WebEx Interactions: A Web Collaboration Blog by WebEx

Resolve to Help Your Co-workers Stay Organized in 2008

Most businesses have wrapped up setting 2008 business goals and the methods and plans necessary to achieve those goals. For those that will spend the last couple weeks of the year wrapping up expenses and planning purchases, this time of year can also provide an opportunity to think about new work habits that will help reach those goals.

Last year Butler Group authored a study on worker time spent searching for information. Per this Network World article about the study, Butler Group found the cost of searching for information in lost productivity to be equivalent to 10% of a worker's salary.  So reflecting on the day-to-day reality of 2007 can help identify and put in perspective where workers burn more cycles than they need to, including time spent searching in email for files coworkers sent.

Most people would find a good deal of that wasted time could be recovered if they had good tools at hand to help to stay on the same page. But even organizational tools that allow teams to share documents, such as WebOffice, aren't enough. Workers need the will as well as the way, and that's the second part of a resolution to be more organized in 2008. Managers and team members need to work together to stay organized.

With one of the teams I contribute to, when any of the team members author content for a project, we store it on our WebOffice. When I report my weekly accomplishments to that team's manager, I have to include links to the documents I've created. If I don't include the link, I can't claim credit.

This requirement reinforces the habit of putting knowledge in a central, easily accessible place accompanied with a good description of the document. It doesn't seem onerous knowing that coworkers can easily access the information and won't spend time on fruitless searches or recreating the content. The team actually polices itself, when contributors send an email that includes content worth sharing, other team members ask the sender to post it online.

The real value is in knowing that when everyone contributes in this effort, it ultimately saves you time. So the next time someone emails around a file for everyone to look at, have that person post it in a shared place and send the link instead. Then it is up to you to start thinking the first place to look is the shared resource, and not your inbox.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

The weather outside is frightful...and the commute isn't much better

The Boston area experienced the first major snow storm of the season today. The qualifier for major would be upward of foot of snow, winter advisories being issued, and evening events, such as classes, being canceled by early afternoon. Basically, the metro Boston area is expecting around a foot of snow to fall in 7 hours.

A further complication is that it began snowing just around noon, which is less than ideal since most people have already gotten to the office and settled in before it started snowing. Companies decided to start letting workers leave early, but after an inch or two of snow had already fallen, leading to gridlock. Schools let out early, so parents, now stuck in gridlock, couldn't get to their children's schools to pick the kids up. The gridlock also kept snow removal crews from being able to adequately plow and sand.

These kinds of storms should prompt companies to be proactive about telecommuting and telework. That is, more people telecommuting all day would have resulted in less gridlock and more work being done, since those workers would have been at their PCs instead of sitting in traffic all afternoon. The trip to pick up the kids at school is a lot easier and less stressful when the school is just a couple of miles away. My day consisted of a web conference this morning with folks in France, New York, Holland, Massachusetts and California, so being in an office park wasn't a prerequisite for working. Plus, I've been available through instant messaging all day.

We are expecting another mid-day storm this Saturday, only this will be a Nor'easter mixing rain, sleet, snow and high winds. A Saturday storm is more likely to disrupt holiday plans than work plans, but people even use web conferencing for social occasions, such as weddings and bed time stories.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Collaborating on the Future

Thomas Friedman's column (may require login) posted yesterday on the New York Times website touches on innovative approaches to addressing energy needs and usage. Toward the end of the column he mentions the Vehicle Design Summit, an enterprise managed by MIT students with the goal of developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle within three years:

Then I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

A couple other points of reference about VDS, they have about 1,000 members globally and the project has goals outside creating the vehicle, such as giving students a framework in which they can collaborate in the future. In the global economy, the ability to work across geographies and boundaries continue to grow in importance. You can find out a some more about the VDS in members' own words in the fourth video on this page, entitled "Essential to our workflow." One of the collaborative tools the team uses is WebEx WebOffice.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx