8 More Reasons For You To Pick Skype At Work

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How do you get explosive productivity from VoIP? Strategic advantage? Delighted employees, partners and customers?

As the managing editor of Skype Journal, I'm asked this question all the time. As an online publication we work with people from around the world. As a management and technology consulting team, we have to do a lot of virtual work before, during, and after projects. In other words, the Skype Journal team has been a testing ground for using Skype at work.

I'm from the old school of IT management that used Dataquest books to compare the performance of data center gear. All hard numbers, feature lists, etc. They weeded out obvious bozos but didn't help find a great fit.

So we chose on stupid soft stuff: How well we liked the sales team, the color of the gadget, internal politics, risk aversion ("big brands") vs. company reputation ("cool startup").

What are smarter soft criteria in the land of The New Conversation? This is our stab at mapping the bigger issues. Try them when you compare Skype to softphones, Vonage, big-iron VoIP systems, or other community and project communication tools. Skype me, swing by Skype Journal, and critique the heck out of this lens.

Hoping you find it useful.

- Phil Wolff

What else should we add to the checklist?

So far:

1. How good do people feel using this software?

2. Do people use it more and more over time, or less and less?

3. Which ones help individuals build social capital with less effort and to better effect?

4. How well do these tools support easy group forming and other elements of adhocracy?

5. How well are they adapted in support of your cultural norms?

6. Do they help people with different communication styles and preferred modes to interact and engage well with each other?

7. Do they provoke the shift from talk to action?

8. How well do they help you build and apply personal, team and institutional memory?

What else do you consider when your sustainable advantage is your people? What other questions and factors should we use to pick the right tools for communication, collaboration, and coordination?

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How good do people feel using this software?

People ask "Why did Skype take off?" One reason: fabulous user experience. The time from click-to-download to your first conversation is short. And it outperforms expectations for ease of use and sound quality. First timers smile, laugh - you should see their faces in a class.

I contrast this with the first time I used the 1998 version of SAP; you attended a two-day class to learn how to fill out an invoice and promptly adjourned to a local bar to drown away the frustration and helplessness.

Do people use it more and more over time, or less and less?

Tools must add readily perceived personal value to create a virtuous cycle. A precondition for group or institutional value.

You may be able to measure this through observation, interview, or personal log analysis. Skype, for example, keeps a record of all Skyping activity on a user's PC including incoming and outgoing calls and chats.

You want to baseline then trend and monitor this data, so you understand if the tool is becoming part of user work styles.

Which ones help individuals build social capital with less effort and to better effect?

Social capital is a residue of conversation. Lots of tools help you talk, but that's not enough. They'd better make you smarter about:

who to talk with
when
for how long
about what
who else to include
prioritizing social commitments under time and goal pressure
keeping confidences
social hubbing, and
managing your reputation.

How well do these tools support easy group forming and other elements of adhocracy?

adhocracy: organizations that form as needed

How many clicks to define a persistant group chat? To charter a group? To create memory of the team's conversations via blogs, wikis, listservs, and podcasts?

Work groups benefit from services like conversation triggers. Trigger by:

schedule (the Monday afternoon check-in),
elapsed time since a last call (don't let us go longer than a week without talking), and
external criteria (invoke a team conference SMS if there's a spike in blogosphere attention to any of our trademarks).

How well are they adapted in support of your cultural norms?

Does the design help avoid bad manners? In some places it's usually wrong to initiate talk too far up the formal hierarchy. For example, an army private is unlikely to click on some random general's name to ask where to get a form.

Does the profile support data you find vital? Or contain data you find illegal or offensive?

Does the toolmaker's choice of presence indicators match the important ways you think of availability in your organization? Do you need an "On the plant floor" or "With a customer" indicator?

Do the brand stories and connotations reinforce your values? Apple and stylish creativity, eBay and the aspiring merchant class, Napster and disruptive skullduggery, your organization and ...?

Do they help people with different communication styles and preferred modes to interact and engage well with each other?

