Slack & Co, The German Way: Episode II
Digital platforms like Yammer, Slack or Sharepoint facilitate communication and collaboration within enterprises. When it comes to Germany, with its special tradition of worker participation, these new tools both pose a challenge to and offer chances for long-established employee councils.
Welcome to the latest episode of Slack & Co, The German Way. In its opening credits, you read buzzwords like Social Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 or New Work. And it soon becomes clear that the plot evolves around the rise of enterprise social networks: New software tools that facilitate working together, sharing information and making decisions collectively within a firm. Examples of full-scale collaboration platforms include Yammer, Slack, Sharepoint or Confluence, but cloud services like Google’s Drive are also employed to a similar purpose in many workplaces.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, Social Software can boost productivity in knowledge-intensive industries by up to 25%. It does so primarily by reducing the number of meetings and e-mails, and generally facilitating internal communication, which in classic hierarchies is often vastly inefficient (or so says Elon Musk). It may also enable more creativity and foster innovation, for instance through “internal crowdsourcing”: New ideas can evolve and spread more easily in a well-designed network.
What McKinsey and other researchers also found, however, is that Social Collaboration needs to be embedded into an organisation’s culture as much as into its technology. If an enterprise platform does not provide employees with an immediate opportunity to participate in processes that were previously inaccessible to them, the software tends to remain isolated, and its potential does not unfold. Given that knowledge is indeed power, both workers and managers tend to be by default often reluctant to share information, because this always also means changing the existing patterns of who is asked for what advice, and opening up established decision-making processes.
For most enterprises, this implies that alongside the new technology a more trustful and less hierarchical decision culture needs to be implemented as well. Managers who are after the promised productivity boost should not content themselves with just providing the technology, but at the same time also promote a culture of participation — even if this may trigger an entire transformation of the well-established power structures. That is no small challenge. But at best, social collaboration may not only boost productivity and agility, but does so by at the same time endowing employees with a new sense of responsibility and empowerment.
Innovation, participation and empowerment? If you are a sincere watcher of German Economy since episode one, this must sound familiar. The beneficial effects of Social Software do indeed resemble those of the traditional German co-determination, naturally begging the question: What can the two learn from each other?
For one, enterprises wishing to adopt a social network need to update their entire organisational system accordingly: Only with more transparency and more opportunities for participation will Enterprise Social Media unfold its full potential.
And when it comes to Germany, participation is the core competency of work councils. The question then is: How can work councils make use of these new tools, perhaps even take the entire process of their adoption in their own hands, and shape it to serve their ends?
A new research project at the Berlin-based Humboldt-Institut for Internet and Society has set out to find possible answers to just this interesting question. Our hope could be formulated like this: Now consider how many industries are presently changing, at an ever faster pace, in what has popularly been termed the “second machine age”. As with the first industrial revolution — whose social disruptions recall also gave rise to the first work councils — virtually no business branch will remain unaffected by the rise of platforms, automatization or crowdsourcing, to name but a few of the current developments.
In the light of this broad digital transformation, Mitbestimmung might play a yet bigger role in the near future: Employee participation may very well help both businesses and society deal with the challenges and social disruptions of a digitally accelerating age.
If the story of the German economy were a serial, then codetermination might play a role similar to that of Adriana La Cerva in The Sopranos, of Gus Fring in Breaking Bad or Tom Hammerschmidt in House of Cards: A character that started off as a supporting role or even just an extra, and then surprisingly gained a lot of importance at some point during season two or three. Similarly, codetermination might have played an important role so far. There is plenty of reason to believe that, with the widespread adoption of Social Collaboration now being underway, and the importance of participatory structures to its successful adoption, all these work councils and employee representative might now have a shot at actual stardom. They have an essential influence on whether Social Collaboration will indeed be social, and in how far the platforms will facilitate participation.
An entire new season of German Economy is now coming up. It is set in a digital, highly platform-ized world, in which agility and innovation are key factors of success. In this new setting, Mitbestimmung might evolve from a supporting role to the star of the show.
