How shared economy will impact teamwork
The reign of collaborative platforms is undeniable. Those most popular, which in fact are kind of early adapters for shared economy trend, enables to share services that can be provided independently. Mostly they don’t require provider to have complex equipment or even skills — to rent a house, drive your car or be a runner for taskRabbit one just have to reach out to a specific platform. Of course, we can assume it’s not because of the nature of shared economy, rather its maturity and development stage. Platforms popular today has been a low hanging fruit for the trend. Some day more sophisticated, specialized services will be propagated through collaborative platforms. In fact, the world economy is starting to prepare for this day. There’s been a discussion going on concerning future changes in national tax regulations and health insurance, that probably are inevitable due to a big impact shared economy trend will make on global economy. We will have to figure out how to also share the responsibility for employee’s security and healthcare, and rethink what is profit and how to measure costs in new, shared reality.
As the shared economy impact is starting to knock to big organizations doors, some managers claim, that they’re prepared. They rightly point out, that freelancers have been here for decades now, and companies got used to cooperate with external workforce. It’s true to some extent. Freelancers have been given precisely described and strictly controlled tasks. Those can be easily isolated, so the hard part of coworking with freelancers had been minimized. Moreover, today freelancers are somehow appropriated for a period of time, serving directly one or few clients having control over their time, tasks and products of their work.
So the question arises, what will actually change for organizations due to shared economy? Let’s connect the dots — economy is turning into collaboration, strategy is getting adaptive or disruptive (that is, long-term planning is in retreat), technology is becoming ubiquitous, and companies are multinational and distributed. Let’s imagine a project with no rigidly set goal (not exactly a research, but still not obvious in terms of when it ends), conducted by a team made of part-time employees distributed over a continent. Let’s make this project highly interdisciplinary, with technology, social media, psychology, materials, biotechnology, others engaged. How to maintain focus, motivation, how to manage the project? And what if the manager himself is sharing his time between other employers?
It definitely sounds like science fiction for hierarchical, internally focused companies. But it’s almost here. I had a great opportunity to work for a couple of months in a fascinating environment, that surely had some of issues that would pop up in an imaginary project I described above. I was a part of European Capital of Culture 2016, that is taking place in Wroclaw, Poland. My role was relatively narrow, as I had to look after all IT-related stuff. But as a team, we had to overcome huge challenges. All of them rooted from the fact, that we were all part time employees with little knowledge about the big picture and what we’re good at. There wasn’t any other choice, the team was made on the spot, and we had to handle it somehow. The worst roadblocks we came across were:
Shared employees, shared manager
We were all part time workers, that had limited time in different hours. It was really hard to meet, and the whole communication was ailing. There’ve been not much that the manager could do with the situation, as his power, methods, and of course time, were limited.
Remote ownership
The true decision maker and owner of our job wasn’t the manager, but the head himself. However, we had almost no chance to co-work with him. Once in awhile our boss just came to a meeting to see we’re not there yet, and many times that we all misunderstand our goal and have to begin from the scratch.
Different languages
Those rare meetings with complete team were sometimes funny. A lawyer, admin, IT consultant, social media guy, illustrator, and a bunch of other specialists not with the core team trying to cowork. We knew absolutely nothing about work of our colleagues, our competencies were almost perfectly separated. Fascinating at once, became our grudge, as we couldn’t find a common language, even though we were all Poles.
Floating scope, new knowledge
Nobody knew everything about our team and the project, including our team. The scope was changing because of external pressure coming from media, local authorities, stakeholders and public opinion.
We were on ice from the day one. Maybe it’s the extreme scenario, but hey, it actually happened!
We figured, that the only way to succeed in this uncomfortable environment, is to start pulling the contribution rather than pushing tasks.
What does it mean? It’s simple — because we all didn’t know who exactly can contribute, we couldn’t assign task. Moreover, we didn’t have a common understanding on the nature of tasks, so we couldn’t intuitively suggest any work package. To get things worst, we couldn’t even divide our goals into tasks, cose it would require us all to have long lasting meeting, and we couldn’t find an hour during office hours to meet with the whole team. So, there was no way to push work packages and responsibility among the team. Our solution was to simply broadcast the goal and let people decide how they could contribute for the project to succeed. I know it sounds silly, but at the end of the day, nothing worked better. We struggled a lot, obviously. Mostly with those consequences of going with pull rather than push:
Communication chaos
Going with pull causes more emails, private messages and phone calls. But with the change shared economy brings, we either way spend more time in motion, or switching context. I don’t say it’s not an issue, rather that it’s our times disease, not an immediate effect of changes in project
Proactiveness and trust
People have to trust each other, that nobody will forfeit his engagement in project. Simple to say, but it could be a serious issue in some cases. We also had to overcome the problem with “That’s not my job” attitude, but I suppose team’s motivation was above average — European Capital of Culture is a unique happening, so we truly wanted to do our best.
Lack of control
Let’s face it — the control is an illusion, maybe excluding some cases of critical projects for government or military. So yes, we definitely lacked control, but I don’t believe one controls much more in classical task-driven projects.
Diffusion of responsibility.
It’s harder to prove someone’s responsibility was neglected, when you don’t explicitly define it. It can be possible, but predominantly when it’s too late to do something about it. I see the diffusion of responsibility as a biggest issue that can cause a huge risk, especially for less devoted teams. To minimize it, leaders should focus on drawing the big picture of a project and make sure people know what they bring to the table. But after all, it all comes to engagement and ownership of team members.
