Long before COVID-19 changed the way companies work, collaboration among employees and between them, suppliers, owners, subcontractors, and trades was being reformed. While in person discussions are fewer, the importance of collaborating among disciplines has never been greater. And the digital age can, if approached properly, improve the situation immensely. Whether computer, smartphone, or tablet is used, communication is the key.
The AGC (Assn. of General Contractors) suggests when building an internal communication plan consider how you are currently communicating, what are the goals you are trying to accomplish, what information must flow between employees, suppliers, trades, and others, and how you can measure the results of any changes you make. One other element should be considered: how do those in your collaboration loop want to get their information? Let’s take these one at a time.
- How are you currently communicating with employees? Start by assessing your current internal communication efforts. Are there any? Managers may find the company lacks any formal communications or collaboration mechanism, no guidelines to make the choice of communications method easier. If so, what has been done in the past? What has been effective and what hasn’t? Conduct a survey or hold focus groups with key employees to gain a better understanding of how they have been communicating; you might be surprised.
- What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Your communication plan is not just delivering information — it’s about the way you support all the activities of the firm. Are you introducing a new line of homes? Do you have a new technology that will benefit suppliers, trades, and clients? When you put business goals front and center, it helps align your activities and shows how employee communication will make a difference to help the firm succeed.
- What information do your employees need to know? What are the essential elements for employees to know to effectively do their work? Address the who, what, why, when, and how of the topic. Create key messages and concepts that summarize the information in a cohesive and succinct way.
- How will you measure progress and demonstrate success? Determine how you will identify that your communication objectives have been achieved. What metrics will you use? Will you count the number of emails per day or calls made to show how communication is performing? Check progress on a regular basis, such as monthly and/or quarterly. By measuring communication efforts consistently, you can determine what is working, what isn’t, and adjust accordingly.
- And finally, how do employees prefer to get their information? Do you have an intranet that employees access daily? Is email the channel of choice? Are these available when working from home, a remote location, the jobsite, or only in the office? Distribute information where and how employees will consume it. If they aren’t reading it, it’s not helping achieve your business goals.
Working collaboratively requires a commitment by individuals and groups to do work in different ways, to make decisions in a different way, and to give up specialized and single-purpose resources. According to Gartner, the benefits of collaborative work are well-documented:
- Business benefits include generating revenue, boosting productivity, improving the allocation of resources, and reducing inef
- The business drivers for boosting collaboration include (but are not limited to) reducing process inefficiencies; conducting better research and making better decisions; responding faster to situations; and working with anyone, anytime, anywher
- Increasing digital dexterity is an important aspect of thriving in today’s business environment. Collaboration, along with innovation, creativity, and analytical thinking, are the core virtues of digital
Whether an organization works collaboratively or not is largely determined by its “corporate culture”: the way people have learned to behave in their organization. So, working collaboratively can be a cultural, behavioral change. Managers can support their organizations through these changes by specifying what working collaboratively means for their organization. Get started through conversations that unearth cultural underlying assumptions, and make sure there is a way to know when progress is being made through measurement—because what gets measured gets attention. The measuring of collaboration should consider the output of the work done by the team along with team’s self-assessment and the leadership’s assessment.
All collaborative teams, permanent or temporary, are put together to get something done. If you have asked the team to design a way to get sources of information working seamlessly together, then the outcome is whether or not the solution works, as determined by the users of that shared information.
Collaborative work is best served when there is clarity around the objectives of the team. Gartner suggests following the SMART principles in setting the goals of the team. Use these principles to make sure the goals are clearly understood by all team members. This will make the measurement of whether the goals were achieved easier.
■ S–specific (simple, sensible, significant)
■ M–measurable (meaningful, motivating)
■ A–achievable (agreed, attainable)
■ R–relevant (reasonable, realistic, and resourced, results-based)
■ T–time bound (time-based, time-limited, time-/cost-limited, timely, time-sensitive)
Do not focus on speed or time-to-complete as an important metric. As the African proverb states, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Speed will motivate the team to cut corners and fall back on individualized behavior.
This is one of the areas that technology can show benefits, even over in-person meetings. The need to augment workers with technology stems in part from major trends that are transforming work: retiring baby boomers, regionalization, the proliferation of data, and now COVID-19. As consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reports, these forces are creating a workforce that is more spread out, less experienced, and more overwhelmed by data with untapped potential.
Contractors need tools that help their workers collaborate and stay connected across geographies and functions, especially now as physical distancing and tighter employee-safety measures take center stage. Digital collaboration tools are a logical way to enable workers to tap into the collective knowledge of the enterprise, solve problems with experts remotely, and turn IoT (internet of things) data from multiple sources into true value. Digital collaboration has the potential to unlock value beyond the investment necessary to implement it, thanks in part to productivity boosts of 20-30% in collaboration-intensive work processes such as supplier management and equipment maintenance.
The productivity boost is particularly important in areas where training, apprenticeship, and other efforts have proven difficult in recruiting and retaining qualified workers. Whether the different economic conditions businesses and workers now confront due to the COVID-19 pandemic will make a sustained difference in hiring is unclear. Yet the fact remains that young workers neither share the same skillset as previous generations, nor have they been exposed to the same training and apprenticeship programs. Contractors can appeal to this new generation of workers by making it easier to train and help them learn. Collaboration tools allow companies to better leverage their experts across a broader group of people to help train the less experienced workforce. There is usually a wealth of experience—corporate knowledge—that can be lost if not farmed properly and stored for future generations of workers to access.
