Are people already rewarded for collaboration?

One of the most interesting and debated topics in my line of work is how to reward people for collaboration and/or participation in Web 2.0 efforts. This topic is worth books in itself (and many, many individual posts that perhaps I will write in the future…), but I want to explore whether this whole problem could be avoided. This is crazy, you say: you have to incentivize workers in order to actually get them to collaborate or use Web 2.0 technology. Or you have to write it into their performance objectives.

Or do you? My theory, I submit to you, is that this is unnecessary. Why? Because collaboration is a means, not an end.

Craziness?

You have to incentivize collaboration and participation in Web 2.0 in order to get people to play, right? NSFMF! There’s gotta be a benefit in collaboration that is self-evident to the people participating. Blogging, using a wiki, or social bookmarking may be inherently public/crowd-sourcing activities; but participation by good will is not sustainable. There has to be a return on investment. This is why collaboration by mandate often doesn’t work well, because people see it as “another duty as assigned” and more work, rather than part of their actual job.

Perhaps think of it this way: prior to Web 2.0 technologies, did you really write into your performance reviews that you drafted products in Microsoft Word or worked with your colleagues via email, instant, messaging, and face-to-face meetings? Not so much. Likewise, a communications professional shouldn’t get rewarded for blogging; he should get rewarded for communicating. An intelligence analyst shouldn’t rewarded for making wiki edits; she should get rewarded for high quality intelligence analysis. Collaboration and Web 2.0 are just two ways that help her get to a higher level analysis. Collaboration is a skill, like writing, research, and presenting: it’s to be developed and honed.

The Ends Justify the Means

Take a moment to think about why you work with others. Ideally, it’s not to check a box. It’s to search for new ideas, get sanity checks, and find different points of view on my work and thoughts (or provide such services out of reciprocity or sense of mission). I do these things because I want to produce something that’s better than I could do alone. No matter how smart I [may think I] am, I’m not smarter than my network. Let’s face it, nobody’s smarter than all of their network. Isn’t that the whole point of this Web 2.0 thing?

Collaboration is an input. It is one of many. At the end of the day, people in knowledge work are rewarded (in a perfect world) for the quality outputs. The point of this entry is not to say that collaboration shouldn’t be rewarded: it’s that collaboration is already rewarded. It’s rewarded because the final output should be that much better if you’ve collaborated with outside peers.*

*Granted, this is of course dependent on having managers who are able to account for said improvement in quality of output…

What You Can and Can’t Learn from an Open Collaborative Workspace

One of my favorite parts about open collaborative tools is the ability to observe the evolution of collaborative projects.  Platforms like wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and even discussion forums enable any observer to come in and view the history of any given article, compare versions, and review the progress and process of that page.  But at the same time, it’s important to remember that there’s a lot of work that goes into a collaborative projects that can’t be gleaned from simply watching the changes to wiki pages. So in the name of getting my thoughts down, here’s an incomplete list of some things that you can learn and what you cannot learn from outsider observation (I see some follow up posts to this topic in the future).

What You Can Learn

Who’s literally made the change to the page: You can certainly measure raw, quantitative participation: i.e. Justin has made 20 edits or has posted 7 blogs or has tagged 14 items with 24 tags.  This has a place in evaluating collaborative projects, obviously: in most cases of open collaboration, more participation is better.

You can tell literally what–qualitatively–a user has contributed to the project. The transparency of contributions means that you can see exactly who and when an idea or contribution was made.  So I can see that Justin added 2 paragraphs of content to the wiki page and 3 blogs worth of ideas today.  While this in isoluation is not really important, these contributions can be qualitatively evaluated.  Likewise, you can see who is playing a more facilitative or leadership role in projects.

Social Networks. Certain elements of social networks become visible when you look at collaborative projects in open environments.  Social bookmarks reveal who is tagging content for a project, thereby linking those participants.  Blogs with comments clearly link people to their thoughts, but also to the people behind the contributions at some level.  Similarly, you can discern the strength and weakness of links by looking at actual participation.

What you can’t learn

However, there’s a lot of work that goes into collaborative projects that goes unnoticed and undetected, even in an open collaborative environment.

Triggers, positive and negative.  One of the most interesting aspects of projects that is simply not visible to the outside are triggers for participation.  You may be able to literally see that a person who should be a prolific contributor only contributed once to a big collaborative project; however, what’s not visible is why they haven’t paricipated.  Technical hurdles? Lost interest? Managerial interference? Too Busy?

Rallying. As I’ve said before, collaborative projects require a good amount of leg work behind the scene in order to get off the ground.  So while some of these are visible–blogs, announcements in the wiki, etc–many are not.  Without actually engaging the participants of the projects, you cannot, as an outsider, understand the work done behind the scenes.  So I can’t tell that the project’s leader called colleagues on the phone from 5 different organizations, visited 3 seperate offices to build the network, and spent 3 hours talking to leaders face to face.  All of this activity is important to the success of a project, but it’s not really visible from the outside.

Ghosting Participants. Technology is changing quickly and some folks just can’t or don’t want to keep up with the latest developments and newest tools.  So, from my experience, many times there ends up being one “stuckee” from an organization or office that ends up doing the lionshare of the actual posting of information.  In this case, what looks to be a single prolific contributer may be 5 people’s contributions via a single point of entry.

The Key

As a consultant, nothing’s asked of me more than to provide best practices.  And the best practice for advising clients is that quite simply, you have to look beyond the numbers so that you can actually tell the story of the collaboration. Evaluating and understanding a collaborative success or failure not only takes leg work to track participation and contributions, but also to talk to the contituency, both active and non.