Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Open Space: How to improve collaboration within our organizations?

This open space was about an issue that I am very keen about: How do you get people to start talking to each other within different organizations? Some of the ideas that surfaced were:
  • informal tea times, coffee breaks and lunches
  • shared projects or shared goals helps bring people together to collaborate - makes people self driven
  • people with more experience could be encouraged to share their experiences and ways of working with the new people
  • have common informal activities outside workplace (sports, music, etc.)
  • set up group emails to share and keep people aware of what each other is doing
  • rotate the chair and organisers for meetings
  • run meetings in different ways than just to have chairs and more formal ways
  • management commitment is important
  • informal sessions are valuable to build social networks
Any other tips?

1 comment:

Pete Shelton said...

I definitely agree that this is a hugely important topic. And I love the idea of hosting more informal social gatherings (e.g., coffee breaks, etc.) as a way of fostering knowledge sharing w/i organizations, but I'm still struggling with the virtual side of things. Personally, I cringe at the thought of having "email updates" since my current email volume often causes me to- well- cringe... In principle, I like the idea of hosting online collaborative spaces for teams (e.g., wikis, Google Groups, etc.), but if it's project-based, I've seen that this really only works if the project leader absolutely INSISTS that related information be placed there and basically tells staff not to just send out material via email.