The most obvious way digitalization can benefit the company is to aid in controlling the data proliferation. Many companies have been challenged to help their workers use the data to maximum effect in solving problems and making better decisions. Tools that connect workers to other workers and to data will help turn the data into actions that generate real value: Imagine an operator who wants to troubleshoot a piece of equipment and can share realtime data with a remote expert to get guidance.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in major adjustments to ways of working and staffing models. The physical distancing, worker (and customer) safety issues, and economic reality that companies now face will have lasting impact even in the post-COVID-19 world. Lasting structural changes to fundamental work processes may be required to minimize physical contact between workers and to mitigate risk. Companies are looking for innovative ways to help these workers interact virtually while maintaining (or even increasing) productivity.
The technologies available to most employees for collaboration thus far have been limited to basic communication tools, such as email, chat, and text messages. These tools are typically disconnected from actual information flows related to business processes, resulting in back-and-forth status updates and complex handoffs that diminish employees’ productivity. Embedding digital collaboration into process workflows can enable faster, better decisions that improve key performance indicators and drive bottomline value.
Improved collaboration would save time and expense by allowing teams to use virtual meetings and online searches for relevant information. Take for example the team that performs maintenance. This often consists of one or two internal employees and a handful of outside contractors. As the team begins fixing the issue at hand, secondary issues often arise. Operating engineers can take and upload photos of equipment issues, fill out templates detailing important facts to record, and access equipment data from sensors or tools, if applicable. The result is better data capture and categorization. A seemingly simple problem with a fan motor can turn into a complex rewiring effort requiring team members to return to the office, order more materials, and search for—and possibly fly in—an expert on wiring. And this long, costly process may end up addressing a maintenance issue that is not nearly important to production as a long list of other maintenance tasks.
A better process leverages collaborative technology to help gather, prioritize, and track work orders, coordinate across multiple stakeholders, and share knowledge and expertise throughout the company. Inspectors can check and gather information using a digital template, reducing paperwork in maintenance inspections. Managers can view work orders more comprehensively, allowing them to better prioritize work based on relevance.
Once you can identify the technology and tools required to address pain points in the most inefficient processes, then you can enable further collaboration. But remember to prioritize tools that relate to overall strategic goals, rather than focusing on “sexy” technology solutions.
Embed collaboration into your overall digital transformation plan, now rather than continuing on in the way the company has operated since its beginning. By embedding digital collaboration-enabled processes into the enterprise’s overall strategies and technical roadmaps, companies can better achieve scale and avoid wasting time on ideas that aren’t likely to yield sustained impact. In the process, foster a culture that stresses the importance of digital. Incorporate frequent training sessions to ensure employees fully understand how to use technology and are excited about the changes.
Much collaboration is instituted among suppliers, owners, and subcontractors, not just internally. One technology approach to collaboration has been the growth of BIM (building information modeling). Here, as in so much of the digital environment, there are multiple choices for how the process is done. But standards are coming, and a promising one is OpenBIM, which can improve the design workflow where the current lack of interoperability forces some stakeholders to work with tools not ideal for their needs so they can collaborate with the architect, owner, or others involved in the project. Owners in particular can benefit because the BIM data is stored and used in an open file format, which does not require updating or depend on any single software company to access their data, making the data and the information derived from it, easily accessed now and in the future, regardless of technology supplier.
With remote workers, jobsite and field representatives, office and shop employees, all in need of data to better do their jobs—or, in many cases, do them at all—management has a challenge to focus resources on the best approach, then the best tools, to create a successful collaboration environment. Some additional things to consider involve not technology but human behavior.
Encourage questioning. A major benefit of collaboration is bringing many viewpoints and skillsets to bear on a problem. Involving people with a wide variety of skills in an effort to tackle novel and complicated problems can help the group collectively see potential risks or solutions that would elude individual experts — especially when they are encouraged to be inquisitive.
Watch out for data hoarding. The term is collaboration, not siloing. When data is critical to a job, people tend to want to maintain it in a silo, kept for personal use only. Whether teams or individuals, working together across boundaries make those silos of information break down.
Constantly reinforce the purpose of collaboration to improve the overall success of the company, to meet its goals, and to make everyone involved have more value to the company. A belief that their work has value leads people to think and act in a more collective fashion. Clearly understanding the business goals helps people see how their own experience and knowledge contributes to the complex needs of the business.
As mentioned before, find out how people want to get the information they need. When you are under stress, you’re more likely to retreat to your comfort zone. When the pressure builds, is the employee more likely to pick up the phone to commiserate and brainstorm with a colleague or to hole up and go it alone? Do you, as a manager, remember the employee’s reaction to stress? When everyone was in the office, on the jobsite, or in the yard, personal observation was possible. Now, with many working at home or remotely, you must depend on second-hand evaluations.
Adding more technology isn’t the answer; add the right technology, the pieces that improve everyone’s ability to collaborate, the ones that will actually get used, that makes the difference between collaboration and just communication.
Original Article: https://constructech.com/digital-collaboration-getting-more-from-less/
