The cacophony that is our digital workplace

Any team is only as good as its weakest link. For digital collaboration to work, the collaboration habits of team members need to align if optimal team collaboration is to be achieved.

SWOOP Analytics has conducted the world’s first in-depth analysis of how people are actually using Microsoft 365, not how they think they are using it. What did we find? 

One of the glaring findings was that the wide variation in collaboration habits within close working teams can be disastrous. 

In SWOOP’s inaugural M365 Benchmarking Report we analysed the M365 interactions from more than 213,000 accounts across more than 3,700 group/teams and 18 organisations over a six-month period. When we analysed at the group/team level, we could see the variation in the habits of the members was by far the biggest predictor of collaboration performance.  

We are currently living in the “wild west” of digital work. Huge variations exist that are damaging our ability to effectively work together online. Opportunities abound for huge gains to be made, by organisations that can reduce that level of variation in digital habits, especially at the operational team level. 

We have always known the size of a group or team is inversely related to collaboration performance. This makes sense - the larger the group, the harder it is to be cohesive. While group size was also a predictor of collaboration performance, we were unprepared for just how big an impact the variation of digital habits within a group or team had on its performance. There is clearly a reason why workplace experts emphasise the importance of developing agreed norms of behaviour and technology usage within operational level teams or groups.   

Which habits should we be most concerned about? 

There is a simple statistical measure called the “Coefficient of Variation” (CV) which enables us to compare the levels of variation between quite diverse factors. For example, we can use the CV to compare the variation in heights found in NBA basketball teams with the variation in interest rates over the past year (it’s only an example!). CV is commonly used to assess the degree of risk in diverse financial investments. It’s calculated by simply dividing the standard deviation by the average to come up with an index score. We used this measure to assess the variation in use between SWOOP’s Seven Collaboration Habits. The CV rule of thumb guidance is that “distributions with CV < 1 are considered low-variance, while those with CV > 1 are considered high-variance”. The chart below shows what we found: 

We can see five of the seven habits are highly variable to the extreme, with the Asynchronous Collaborator - shows how good you are at collaborating in Teams Channels and Yammer (asynchronous) compared with collaborating in Teams Meetings/Calls (synchronous) - by far the most variable, scoring close to 40.  

Email Liberated measures how much email is preferred over other asynchronous channels; the same for chat. The Community Contributor measures how good you are at balancing participation in Yammer communities with working in Teams. The above chart is, in essence, quantifying the relative size of the problem for each habit. 

The only habits not suffering from wild variations between staff are the File Sharer habit (use of SharePoint versus OneDrive) and Camera Confidence (% time spent with the camera on in meetings). 

Where to now? 

Our analysis has validated the concerns we see regularly reported in the public press - being over-committed to digital meetings; living too much in email; being constantly interrupted by chat are all commonly reported issues since the start of the pandemic. However, we need to be mindful that high variation means there is a big gap between, for example, those that are suffering from meeting overload, and those that are arguably not meeting enough! This is the “long tail” of poor M365 adopters; which is a topic for another post. 

Harvard professor and virtual working expert Tsedal Neely, in her new book “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere”, states from her research; “Successful remote teams adhere to the group norms that they establish collectively.” These norms include agreeing on how the team is going to communicate with each other, and what tools they are going to use and how. She goes on to suggest; “Focusing on process and not outcome when assessing productivity. Equip your teams with the tools and resources they need and assume that they will have the insights into how best to achieve their work goals.” 

This is precisely what we aim to do with SWOOP products - place data on how individuals and their teams are collaborating online, in the hands of the users themselves. Our tag line “seeing how you work, changes how you work” has never been more prescient.