Remote work and transversality: the complicated equation

In an age of everyone at home and chat for everybody, is it really possible to develop remote working without aggravating the silos?

One of the most significant effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world of work has certainly been the paradigm shift in where and how work is done.
Whether in an open space, a closed office or jogging on the sofa, work is the same.

No more need to constantly expand office space to accommodate new teams. Realise that in the end what matters is that the work gets done.

This reshuffles all the cards in the world of work. You don’t manage your teams in the same way at a distance, you don’t always have the same comfort as in the office, you don’t exchange information in the same way, and social ties are certainly the most negatively impacted. Gone are the days of informal discussions, meetings in the lift and impromptu lunches with colleagues.

According to a recent study carried out by researchers on Microsoft teams in the United States before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the meteoric acceleration of telework, perceived as a democratisation for some and a boon for others (including Microsoft), ultimately proved to be a brake or even a setback in terms of breaking down organisational barriers.

Researchers commissioned by Microsoft have analysed the working habits of more than 60,000 Microsoft US employees.
During the first half of 2020, they deciphered all interactions between employees (emails, calendars, chat, video, calls, collaborative tools, etc.).

And here is the result: “Our results show that enterprise-wide remote working made the workers’ collaboration network more static and compartmentalised, with fewer bridges between disparate parties. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication.”

Despite the accelerated digitalisation of companies, the impressive offer of collaborative tools, and a massive adoption of them (due to the pandemic), communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing are the big losers.

This observation demonstrates the importance of social ties within companies, the intangible part of informality, and above all highlights the crucial role of human assets within companies.

A company is not a sum of people or a pile of expertise. A company is organic: it is a continuous flow of skills, knowledge, know-how, emotions, desires and ambitions that collide and interact on a daily basis to create the company’s value and culture.

Collaborative tools create wonderful bridges and a virtual network between employees, but they do not really connect them.

At elqano, we provide this thin but essential missing layer: creating the paths among these bridges, connecting needs and knowledge, questions and answers, in short connecting people.

For more information on Microsoft’s study on the adverse effects of teleworking: click here

Read also : the article by Guillaume de Calignon in Les Echos

How to improve collaboration in a teleworking context

Today, with the advent of new technologies, more and more companies are adopting telecommuting as a mode of operation. This offers many advantages to employees and employers alike. However, this transition to remote working also brings with it a number of challenges.
In this article, we’ll explore the common obstacles encountered by employees in the teleworking context, and share all our expert advice to help you foster collaboration within your structure.

Barriers to teleworking

Remote working can be very useful for companies wishing to improve their performance but, is not without its challenges. Two of the main obstacles employees can face are communication and time management. Indeed, ensuring clear communication and optimal management of working time can quickly become difficult in a virtual environment.

Remote communication

Setting up remote collaboration is a challenging step, especially when it comes to communication. Working remotely offers greater flexibility, but also creates communication concerns. Without face-to-face interaction, employees can feel isolated from their projects and their team. This distance blocks understanding and the sharing of ideas.

Communication, limited by virtual tools, can lead to misunderstandings. Body language cues, which help clarify interactions, often disappear, leading to misinterpretations. These misunderstandings lead to delays, errors and reduced quality of work, affecting the overall efficiency of the team and the company.
How can this situation be resolved?

There’s no doubt that the use of appropriate communication channels is essential to maintain effective collaboration between teams. Regular virtual meetings are an effective way of resolving problems quickly. Collaborative platforms and file-sharing tools are also very useful for maintaining open communication. You can, for example, set up brainstorming sessions to strengthen links between colleagues and foster better communication.

Time management

The transition to teleworking introduces significant changes in your employees’ working methods, challenging their ability to organize the time allocated to each task effectively. These problems become more complex when the team has to coordinate its actions. The fact that telecommuting isolates employees can lead to situations where each person works individually, without having an overview of the others’ progress. This separation leads to redundant efforts and, ultimately, lower productivity.
How can you keep your teleworking staff productive?

There are several solutions available to you, and you can combine them!
Start by implementing an effective global organization strategy. This involves defining a clear timetable, setting precise objectives and prioritizing the tasks that are essential to effective time management for each of your employees. At the same time, encouraging flexibility within the team by allowing schedule adjustments according to need can help adapt to telecommuting.

