In an ideal scenario the corporate management team at your organization will make the necessary technology and strategy investments around collaboration and the future of work across the enterprise. However, what if you’re a part of a larger organization and corporate is just moving too slow? Oftentimes departments make these investments independent of what corporate is doing. This is actually the case with some of our clients right now, one of them is a 500,000 person global company. In these types of scenarios the business leaders of specific regions or departments shouldn’t feel the need to wait. There are several reasons for why departments shouldn’t wait for corporate:
Corporate can learn from you
There have been several situations where corporate finds out of regional or department deployments and then piggy-backs on top of those for an enterprise wide deployment. Your department can be the pioneering group for the whole enterprise and can help educate and show others what the business value is and how to make it work. This approach can also help dramatically speed up an enterprise wide deployment backed by the necessary resources from your corporate management team.
Don’t sacrifice opportunity
There is no reason for why you should be sacrificing the potential opportunity and business value of investing in collaboration just because corporate isn’t. Your department or region can still benefit from creating an engaged and connect workforce. Don’t wait just because other people want to. That’s their problem. This evolution of how we work needs to start somewhere, it might as well start with you.
Timing
I know of several initiatives being led by departments within larger enterprises that have been ongoing for at least the last two years. Meanwhile corporate management in many of these organizations is still trying to make decisions around what to do. The best thing you can do is communicate with corporate around what your plans are, your successes, and challenges. But sitting around idly and waiting is useless.
The reality is that in many larger organizations there are already several collaboration initiatives being led by employees that management just isn’t aware of. I can pretty much guarantee that in large organizations there are already some Yammer deployments, perhaps a few instances of Confluence, Jive, MangoApps, or some other platform. When employees see an opportunity to improve the way they work they typically go after it. Consider that setting up any of these cloud-based platforms just takes a few minutes and only requires a credit-card. The barrier of going through IT or getting the blessing from corporate is completely removed. This is why management needs to really pay attention to what is happening in the enterprise. Smart management will leverage these pockets of collaboration as a springboard for a much broader initiative.
If you’re running a department or a region within a larger company and corporate isn’t making the investments in collaboration that you want to make, then make them yourself, corporate will eventually follow.
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