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Tag: social media at work

I don’t need to see my boss to communicate

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

While I waited for the kind HR body to take me off to lunch, I doodled away on my nice clean notepad thinking how much organizations have changed since I first studied management.

Classical organizational structure

Eight soldiers march across the country side careful to walk in a straight line so they don’t shoot each other.  They are also spread out so that no more than one soldier is hit in a burst of machine gun fire from the opposition.

And they are limited to 8, because only four either side of their leader can hear his voice and see his hand commands.

The army makes a choice to use ‘voice and hand’ to communicate and that, amongst other factors, constrains their organizational structure.

Social media is a choice and available now

Now we have social media tools available to us to communicate, our choices have broadened.  We can communicate with people out of sight and sound.  We can communicate with more people too.

If I knew more military history, I would know more about how communication has changed warfare through the ages.  I am sure the changes were huge.  And they will be huge in business with the arrival of social media.

Well lunch calls so I will think about this more later.  I wonder what face-to-face communication is like in Xoozya.

Communication channels constrain structure

How does you organization communicate and coordinate?

Have you adopted social media?

How do the physical choices you’ve made determine your structure?

Does your structure allow you to move faster than your opposition?  What structures do they use?

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Thank you for reading and do come back to here what happened at lunch.

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Conversations don’t scale: pick my team

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

Exploring my dashboard

The HR body went about her business, leaving me with my pencil & pad and flask of coffee to spend the next two hours before lunch exploring my dashboard.  378 hits on my CV already.  I started to look.

Open “CV”

Yes, the CEO has looked at my CV and is interested in a project I did, wow, almost 20 year’s ago.  And he is not the only one.  Ah, but this guy is interested in something else.  And this one in something else.  I might be hard pressed to find two people interested in the same thing.  So what do I do?  How do I respond?  What do I say?  What is expected of me?  What is my objective? Let me look closer.

Dashboards as open as Twitter

Well, other people can see my dashboard and I can see thei’s.  Let me look at the CEO’s profile.  Oh, how interesting.  He is following 3452 people.  He must follow everyone.  But he only as 26 followers.  Hmmph – Twitter wouldn’t like that.

Who is following the CEO and more importantly why isn’t everyone else?

I’m looking down his list of followers now.  That seems to be the PA.  That seems to be the communications secretary.  Wow, that’s his wife, and his daughter.  The Financial Director, the Chairman of the Board, the Marketing Director, the odd intern.

Why don’t other people follow him?

Follow Town Hall rather than CEO

Let me look at someone else.  Let me look for a well know name. This will do.  Hmm, quite a few followers and byt not following many people.  Ah, the CEO conundrum explained.  Following “Town Hall” – and yes 3725 people follow Town Hall.  Let’s put that on a To Do list.  Follow Town Hall because everyone follows Town Hall.

  • OK I think I am getting this.  I need to follow people whose movements I need to know about.
  • Then I probably need a sprinkling of people throughout the company to give me some idea of what is happening across the piece.

That’s enough learning for the moment.

Conversations don’t scale

  1. How do you decide who fits into your ‘Dunbar’ groups?  Who are your intimates (who probably are not part of your work group)?
  2. Who is in your hunting band of 30 and how do you know where they are and what they are doing?
  3. Who is in your tribe of around 150 and how do you know enough about what they are doing without being overwhelmed by detail?
  4. And how do you keep abreast of the greater mass of of army and world around you?

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“Open CV” and Friending at Work

Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)

Choosing an avatar to show my noobe status

The HR person was as good as her word.  My first task was to choose an avatar.  I thought for moment that I should choose carefully.

Then I realized that I had been so focused on finding out what the company wanted from me, I hadn’t been thinking about what I brought to the company and I couldn’t express my identity quickly.  So in the interests of time, I picked randomly.  I’m going to change the avatar later anyway.

It was a good choice.  When we looked at the ‘dashboard’ I would use, all the ten basic avatars have ‘noobe’ under each.  Good, so everyone knows I am a noobe.

Breakfast was good and very welcome as I had a long commute and had left home early to allow for delays.  Real coffee, fruit, fresh croissant.  And it goes down on the tab too.  So no need to fuss with cash or card.

Dashboard

After breakfast, we had a look at the standard dashboard that is at the heart of Xoozya’s communication system.

My avatar was already up, waiting for me.  So was my full name.  What I needed to do was choose a screen name, which I could also change later, and choose a strong password.  And the HR Advisor thoughtfully provided a little A6 ring bound notebook for me to keep notes.

The main tabs on the dashboard are similar to Facebook.  Home page which had a heap of stuff already on it, email, and profile.  And three more tabs: blog, CV, status.

Blog, I know – and there was a basic post saying “Hello, World”. Status was obvious at at glance.  It said April 1: Noobe Day 1.

CV was unexpected.  The CV I had used when I applied for the job was loaded up.  At the top of the page were links to my Linkedin Profile, Xing Profile, external blog, Facebook page with links for 30 external sources in all.

Down the right hand side was something more unexpected.   Nope, not adverts, but lists for “friend requests”.

Each request look like a tweet starting like @ceo Saw you facilitated a corporate strategy 10 years ago.  Can you make a note to tell me about it next time you see me?

There were dozens of these.  People all over the company had been going through my CV before I arrived!

What’s more, when I followed the tweet, I went through to their dasboard and their CV.

It seems I had 378 hits on my dashboard before I started work and people spent a total of 85 hours checking me out – and that’s before they followed the links outside.

Well that’s a heap of messages to answer.

And with that the HR body, put a flask of coffee, a clean A4 pad and a pencil pen on the desk and left with a few words of advice.  “Look around until I come back to find you for lunch at noon and maybe delay replying to anyone till you have a picture of who is who and what is what.”

Open CV and Friending People at Work

1   Would you like it if people knew you were coming and had looked through your CV carefully before you arrived?

2   Would you like it if people had sent you tweet-like messages pointing out which aspects of your previous work are interesting to them?

3  Do you like the idea of looking freely at other people’s CV’s (including the CEO’s)?

I would love feedback on this post.  If you liked it, would you do 1 of these 5 things, please?

  • Comment
  • Bookmark the article with DeliciousStumble, Digg or any other service
  • Subscribe using the RSS feed (top right)
  • Subscribe to me in your feedreeder
  • Blog about the post and give me some ‘link love’ by attach this url to the words Xoozya OR Jo Jordan OR flowingmotion

WordPress kindly tells me when you have done that and I’ll be over to read what you have written!

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