Opt for high-performance collaborative tools that encourage knowledge sharing, facilitate communication and optimize the use of your employees’ time. These effective solutions strengthen collaboration, improve mutual understanding and boost your company’s overall productivity.

Essential collaboration tools for telecommuting

Instant messaging: the ideal tool for fluid exchanges

Instant messaging platforms provide a friendly, easy-to-use interface. They maintain a real-time connection between collaborators, facilitating direct and effective communication with all teams, wherever they may be. The result? More effective coordination and faster exchanges that help boost productivity and creativity, while creating a sense of unity despite distance.

Did you know?
With instant messaging platforms, you can create project-specific discussion channels, making targeted communication simpler. You can also organize virtual meetings, offering almost face-to-face interaction. If required, you also have the option of integrating third-party tools for a smoother business experience.

Tools to simplify your project management

Project management tools offer a convenient visual interface. They let you keep track of your tasks and distribute them among different collaborators. Using them, you can organize your projects by priority and assign responsibilities to each collaborator. You can also add comments, deadlines and attachments, create dashboards, track dependencies, manage resources and collaborate with your team with ease.
By opting for these project management tools, you’ll get a clear view of task progress, even when working remotely.

Videoconferencing for interactive virtual meetings

Videoconferencing plays an essential role in keeping communication flowing, even for employees working remotely. By using these tools, you can encourage real-time interaction, team discussions, brainstorming sessions and all kinds of collaboration. Screen-sharing functionality adds a valuable visual dimension to communicating complex information clearly and convincingly.
Whether for regular meetings, training, product presentations or other professional needs, videoconferencing helps maintain a direct connection that strengthens team cohesion, even across geographical distances.

Tools for sharing files

When you opt for telecommuting, these tools become real business assets. They play an essential role in bringing all information together and enabling targeted access control to key parties.

Put simply, they let you store your documents in the cloud, which means you can access them from any connected device. Using these tools, sharing files is a breeze, and you can specify who can view or edit. You can choose to be read-only or editable.
As an added bonus, they make it easy to collaborate in real time on the same document, making remote teamwork much smoother. And to top it all off, they even connect with software like Google Docs or Google Sheets.

Agile methods

In turn, agile methods improve efficiency and collaboration in the workplace. These are perfectly suited to the context of remote working.
They are based on the division of projects into several distinct tasks called “sprints”. These tasks are then assigned to all employees, so that the set objectives can be achieved.

Did you know?
To improve teleworking collaboration, it’s advisable to combine agile approaches with the use of digital tools. You have the freedom to select the technologies that best match your company’s culture.

How to cultivate a collaborative corporate culture

When it comes to telecommuting, it’s crucial to promote a collaborative culture within the company. If a new employee joins the company remotely, the welcome must be just as important as if it were an on-site arrival. It is essential to ensure a successful integration by using video sessions and remote team presentations. Organizing virtual team-building activities can also prove beneficial. You can even provide new employees with the information they need to feel included, even while working remotely.

Why promote employee engagement?

Promoting employee engagement can strengthen collaboration and foster a good dynamic within the company. This involves recognizing their achievements as well as setting up a reward system to motivate them.

What is the role of human resources?

The human resources department can create a better collaborative culture within the company. It can :
Organize training courses to encourage employees to work better remotely;
Mobilize exchange programs to help employees get to know each other better;
Set up virtual events to foster team cohesion.
In order to establish a better culture of telecommuting collaboration, care must be taken to foster the integration of new employees, have a strongly committed human resources department as well as promote employee engagement.

The customer experience in the telecommuting context

Coordination between your teams working remotely can influence the customer experience. To counter this problem, it’s crucial to establish solid communication. When teams work closely together, they are more likely to respond to customer needs and offer solutions tailored to their requirements.
In fact, regular communication enables more accurate monitoring of each project’s lifecycle, contributing to better quality service. It is therefore advisable to maintain frequent communication so that each member is aware of his or her tasks and deadlines.

Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Strategies

In the realm of artificial intelligence, progress never comes from nowhere. Its evolution, indeed, is an accumulation of years of relentless pursuit and exceptional breakthroughs. One such disruption emerged in 2022, with the advent of Generative AI.

The story of AI’s evolution started with a focus on deep learning, a machine learning technique where layers of neural networks process data and make decisions.

