Media

CNBC

Can you identify a time when you were energized at work? In other words, you gave more effort than you would’ve expected to, doing something that you wouldn’t have thought was particularly exciting — because someone infused the task with energy and spurred your enthusiasm. Why did you feel that way? Chances are it was less about the work and more about the people you collaborated with. Perhaps the client visit became inspiring because your counterpart was so passionate and engaged. Or your boss gave you a boost of motivation because they showed genuine excitement about your ideas, interests and aspirations for the project. People who create this experience for others at work frequently are called energizers. They thrive on collaboration and personal connections with teammates.

Financial Times

Collaboration has become a constant of global business. Today, practically everything we do at work is based on cooperation. Much of the unhappiness among executives, managers and employees, however, comes from dysfunctional forms of collaboration that most of us fall into. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Rob Cross shows how to rethink beliefs, structures and behaviors to help us adopt new patterns of interacting more efficiently. Networking plays a large part in this, especially non-insular networks– those that encompass a diversity of perspectives, values and expertise—which offer rich opportunities to get help with projects, tap into ideas, gain a broad perspective and enable us to see problems and opportunities in novel ways.

The Wall Street Journal

We are deep in the age of the never-ending check-in. Meetings have gotten shorter during the pandemic, but they are also multiplying. There’s the 25-minute client touch-base, the general life catch-up with your manager, the bite-size performance feedback session, the meeting to prep for the meeting. Toggling between more, shorter meetings is hugely taxing on our brains and has created work that we don’t always realize or take account for. Once we acknowledge this, there are steps to be taken to eliminate this impact.

Harvard Business Review

Agile methodology is now being used throughout organizations to execute projects quickly, but those efforts often don’t pan out. Many large agile initiatives not only miss their goals but also cause organizational disruption—including staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams. Organizational network analysis has identified the main problem: companies err by staffing agile teams only with stars, isolating them from the main business, and dedicating members 100% to teams. Instead, leaders should tap “hidden stars,” who will be less overloaded, for agile initiatives, and then identifying and reaching out to highly connected potential resources who can bring in expertise as needed.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Collaboration among employees has risen by five to eight hours a week during the pandemic, overwhelming workers. The best answer to adressing this hypercollaboration is examining our own behaviors to jump in and overwhelm ourselves by taking on more work.

MIT Sloan Management Review

For most organizations, the balance between in-person and virtual interactions will certainly shift as a result of the pandemic. Using organizational network analysis to map employee work relationships and patterns helps companies answer critical questions for hybrid work planning. ONA is uniquely positioned to address three critical questions in a return-to-office strategy: Who should be brought back together in a weekly cadence of in-person and virtual interactions? What work should be prioritized in the now scarcer in-person time? How do leaders manage the transition to a hybrid model with the least resistance?

MIT Sloan Management Review

As hierarchies continue to flatten, and work becomes more agile, network analysis allows organizations to consider two key questions with a fresh lens: What kinds of relationships foster inclusion, and how can they be facilitated? Initial research suggest that people of color advance through the ranks more rapidly and stay with their organizations longer when they have opportunities to apply their skills and build trust early on in local networks. Employers can help by facilitating rich interactions among colleagues, creating more chances for people to shine.