5 tips for building a collaborative community
Posted by Tad Johnson - Apr 17th, 2008 at 15:04I wrote the article below for an internal blog at work. Once I wrote it, I realized that it was pretty much applicable anywhere so I thought I’d try to get a little more press. I’m also posting it over at tadfad.com.
Collaboration is all the rage in Corporate America this year. With a globally dispersed workforce, much of this collaboration is taking place online. Web sites, wikis, blogs, forums, and even full collaboration suites are emerging on the scene.
Are you looking to tap into this collaborative energy? Want to form an online presence for your global team? Here are 5 tips that will help grow your collaborative community.
1. Get Personal. The web is often criticized for being too impersonal–but it need not be so. Most (all?) online collaboration tools have the ability to include small photos (sometimes called avatars) for users. Encourage everyone on the tool to add their own photo. We’re visual, personal creatures by nature so let’s make it personal! For example, there’s my photo. Doesn’t that feel more personal?
2. Respond. If you are trying to start a collaboration community online, you have the burden to check for updates frequently and respond as much as possible. This is especially critical during the first days/weeks as users are testing it out. If a colleague is going to take the time to pose a question or comment, you need to respond in kind. Yes, this is a time investment. Yes, it will pay off.
3. Reward/Recognize. Participating in collaboration communities is not a mandatory task. It’s not critical to our day-to-day jobs. Yet it has the potential to yield great results in improved efficiency and outcomes for businesses. The early adopters who are willing to stick their necks out and participate should be recognized and rewarded. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, and it can be done entirely within the online community, but some sort of recognition is key. As an example of free, easy recognition, Flickr.com (a photo sharing site) allows users to give each other virtual awards for outstanding photos.
4. Set some goals. Users will be encouraged to participate if they know why they’re participating. Set some goals for your collaborative community, making sure they’re time based, measurable, and significant. As an easy example, you could set the goal to reduce team emails by 20% through the use of an online collaboration community.
5. Show progress. Once you’ve set some goals above, track them and communicate progress. We all love trackers and metrics, so this should be second nature. Give your collaboration partners a sense of accomplishment by charting the groups successes (and/or failures).
Don’t be discouraged if your first attempt at collaboration is not wildly successful. As we all become more comfortable and aware of the opportunities of online communities we will work our way up the capability ladder. These tips will help you start that climb.
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This post reminded me of a new school program I recently learned about. A few teachers of mine just returned from visiting New Technology High School in Napa, CA (http://www.newtechhigh.org/Website2007/about-NTHS.html), where they toured the facilities and spoke with the students involved in a radical project-based learning curriculum.
Rules are minimal, technology is ubiquitous, and collaboration dominated the classrooms; team work strategies and communicative abilities are the primary skill sets students graduate with, far more prepared to enter the ‘real world’ than most high school youth.
Your 5-step guide to collaboration is an excellent resource for any graduate who was not fortunate to attend such a school as New Tech (and with a graduating class of 100 students, that would be almost all of us!). I really hope that this picks up some momentum… it appears to be mash-up of some of the best ideas shared by entrepreneurs like Seth Godin and books like ‘Wikinomics’. I like it, keep up the good work.
Comment by Glenn — April 17, 2008 #