Questão 712988

Text II

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet

the nature of knowledge work remains poorly

understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness.

The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is

5 collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they

interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with

partners, and nurture new ideas. Technology and

workflow processes support knowledge worker success

and are increasingly sources of comparative

10 differentiation. Those able to use new technologies to

reshape how they work are finding significant productivity

gains. This article shares our research on how

technology can improve the quality and output of

knowledge workers.

15 Knowledge workers are growing in numbers. In some

sectors of the economy, such as healthcare providers

and education, they account for 75 percent of the

workforce; in the United States, their wages total 18

percent of GDP. The nature of collaborative work ran-

20 ges from high levels of abstract thinking on the part of

scientists to building and maintaining professional

contacts and information networks to more ground-level

problem solving. Think of a buyer for a retail chain whose

distributed web of contacts span resourceful

25 professionals as fashion designers in Tokyo to experts

on manufacturing in Brazil.

For companies, knowledge workers are expensive

assets — earning a wage premium that ranges from 55

percent to 75 percent over the pay of workers who

30 perform more basic production and transaction tasks.

Yet there are wide variations in the performance of

knowledge workers, as well as in their access to

technologies that could improve it. Our research shows

that the performance gap between top and bottom

35 companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times

that of production- or transaction-intense sectors. And

that underscores what remains a significant challenge

for corporations and national economics alike: how to

improve the productivity of this prized and growing corps

40 of workers.

Unfortunately, the productivity measures for

collaboration workers are fuzzy at best. For production

workers, productivity is readily measured in terms of units

of output; for transaction workers, in operations per hour.

45 But for knowledge workers, what might be thought of as

collaboration productivity depends on the quality and

quantity of interactions occurring. And it’s from these less-

than-perfectly-understood interactions that companies

and national economies derive important benefits.

50 Consider the collaborative creative work needed to win

an advertising campaign or the high levels of service

needed to satisfy public citizens. Or, in a similar vein,

the interplay between a company and its customers or

partners that results in an innovative product.

55 Raising the quality of these interactions is largely

uncharted territory. Taking a systematic view, however,

helps bring some of the key issues into focus. Our

research suggests that improvements depend upon

getting a better fix on who actually is doing the

60 collaborating within companies, as well as understanding

the details of how that interactive work is done. Just as

important is deciding how to support interactions with

technology — in particular, Web 2.0 tools such as social

networks, wikis, and video. There is potential for sizeable

65 gains from even modest improvements. Our survey

research shows that at least 20 percent and as much as

50 percent of collaborative activity results in wasted effort.

And the sources of this waste—including poorly planned

meetings, unproductive travel time, and the rising tide

70 of redundant e-mail communications, just to name a

few—are many and growing in knowledge-intense

industries.

There are some companies that already are tackling

aspects of this collaboration–technology nexus. A well-

75 known multinational company selling networking and

communications technology, for example, was eager to

improve interactions between its technology specialist

sales teams and enterprise customers. Frequent travel

and stepped-up job requirements had resulted in

80 overstretched teams whose effectiveness had become

diminished. The company tackled the problem by

mandating the use of its own video technologies, as well

as other collaboration tools to reach more customers

and business partners by shifting a large portion of in-

85 person meetings to virtual interactions. Policy and

governance changes ensured that technology use

became part of daily workflows and not an added task.

Internal surveys showed that 78 percent of the targeted

employees reported increased productivity and improved

90 lifestyles without diminishing customer or partner

satisfaction.

But most companies are only beginning to take these

paths. That’s because, in many respects, raising the

collaboration game differs from traditional ways of

95 boosting productivity. In production and transaction work,

technology use is often part of a broader campaign to

reduce head counts and costs—steps that are familiar

to most managers. In the collaboration setting,

technology is used differently. It multiplies interactions

100 and extends the reach of knowledge workers. That allows

for the speedier product development found at Proctor

& Gamble and improved partner and customer intimacy

at Cisco. In general, this is new terrain for most

managers.

Adapted from the article written by James Manyika, Kara Sprague and

Lareina Yee,

published in McKinsey Quarterly, 27 October 2009.

http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/internet/using-technology-toimprove-workforce-collaboration

Web 2.0 tools are defined as "a category of new Internet tools and technologies created around the idea that the people who consume media, access the Internet, and use the Web shouldn't passively absorb what's available... These new tools include, but are by no means limited to, blogs, social networking applications, RSS, social networking tools, and wikis."

(http://www.techsoup.org/toolkits/web2/)

The authors of Text II acknowledge that such tools