If you are on the lookout for some new useful tools that can help you better manage your distributed virtual room or your vacationing class of students, here is Master New Media new weekly set of cool online collaboration tools that you may have recently missed on their launch date and that Nico Canali De Rossi has carefully hand-picked and summary-reviewed for you.
Corporations have a common problem in their thinking. The problem is not listening to their employees or their customers. The history of communicating within the corporate world has been designed around doing things right vs. doing the right things.
Saying and doing things right has become an art of “corporate speak” driven by cultures of fear, politics and a mentality that the boss knows better than the people so don%u2019t offend him/her by having original thought on matters of importance. Over the years the environments of business have taught the people to simply follow even when they know a better way or have opinions or facts that suggest another way is better.
These type environments are not uncommon and if you talk to employees around the water cooler you get more than enough evidence of “my boss just doesn’t listen or care to hear my opinion”. Be honest, is this not the prevailing cultural norms within organizations globally?
CORT Business Services has adopted wikis and blogs to help foster internal collaboration across different departments and to manage the workflow for its e-commerce site, which rents out home and office furniture and helps companies relocate employees to new locations.
A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, CORT has approximately 2,500 employees spread out across 180 locations. The highly distributed nature of its workforce made it a perfect candidate for a social software suite, notes Lee Thomas, vice president of information technology and product development. “We’re a decentralized company,” he says. “It’s hard to know who is impacted by every decision we make. We need the proper people to stay in the loop regarding relevant information, and stay out of the loop when it isn’t relevant.”
As that comment might suggest, Thomas says most internal communications and project management at CORT had been previously done over e-mail, which had its pitfalls.
A case study of BT’s experiences to date with the adoption of social media tools - it was published in the November edition of Employee Engagement Today magazine.
