- One of the markers of the new workplace are the advent
of these new collaboration tools.
We know that people like to work together,
and digital has provided a great way
for these new platforms to come up.
They can range from anything like an intranet,
which many companies have, to a real collaboration platform
where people do file sharing or messaging with each other,
all the way to social networks
that are being used inside the enterprise.
So, all of these areas are new ways
of working in a digital way, and HR needs to be very,
very aware of how they are changing the way
that work gets done.
And I wanted to dive a little bit deeper
into the collaboration platforms.
There's lots of mystery around this
'cause it's something typically that IT runs,
and I think it's important for HR
to understand what's going on with these.
Now, one of the interesting things about
collaboration platforms is that in the past,
it was hard to get employees to adopt them
because it meant that they had to stop using things
like email and be able to use these tools.
And what we've seen over the past two years is
that the adoption rate has increased tremendously.
One major reason, leaders are starting to use these tools.
And when leaders go on to these collaboration platforms,
everyone else follows them.
This is no longer something that's optional.
Real work is being done on these platforms,
information is being shared, and very importantly,
decisions are being made on these platforms.
So, if you're not on them, you're basically out
of the picture.
So, ask yourself as HR, are you on these platforms?
Are you using them?
And what we found inside most organizations
that most employees are using some form of collaboration.
They're not using everything, but a good majority of them,
and in some cases, 2/3 of them are using it.
It's only very small numbers of people
who aren't using any collaboration platform,
and this is across all industries.
And I want to challenge one myth in particular,
that older workers just don't use these tools.
What we found is that for this group, 45 to 54 year olds,
only 13% of them are not using these tools.
And even for the older group of 55 to 64 year olds,
only 14% of them never use these tools.
So, the vast majority of employees are comfortable
using these tools on a regular basis.
Let's go back to HR and when they look at these
collaboration tools, they say,
that's not my responsibility, that's IT's job,
and that couldn't be further from the truth.
HR needs to make sure that employees
not only are using these tools, have the training,
and have the mindset to be able to approach these tools,
but in particular, that the leaders are comfortable
using them because if they don't go on to them,
nobody else will.
And leaders fundamentally feel very uncomfortable
going on to these tools because they feel like
they're putting themselves out there.
It's a new way of working, and I think HR could be
really helpful in the learning and development function
to help them understand how this new way
of working is going to impact their leadership.