Sometimes I'm a text guy, most times an ear guy and occassionally a video guy. Most people shouldn't bother with a voice call when I'm in a meeting, unless they are family. I actually listen better without video, at least with some speakers. Software should be able to infer some modal preferences from my settings and behavior.

Are those preferences available for people initiating a conversation with me? Available to their software so they can pick a mode of conversation (Phil Arrow on Second Life, if you please) that fits both of us in the same time/context window?

If I pay more attention in one mode, does the software provide live translations across modes, from speech to text or text to speech?

Do they provoke the shift from talk to action?

Real-time tools can help you focus on this conversation's goals, on its deliverables. Sometimes it's as simple as an agenda ("first we'll catch up, then we'll discuss the colors, then, we'll review status"). Maybe you use time-boxing ("from 0812 to 0821 we will pick the new colors") and need count-downs to the end/start of time boxes ("4 minutes left to pick the new colors"). Are you generating new projects and tasks? How do you bring them from pie in the sky thinking aloud to detailed commitment?

Metawork (work about work) involves planning, coordination, scheduling, status reporting. Metawork conversations can be augmented with agendas, forms, templates and light integration with other systems. How well does your tool easily bring action drivers into your conversation?

Communication tools can support specific knowledge work practices. Can you use your tools to brainstorm, make team decisions (real time voting), deliver presentations, review co-authored work, and train?

How well do they help you build and apply personal, team and institutional memory?

Tacit knowledge, inferred by behavior, is truer, more accurate, and less subjective than declared knowledge. Social media, like Skype, present several great opportunities to build and apply tacit knowledge.

A personal history of your relationships, at least the online parts, is an invaluable mirror. Better than log files, actual records of chats, phone calls and video calls let you refresh your memory.

Does the tool help you share your conversational metadata (Phil knows Mary a little, mostly an email relationship) with friends, family, team mates, colleagues?

Does your toolkit aggregate conversational metadata, so you can navigate and visualize the threads of your many-to-many relationships? For example, you could show a living timeline of how and when the members of your project team are communicating with each other, perhaps even on what topics.

Does your tool let you repurpose your conversation leftovers, converting IMs to blog posts, phone calls to podcasts, video calls to vlogs, documents to wikis?

Do your aggregators provide gisting (summarizing) services that save time? Full text transcripts of audios and video? Synthesis, clustering related media by across dimensions you find useful?

Collective memory, where shared metadata becomes useful in role taking, team assembly, and progress reporting. Team history shows all of the elephant by combining views for better accuracy and risk avoidance.

Knowledge Management Sites

Skype Journal: Writing about the applications of Skype and other real-time social software to work and life.
Nancy White: Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: On team building, collaboration, and blogging.
Richard MacManus: The ReadWrite Web: Richard MacManus on Next Generation Web and Media
Lilia Efimova: Mathemagenic:: personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance...
Henry Jenkins: Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
danah boyd: apophenia: making connections where none previously existed. a PhD student in SIMS at Berkeley and a social media researcher at Yahoo!
Ton Zijlstra: Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Knowledge work and management, and the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world. He's passionate about increasing people's ability to act (knowledge), and their ability to change (learning).
Sebastian Fiedler: Seblogging: Weblogs, CMS, and personal Webpublishing for learning and education
Jeffrey Treem: Inside the Cubicle: An Analyst with Edelman's Change and Employee Engagement practice, on how new media technologies are changing the ways organizations communicate with their workers.
KM Column: Knowledge management for call centres: I like this thorough walkthrough of KM in a talk-intensive workplace. FEBRUARY 2002 KM Column: Call centres are growing rapidly. They are also confronted with many challenges, and KM has much to offer in overcoming these difficulties.
Maish Nichani: elearningpost: elearningpost provides news and views into the process and practice of e-learning.
From knowledge managment to learning design and from usability to strategy, it caters to those responsible for making it work in their organizations.
Jon Husband: Wirearchy: Social Architecture for the Wired Age by one of the most insightful thinkers on the subject of social media.