Many companies are restarting office and asking employees back to the office. The main reason is the concern that employees have difficulties in having knowledge sharing experience with each other. For many companies this is necessary, it shares knowledge on the best practices and helps people who are struggling with their work. This is assumed to suffer when we work remote.
However, this can be implemented in remote teams with greater effectiveness. How managers share knowledge between frontline employees? There are always some top performers and what was stopping them from sharing knowledge organically? Can they successfully share their knowledge with others?
There are a few reasons why this sharing does not take place. Frontline teams are competitive people with no incentive to share information. They need to be given explicit incentives to make them share knowledge with others. Again, it could be that the lower performers do not want to demonstrate weakness or they want to find solutions themselves and this stops them from asking for help.
Managers must find ways to encourage team members to ask peers for help. Pair the employees and put them in managerial guided meetings. One way is to provide each person with a self-reflective worksheet to identify and document previous weeks challenges and triumphs before the meeting. The employee pairs are then asked to interview each other, record responses on the same sheet opposite their observations. This encouraged the members to open up, share their problems, exchange both actionable advice and encouragement.
This leads to members performing better in their work and its effect continues even after the guided meetings concluded. The biggest beneficiary was those who were paired with the high performers who could improve their productivity by sharing their challenges and seeking solutions from the high performers.
This indicates very strongly that social frictions, awkwardness, the embarrassment of asking a high performer for help are responsible for the lack of information sharing. It also indicates clearly that co-worker interactions can improve the individual and overall performance especially when they are thoughtful and intentional.
In a virtual environment, this may become increasingly difficult not knowing when the remote colleague would be available to discuss and answer questions making it more threatening to seek help.
Organisations have quickly adopted new technologies to manage core needs. Substituting technology for physical presence introduces a new layer of friction but at the same time, it has reduced the cost of guided meetings described above. Many of the digital tools in use today offer an equivalent tool to have something similar to guided meetings.
Microsoft Teams has recently introduced Icebreaker, finding free time in employee calendars and booking virtual meetings within and outside. This helps employees to be more connected, energising, be more emphatic and effective.
In future, newer digital tools can be leveraged to foster social connections in the workplace, boosting morale and productivity.
Research: How Virtual Teams Can Better Share Knowledge
by Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert,
and Christopher Stanton HBR 2020/11
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