5 bad and good reasons to measure collaboration

Collaboration projects are often political, conceptual and difficult to discuss in the corporate world because it deals with human behaviour. Collaboration usage is an illustration human behaviour in the digital.

The purpose of these bad reasons is to exclude some of the common discussions arising when analysing collaboration which will not help you to boost collaboration in the long run:

#1 Analytics is trend to follow!

#2 Tracking bad behaviour : negative contributions, sharing sensitive document to external users, creation of groups dedicated to leasure…

#3 Tracking volume of documents

#4 Compare your own collaboration to your colleagues

#1 audit the collaboration with tangible information

Whether your company starts a collaboration project with some existing experience, or has started without planning, auditing with an analytics tool is useful to understand how your company collaborates.

An effective audit will get you insights to find out :

> which is the favourite tool of the company, emails, skype, Yammer, SharePoint, Teams?

> who are the users, not only the exhaustive list, but identify if they are monthly or daily users, working on a particular project from which which department or country…

> which content is popular and driving traffic

> within Yammer groups and SharePoint sites, what are features mostly used, what are the users types (based on any criteria)

> identify why the collaboration is more intense for some groups than others (project, international teams, small or big groups)

From this audit you will get effective information highlighting the positive and the negative outcomes. It empowers you to detect the opportunities or obstacles to deploy the collaboration tools.

#2 Select the KPIs corresponding to your company’s objectives

Your company has purchased Office 365 licences and your team is in charge of deploying it.

The first easy step is to set quantitative objectives to measure the number of connected users and quantity of activities occuring in the plateform and it will quickly show the activity growth. However it won’t be enough for the long run to set generic volume objectives.

The rolling out of such a platform always experience a slow on-boarding process then a quick viral enthousiam generating a pick of connections (generated by corporate communications or events). But unfotunately the users often end up being lost, because they don’t know why they are using it and the activity will inevitably decrease.

To avoid observing this standard adoption process, you will need to set long term objectives to reach and define the corresponding action plan.

We often hear the “digital transformation” is the main goal of collaboration tool, but what does it mean? In other words, from business strategy of the company you will need to specify how using the digital tools will help a team/department to work toward the strategy.

If the board is asking to develop the customer experience, this can be translated by developping the social selling skills of the sale team or improve the customer support. For this 2 use cases, you could create groups in Yammer : for the first case to train the sales team to social selling and the second case to accelerate problem solving by including technical team and the support team in the same group of discussions.

Once you know what you are trying to attempt, and accordingly set use case it will be easy to follow the KPIs and compare them to the result of the team. For example, will the number of problem solved per day increase since the Yammer group exists?

#3 Customize the training and communication plan

Once you have set the objectives and understand the different type of collaboration profiles in your company, you can taylor a specific training plan. The actions will be more efficient if targeted to specific audience with dedicated content.

Often, when launching a new platform only one training program is assign to everyone explaining it will improve your efficiency and collaboration. Hm!

So on top of this generic training, if you design training program for each profile type to show them more specifically how it will accelerate their daily tasks, the users will be more likely to integrate the tools on a regular basis.

#4 Follow the changes from the start

In most project, the objective implies a transformation from an existing situation to a new situation, meaning it generates changes in collaboration behaviours. Measuring the change is the way to evaluate the rolling out, from the start of the project to notice progression from very low to medium after few months. If you are considering using a reporting tool, it might be because you have already spot a disfonction but keep in mind that a reporting tool is not a solution in itself.

If you measure collaboration in the early stages of a digital transformation program, you will allow you to follow the changes and learn if your action plan is efficient. That way your reporting will be clear for the management who needs to see results while injecting time and money into the project.

#5 Provide reports to your management to illustrate the ROI with examples

Now that you know why you are rolling out the collaboration tools and how to help users to take benefit from it, you can provide tangible example of ROI to your manager.

Indeed, reporting tools are common and they are powerful only if you have a story to tell to illustrate the KPIs.

With the story of your users it possible to explain a the KPIs the outcomes of the transformation process.

When presenting a dashboard to your management, keep in mind to explain the context, the training and communication plan and the positive outcomes.

Finally, don’t forget to set new objectives to ajust with the reality and the adoption standard process.