Despite many tech companies announcing that workers could remain remote going forward, leaders like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon have called employees back to the office. Their concern about remote work largely centers on difficulties co-workers have sharing knowledge and experience with each other. For many companies, this kind of sharing is valuable — it disseminates best practices and enables those who are fumbling to seek help. It’s often taken as an article of faith that it suffers when employees work remotely. But we’ve found successful practices to facilitate this kind of sharing that can be ported, possibly with greater efficacy, to remote teams.
In a recent experiment, we set out to test how managers can facilitate knowledge sharing between coworkers and to quantify the bottom-line impact. We partnered with an inbound sales call center that collects personalized sales productivity data for each of their salespeople. Our study was motivated by the fact that, despite tremendous technological advancements in the workplace, the Pareto Principle (20% of workers generate 80% of revenue) persists to this day. What we wanted to know was: If top performers have developed best practices, could they successfully share that knowledge with others? And if so, what was stopping them from sharing it organically?
There are a few plausible explanations for why top performers’ insights don’t spread to the whole team. One view — which might be an economist’s knee-jerk reaction — is that salespeople are competitive creatures with no incentive to share information. According to this perspective, companies need to give high performers explicit incentives to get them to share what they know. An alternate view maintains that humans are social creatures who will eagerly share their knowledge and experience when asked; if that’s the case, then some kind of social barrier keeps lower-performing coworkers from asking peers for help. Perhaps they don’t want to demonstrate weakness, or they want to figure out the job on their own. Either way, managers need to find ways to encourage them to ask peers for help. It’s possible that both explanations have merit, which implies that the group needs both incentives to share and paths for seeking help.
To figure out how companies could best leverage their top performers’ knowledge, we designed tests to distinguish between these hypothesized obstacles to knowledge sharing. We randomly paired over 600 salespeople together and then put the pairs into four different groups, with each group receiving a different four-week-long managerial intervention or treatment — guided meetings, explicit incentives, a simultaneous application of both treatments, and a control. Each treatment targeted either a single hypothesized barrier or a combination of possible obstacles. To measure the bottom-line efficacy, it was important to find a setting where many workers perform identical, albeit independent, tasks and to have granular, worker-level performance measures, making our inbound sales call center an ideal setting for studying knowledge sharing practices.
Structure Outperforms Incentives
One managerial intervention vastly outperformed the others: the guided meetings used in the first group. In this treatment, management booked meetings in paired employees’ schedules and provided each salesperson with a self-reflective worksheet intended to surface the prior week’s challenges and triumphs in preparation for the meeting. Employee pairs were then asked to interview and record their partner’s worksheet responses on the other side of their own sheet. Armed with completed worksheets and a charter to interview their partner, management opened the door for partners to share their problems and exchange both actionable advice and encouragement.
To test the alternate, neo-classical economic view that incentives reign supreme, the second group of randomly paired employees were provided incentives for them to grow their collective sales relative to their combined, individual-sales history — the idea being that explicit goal alignment would precipitate knowledge sharing. Managers did not direct workers in this group to meet or to help one another, relying instead on self-management of workers with aligned goals.
A third group of workers received both the pair-performance incentives and the guided-meetings treatment, allowing us to test whether managers need a tandem focus on both breaking down social barriers and providing incentives. Comparing these three groups against a hold-out or control group reveals a striking difference in efficacy between the guided-meetings approach and the incentives-oriented one.
- Workers who participated in guided meetings with a randomly chosen partner realized a 24% increase in sales productivity, on average, during the four weeks that the meetings took place. Worker pairs who only received explicit incentives saw a 13% lift in performance during these same weeks.
- The increase in productivity for those in guided meetings persisted well after the formal meetings ended. Several months later, workers who participated in these meetings averaged 18% higher sales production than those who had not. By contrast, the group that received incentives alone had no long-term gains.
- The greatest beneficiaries of the meetings were employees who had been paired with high-performing peers. The findings in the study suggest that discussing one’s job-specific problems with high performers, in just a single meeting, can have long-lasting performance implications. The key is for management to create opportunities — and directives — to ensure that such interactions occur in the first place.
- Over the 24 weeks that we tracked sales data, the firm realized a 7-figure increase in revenue among those who participated in the guided meetings. The implementation cost was less than $15,000.
The results suggest that the incentive program had little impact. The third group of workers (those who received both managerial interventions) also increased their sales performance; however, the outcomes closely tracked those of the employees who participated in guided meetings alone. Combined, the results strongly suggest that social frictions — say, the potential awkwardness or embarrassment from asking a high performing co-worker to meet and discuss their strategies — were responsible for the lack of information sharing at the partner firm. Put simply, coworker interactions can improve the long, lower tail of under-performers — provided such interactions are both thoughtful and intentional.
While our study took place in two physical campuses ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, the same underlying principles are present in virtual workplaces; in fact, they may be more powerful. As many of us have come to realize, it can be incredibly difficult to discern when remote colleagues might be available to answer questions or merely to catch up, making it that much more intimidating to reach out for help. Organizations of all sizes have quickly embraced new technologies to deliver core business needs during the pandemic, and while the substitution of technology for physical presence has introduced a new layer of social frictions, it has also lowered the adoption cost of the guided meetings described above.
Consider this: the very same manual, managerial interventions introduced in our partner firm’s campuses can now be automatically accomplished with Microsoft’s recently released Icebreaker-Bot for Microsoft Teams. (The authors were not involved in developing the bot.) By finding time in employee calendars and booking virtual meetings both at Microsoft and with some of their customers, the application has “made a huge difference in helping teams be more connected, inclusive, energizing, welcoming of new and remote teammates, and ultimately more emphatic and effective,” says Sid Uppal, Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft and creator of the Icebreaker bot’s predecessor, Meetuply bot. Future research is needed to isolate the benefits associated with virtual human resource management, but combining our results with the Microsoft team’s experience to date, we are incredibly optimistic about the future of leveraging digital tools to foster social connections in the workplace, lifting morale and productivity along the way.
"share" - Google News
November 02, 2020 at 09:07PM
https://ift.tt/3oSGdDw
Research: How Virtual Teams Can Better Share Knowledge - Harvard Business Review
"share" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2VXQsKd
https://ift.tt/3d2Wjnc
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Research: How Virtual Teams Can Better Share Knowledge - Harvard Business Review"
Post a Comment