I’m lucky to work in an organization that has tech-savvy, trend-aware leadership. The assistant director has personally encouraged me to engage in social media, in particular, to connect to a larger knowledge-sharing body, beyond our workplace. This assistant director has fostered an atmosphere where the employees are trusted by management to do their jobs well and supported when they want to initiate changes to workflows or policies, for instance. The director herself has a philosophy that happy employees are more satisfied and do better work; and this means that she has put policies in place that allow for flexibility and creativity. Plus, she supplied free coffee and pop!
Hutch Carpenter, in his blog post, “Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does” (2009), talks about how culture maybe isn’t the big potential barrier against change in the workplace that everyone makes it out to be. If management dictates that a change will take place, employees will fall in line. So, if administration at my workplace let us know that we would now be using Basecamp for all our special team projects, we would use it. Admin would create training documents and set up sessions for us to learn how to use the new system, and a plan would be developed for the stages of implementation. Admin would communicate the phases to staff, ensure those that needed to be trained were, and evaluate the process during the roll-out period.
This has been my experience in my organization when technological changes are afoot. The people in management have had a vision for a better way to do business, they’ve made a plan, and made it happen. This doesn’t seem to be what Carpenter means by “organizational culture”--he seems to imply that culture is all about employees’ attitudes to change (or maybe he’s merely just sick of the term...he does make that clear)! But to me, the vision and mission of management has been to grow and improve our organization, and I have learned--and adapted--from the example of my “superiors”. The culture at my workplace has been envisioned by management, and they have modeled it and made it happen.
I have learned a lot about how to encourage change from my supervisors and bosses at work. For instance, in one of our latest “improvements” which was adding the BiblioCommons interface to our regional library system OPAC, I’ve seen them gently support and encourage their staff, deal with conflict gently and efficiently, work through strategic plans and plans of service, and praise the staff as a whole for accomplishments and awards. They employ the elements that Carpenter suggests for new-tech adoption: outline defined “in-the-flow” use cases, engage enthusiastic evangelists, broadcast deployment & verbal support from management, and establish evaluation frameworks. We are in the business of knowledge management and sharing, and that happens best when people feel enabled to share, communicate, and collaborate openly and safely with the tools chosen by those in charge.
I think your work environment fully understands how to implement collaborative tools, and provides a feeling of empowerment to its employees through communication, effective training, and excellent leadership. I somehow feel that libraries would be more conducive to collaborative efforts, as we all know that not one person knows everything. We are dependent upon each other for information sharing, as it is the business we are in. Libraries are probably some of the best examples for collaborative tools in the workplace. Great points!
ReplyDeleteI would argue that you and Carpenter are both talking about the same thing when you mention the culture of an organization. The primary difference is that Carpenter focuses on a negative culture that effects collaboration whereas your experience has been a positive one where management knows what needs to happen and ensures that it does.
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