Generative AI emerged as a game-changer in 2022. It has the potential to create new written, visual, and auditory content based on existing data or given prompts. With this emergence, the productivity race truly took off. Generative AI capabilities usually include diverse use cases such as content generation, summarization, code generation, and semantic search.

Elqano and Generative AI: Harnessing Power, Evading Pitfalls

At Elqano, we saw both the potential and the pitfalls of generative AI.

Instances such as the accidental leaking of sensitive data via ChatGPT at Samsung underscore the pressing issues of data confidentiality. In response, Samsung temporarily banned generative tools. However, this action does not solve the AI problems faced by companies as more and more generative tools will be introduced in the coming years.

Prompt sensibility is another hurdle. Bad prompts can be incomplete, vague, or misleading, which can lead to undesirable results. Meanwhile, a good prompt provides relevant information and clear instructions.

Moreover, we must consider ‘model hallucination.’ This phenomenon occurs when the AI model combines unrelated or inaccurate information from its training data or misinterprets the user’s query, resulting in fictional or incorrect information. It is crucial to verify AI-generated responses to avoid such issues.

Strategies for Safe Integration and Effective Use of Generative AI

At Elqano, we developed an approach to avoid these pitfalls and benefit from generative AI.

At the core of our philosophy is a pragmatic approach that prioritizes customer relations. This ethos serves as the guiding principle for our internal R&D team that specializes in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (ML/NLP).

Our main focus: A Secure Environment. Our algorithm is hosted on an Azure server in our client’s cloud, ensuring data confidentiality.

In addition to these strategies, it is essential to think about the process to avoid misinformation, identify the right partnerships, and understand the underlying technology.

Now, what Role Can the Generative AI Play in Knowledge Management

A short reminder about knowledge management, what does it mean?

Knowledge Management (KM) is a multidisciplinary approach that makes the best use of an organization’s knowledge.

It encompasses creating, sharing, using, and managing the organization’s knowledge and information.

Generative AI can significantly enhance KM through various use cases, including:

• Summarizing, gathering, and reconstructing information
• Creating intelligent knowledge bases
• Extracting knowledge
• Performing topic modeling and automated documentation
• Reviewing and optimizing content
• Curating data automatically
• Performing semantic searches and smart document analyses
• Recognizing sensitive content
• Referencing source content
• Enabling business intelligence, trend identification, and sentiment analysis
• Detecting anomalies
• Generating knowledge graphs and multilingual content

Our next step: Integrating Generative AI to Improve Elqano’s Solutions

Elqano aims to combine the best of both worlds: our philosophy of security, control, and human-centric approach, with the power of AI and Generative AI. We are integrating advanced features that tap into the power of Generative AI.

These include:

Refining Collaboration with “Automated Drafts of Answers”

Currently, Elqano’s robust functionality is rooted in fostering internal expertise within an organization.

When questions are posed by collaborators, our system identifies the most knowledgeable internal expert in that specific field by analyzing document indexation. This expedites the information-sharing process, ensuring questions are directed to the right people without delay.

As we move forward, we aim to integrate the capabilities of Generative AI to further streamline this process.

The new feature, “Automated Drafts of Answers”, will produce preliminary responses to the posed questions by leveraging the AI’s understanding of the indexed documents and the organization’s collective knowledge.

These AI-generated drafts do not replace the human experts but rather provide them with a foundation to build upon.

Experts can then review, modify, validate, or dismiss the proposed answers. This not only accelerates response times but also alleviates the workload on experts by providing them a head start in crafting their responses.

In addition, we are setting a new benchmark for data validity. Contrasting with Large Language Models like ChatGPT, which typically utilize public and non-verified data, our generative AI operates on expert-validated data drawn from internally verified sources. This unique approach guarantees a higher level of data security and the reliability of the AI experience we offer.

By innovating and continuously refining these features, we aim to provide an unparalleled user experience that marries safety, control, and the immense potential of AI and Generative AI.

The Journey Continues

The journey to harness the full potential of generative AI in knowledge management is ongoing. But with the right strategies, tools, and philosophies, we believe we can transform the way organizations manage and utilize their most valuable resource: knowledge.

As we embark on this exciting journey, we are grateful for your continued support and look forward to exploring the endless possibilities of generative AI together.