The verb “to collaborate” is defined in dictionaries as willingly assisting an enemy occupation force in one’s own country. For today’s senior managers, while the concept of collaboration certainly includes willingly assisting others, they would hardly like their executives to see “enemy” as lying within the company’s own walls.
Even so, internal enmity can exist. Binna Kandola, co-founder of Pearn Kandola, a firm of occupational psychologists, says teams or individuals may often compete rather than co-operate with one another. “If you make the culture too competitive, people will start looking after their own interests,” he says. “You need a degree of competition but it needs to be kept at a low level – the real competition is outside.”
Even if they are not competing, there is a danger that different business units across the world may be working independently of each other, so not harnessing the collective skills and resources of the group as a whole.
One company in the midst of reversing this trend is Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods group. Traditionally, the group relied on a model that emphasised the strength of local knowledge, distribution and networks of companies such as Hindustan Lever in India. Unilever is now undergoing an extensive corporate re-organisation through which it aims to move away from this model.
“For us it’s a big shift,” says Sandy Ogg, the company’s head of human resources. “We’re moving from the multi-local, multinational model and from a position of having strong, independent, decentralised operations to still having the local touch and feel but being interdependent. Our business model doesn’t work if we don’t collaborate.”
In achieving this collaboration, one of the most powerful cards in Mr Ogg’s hand is the performance management system through which rewards can be focused towards team-based activities, as opposed to individual achievements. “We have been experimenting with getting the right level of ownership,” says Mr Ogg. “So the rewards have a line of sight and we keep the local strength but also promote team building.”
At BT, which has also been undergoing an extensive internal reorganisation, the rewards system is closely focused on customers. BT’s first step was to implement a new way of measuring performance, unifying the language used to describe objectives and achievements and introducing the concepts such as a “calendar of commitments” and a “calendar of demands” whereby, at the end of certain periods, assessments are made as to what has been achieved and what lessons have been learned. In all these assessments, the measurement is focused around what has been delivered to BT’s customers.
“We had people from different countries, backgrounds, disciplines and ages – and diversity is what you want to encourage. But it’s hard to align everyone,” says Dina Matta, BT’s group transformation director. “But it’s easier to collaborate when you have a shared goal and customer focus.”
While companies such as Unilever and BT are busy transforming their internal structures, Louise Fletcher, a partner at Booz Allen Hamilton, the consultants, argues that even seemingly insignificant things such as office layout can be turned into effective tools for encouraging greater employee interaction.
“Physical proximity leads to better team behaviour,” she says. “And collaborative-style working is aided by an open-plan environment where there are no long corridors, or different buildings. Whether it’s an office door or a ten-minute taxi ride across town, that is a barrier.”
Even technology can erect barriers when electronic communications are overly relied on in situations where a conversation with a colleague would be preferable. “Relationships are formed between individuals, not between e-mail inboxes,” says Ms Fletcher. Moreover, for companies to work efficiently, IT systems need to be able to talk to each other.
At BT, which at one time had more than 3,000 systems, an important part of the reorganisation has been to introduce one IT system across the entire company.
Mr Ogg points to the kind of problems that can arise from having multiple IT platforms. “You might have a strong set of systems designed and built for Hindustan Lever that doesn’t connect effectively on a global basis,” he says. “If you want to know the total cost of HR, you have to ask for a spreadsheet from every country.”
When it comes to teams working virtually across different locations, new communications technologies are greatly enhancing collaborative efficiency. And in many ways, the technological landscape within corporations is reflecting that of the world outside, as teams rely increasingly heavily on wikis – communal web pages – and blogs to exchange knowledge.
At IBM, BluePages – part of the company’s internal intranet – enables staff to create their own profile page to describe their expertise, the teams with which they interact, their reporting chain, how to locate them and which time zone they operate in.
For many companies, unified communications – which brings together different forms of communications such e-mail, instant messaging and voice and data applications – are helping improve responsiveness, particularly when combined with presence-aware technology, which indicates whether users are “online” or not.
Some 79 per cent of companies recently surveyed by Nemertes Research, which assesses the business value of emerging technologies, were using or planning to deploy unified communications in the next two years.
However, while technology provides the tools with which executives can communicate and share knowledge more effectively, experts stress the need to remember that gadgets and gizmos can only support human behaviour, not replace it.
Management techniques can help. Putting together cross-functional teams can be particularly effective. Ms Matta points to the example of how BT put together a small pilot team of executives from different disciplines to solve a looming issue relating to data-carrying MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) networks. As a result, a process that once took six days was cut back to six minutes.
“We were able to do that because we took a completely different approach to working together,” she says. “And now we’re going to use this approach across BT.”
In addition, Ms Matta stresses that fostering informal networks can be as effective as forming cross-functional teams. At BT, funding and coaching is provided to support self-selecting groups such as women’s networks. The good news for companies is that evidence is emerging that executives are starting to recognise the need to interact and collaborate more effectively.
A report published in June by the Chartered Management Institute has found that UK business leaders are turning away from politically driven “turf wars”.
The report, published in conjunction with Warwick Business School, found that 59 per cent of respondents believed that good political skills involved building alliances.
“In order to operate in a much more complex environment, collaboration and partnership are becoming real issues for organisations,” says Jo Causon, director of marketing and corporate affairs at the Institute of Management.
“That is particularly important because, if you think about the organisations we work in, they will never have enough resources,” she adds. “So the challenge for organisations is making that resource work more effectively, and that’s about people.”
