In my last post, I talked about how collaboration creates a significant number of tasks that fall outside the sphere of regularly assigned work—things like providing feedback to others; reviewing documents and presentations; joining meetings, conversations, and online discussions; documenting best practices; and identifying new problems and solving them on an ad hoc basis. Beyond creating a bunch of new tasks for employees, the implications for measuring and managing productivity are profound.

Most managers still measure knowledge worker productivity based on the number of widgets they pump out (i.e. How many papers/reports/models/spreadsheets/client engagements/etc. did you create/take part in this year?). The truth is; a tremendous amount of value is being created through collaborative initiatives that are not measured in traditional performance reviews or budget line items.

The best existing method used to capture the value of these collaborative initiatives is 360-degree performance reviews where managers solicit feedback, not only from direct supervisors, but also from employees, peers, customers and anyone else the employee might relate with in the course of doing his/her job. However, the information collected is subjective, exposed to the personal bias of co-workers, and not terribly timely (i.e. reviews are given annually). What’s needed are more scientific, real-time, analytic reporting tools that can capture collaboration and productivity metrics in the same way that we gather metrics about manufacturing processes, supply chains, IT networks, call centers, sales, and other facets of the business.

While the current state of software tools around collaboration metrics is far behind the reality of what’s going on in most knowledge work environments, there are glimmers of hope. Our office recently started piloting a tool called Snowflake (currently in alpha launch). The software is taking steps towards providing the type of “collaboration ledger” that I’m envisioning, at least for some activities like providing feedback. It allows co-workers to solicit/offer anonymous feedback and advice from each other at regular intervals. More importantly, the program captures metrics around who provides feedback and how often, how feedback is valued, what topics are most popular, who has expertise in different areas, and so on. The tool is still in alpha launch, but I can see great potential if it expands to develop reporting capabilities for managers, allows for the sharing of documents (also tracked by metrics), and can be integrated with other applications so that metrics are gathered for all types of collaborative activities.

Part I, Part II, Part III