As an implication for the guidelines, positive effects for users without disabilities should be mentioned explicitly as well as the fact thatlevel AA is of particular importance for such users. Second, the consistent pattern of beneficial effects of level AA compared to NA is highly relevant for practitioners. Third, the 10 success criteria that were changed from level NA to AA are rather easy to implement (e.g. meaningful link text, sufficient contrast and text alignment). These ‘easy-to-be-changed’ criteria may help practitioners improve websites or design new ones, following WCAG 2.0, by offering a positive cost–benefit trade-off.

Social collaboration in intranets

Time to return to social networking. We form communities based on our shared interests and goals regardless of geographic ties. In the past, networks were very much based on location and I can well remember the very close community that people who smoked created as they stood outside the office in the rain. In a number of management positions, I was able to make good use of this cross-department community! In virtual communities, we seek to establish what social psychologists refer to as a sense of community (SOC) that refers to our perceptions, expectations, understanding and feelings about a community as well as our relationships within the community. A sense of SOC is very important because research has shown that it leads to satisfaction with and commitment to the community. The author Nur Uysal ⁵ notes that many empirical studies on internal communication have been conducted in the area of business communication, but few have empirically examined a theory-based framework of factors related to SOC perceptions in an organizational intranet. This study resides at the intersection of business communication and community psychology and contributes to these two fields. The objective was to see if a sense of virtual community (SOVC) was greater when supported by an intranet rather than as a stand-alone social network.

This study used a mixed-methods approach incorporating quantitative and qualitative data from survey instruments to examine the factors that lead to an SOC perceived through intranet communication. The Southwest Airlines’ (SWA) intranet system called SWALife was used as the test application, with data through an online survey of SWA employees. The survey asked for opinions on a range of 14 questions, such as:

I think this group is a good place for me to be a member.

Other members and I want the same thing from this group.

I can recognize the names of most members in this group.

I feel at home in this group.

Some open-ended questions were also used. Overall, there were clearly benefits in using the intranet to support social communities through the sense of structure and culture that were features of the intranet. The discussion of the results considered the importance of the visibility of the groups, the implicit norms of behaviour that were based on the overall governance of the intranet and the balance between active community members and lurkers who benefit from the groups but who are not contributors.

The study reported in this article was based on research in a single company, and I would have liked to have seen more analysis of the overall social culture of the company and the likely impacts on SOVC development. Small airlines tend to have a very focused approach to customer service as a crucial factor in surviving in a very competitive business. Nevertheless, the research reported in this article does raise a number of issues about the role of an intranet in supporting community development and hopefully it will encourage others to extend the work to other sectors and to other sizes of company.

Co-worker communication in Jyske Bank

Jyske Bank is the third largest bank in Denmark, which has a well-developed and highly competitive banking system. It has 4000 employees in 110 locations. The bank was selected for study because the management in the organization has promoted a culture of open communication for many years. Co-workers are known for voicing opinions on both work-related and organizational matters in the various discussion forums. The organization has received a digital communication award for the best internal communication in Europe in 2014 and for the best social media intranet in Europe in 2015. This study ⁶ explores how co-workers use internal social media (ISM) to contribute to the construction of organizational identity. The study analysed 3 months of interactions among co-workers and in addition, 17 co-workers were interviewed to provide additional understanding about the online interactions.

Four significant themes emerged

Customers and products: Sharing knowledge, generating ideas, finding solutions to challenges and other task-related communication.

Working conditions: Discussing IT systems, work routines and employer benefits.

Organizational issues: Discussing organizational issues and organizational identity.

ISM-specific issues: Metacommunication about how to communicate on ISM.

Some of the discussions would start in one category and end in another as the discussions developed. Generally, a discussion started with a concrete problem that developed into an organizational issue. About 22 of the discussions could be perceived as discussing organizational identity, thus making the category the biggest one.

Co-workers in the study perceived that there was something unique about the organizational identity of Jyske Bank. On ISM, they would comment if they perceived a gap between how different external stakeholders saw the bank and the organizational discourses about the identity of the bank. But ‘the product’ or the perception of what Jyske Bank should be was somehow taken out of the hands of the managers and left to co-workers’ sense making both in the discussions on ISM and through discussions in the lunchrooms and across the tables in the offices.

Co-worker communication on ISM contributed to the construction of organizational identity in at least three ways. First, co-workers discussed who Jyske Bank was in relation to other banks by a applying a them-and-us rhetoric as shown in the findings. Second, the interviewed co-workers paraphrased several memorable discussions on ISM. In this way, some discussions on ISM became organizational stories and types of milestones in the construction of organizational identity. These types of organizational stories help co-workers identify with the organization and co-workers who identify with their organizations are more engaged and willing to make a difference to the organization. Third, the discussions on communication behaviour contributed to organizing by developing and maintaining group norms, which indirectly affect organizational identity.

The author emphasizes that Jyske Bank has developed an organizational culture that encourages co-workers to speak their mind, which is likely to make a difference on co-workers’ willingness to discuss organizational identity on ISM. It is therefore important not to scale up or extend the outcomes to other organizations without recognizing this. However, having a research article of this quality does set a standard for similar research projects in other organizations and the outcomes do provide a very high benchmark for what is possible in the area of ISM communication as an example to others.

Knowledge management as management innovation

I have perhaps kept the best to last. This article ⁷ draws on findings from a longitudinal study of the adoption of a management innovation within an organizational setting. It is based on the findings of a case study that explored in depth a knowledge management programme that was introduced within a large distributed public sector agency in Europe. The site for data collection was a national public sector agency responsible for economic development in a European country. The organization directs its operations from a headquarters office in a major city through 12 distributed agencies. Across the full period covered in this research, the agency employed a minimum of 1500 and a maximum of 2500 staff.

Qualitative multi-methods were deployed to gather and analyse data for a longitudinal time frame of 13 years (1995–2008). This is an exceptional period of time and may well be unique in research into knowledge management adoption. Materials for analysis were collected from electronic sources generated over the full 13-year period and from participant observations made over five of these years during which time one of the authors was an employee of the agency. Two main types of materials were gathered for analysis. The first comprised historical archive material generated within the agency between 1995 and 2003. The second set can be classed as ‘situated material’ on the basis that it was gathered in situ between 2003 and 2008. These materials comprised 8732 documents and online files, 4567 email threads and extensive field notes. Once assembled, the materials were sorted into electronic folders by theme and categories in a case study database. From a close analysis of the materials, it was possible to construct a chronological timeline of the KM implementation between 1995 and 2008.

The main outcome of this research is an extended and refined model of the process of adoption of management innovation that differs from the generally accepted innovation-adoption model. In the conclusions to the paper the authors note that the study makes three primary contributions to research in the area of management innovation. First, it widens understanding of the process of adoption of management innovation, a process that has been neglected in favour of the process of generation. Second, it identifies decision-making related to the changes required for adoption of a management innovation. Finally, it has developed a model of the process of adoption of management innovation that includes decision-making. The authors suggest that these contributions are theoretically significant because, to date, no attempt has been made to model decision-making for the process of adoption of management innovation (in general), or knowledge management.

I have included this article for three reasons. The first is that it is very unusual to find a longitudinal study of knowledge management adoption that takes in developments over a period of more than 10 years. The second is that it places knowledge management as an example of management innovation. The final reason is that it is an example of knowledge management adoption processes within a public sector agency that complements the wealth of research into corporate knowledge management adoption.