Like many people I had an immediate reaction to Yahoo’s new policy on teleworking — huh?
I was a VP at Yahoo! and I experienced first hand some of the cultural and communication issues that the new policy is trying to address. How to foster informal, ad-hoc communications. How to enable the impromptu meeting that leads to a key insight, or creates a deeper relationship with a colleague. How to create a culture of collaboration.
I left Y! to found Sococo. Our mission is to solve these exact issues in a distributed world.
Everyone agrees that having co-workers together physically is the best. The problem of course is that the real world doesn’t work this way. We live in a globally distributed world. The right talent for a project can be anywhere. Customers, partners, and suppliers are all part of the equation of building great products and services – and they are located all over the world. Even if you are lucky enough to be physically with the folks you need to talk to, ever notice how big that corporate campus really is? The next building over might as well be across the ocean.
At Yahoo! every VP fought to keep their teams in the core campus Buildings A, B, or D. Having to move to Buildings E or F was tantamount to moving to Siberia – and those buildings are simply 50 feet away, across the street.
We need to get good at communicating from anywhere, at anytime. I think technology plays an important part.
Unfortunately, most of us have only been subject to first-generation tools that have served one purpose reasonably well: the planned, scheduled meeting. But these tools are completely useless when it comes to the informal and the ad-hoc.
Take audio, video or web conferencing for example – pick your UC (Unified Communication) tool. They are all transactional. Schedule the meeting in advance. Send out the #s and the pass codes. Setup the session (usually takes about 10 minutes). Have your meeting and adjourn.
The transactional overhead is simply too high for these tools to be useful for ad-hoc communications. How can I swing by a manager’s office for a 2 minute check-in when I have to dial a number or enter a code? What’s worse is that you have no visibility into what your colleagues are doing at any moment – so how can you possibly have a spontaneous interaction?
Our Team Space service co-locates teams regardless of physical location. Its always on. You see your colleagues – and see what they are doing right now. Who is busy, who is free, what meetings are happening right now, across my organization, that might be relevant to me. This “social” information inspires informal communication. It makes ALL the difference.
