In the past few weeks I explored a few themes or concepts which I believe are heavily impacting the future of work.  The first was, Customized Work, the second was Connect to Work, and today I want to talk about Sharing is Caring.  I’m sure we all heard the phrase when we were younger and in fact many of us have used this phrase at some point in our lives.  It may be a bit childish in nature since it was mainly used when someone had something that we wanted and we would jokingly say, “sharing is caring.”  But still, the concept behind it makes a lot of sense in the context of the future of work.

Jeremiah Owyang recently released a report on the Collaborative Economy which explores this very concept in much more detail but it mainly focuses on sharing goods or products and focuses a bit more on consumers instead of on organizations and employees.  However, this concept is very relevant to companies around the world but not as it pertains to good or products.  Instead what is more valuable is the sharing of information internally.

Companies around the world are deploying collaboration platforms for this very reason.  They are starting to understand the value in sharing information across the enterprise and connecting people.  The traditional model of work saw only a few people at the “top” in control of all of the information, these were the same people that made all the decisions.  Now, information is being opened up instead of closed off, the hierarchy is being flattened and communication is becoming horizontal and vertical.  This is a big change in the traditional model of a company and it’s something that is going to take some adjustment.  But I strongly believe that the successful organizations out there are going to be the ones that can get their employees to share across the enterprise.  But share what?  Ah, good question!  Everything!

Sharing isn’t just about providing information when someone asks for it’s also about proactive sharing which means sharing your thoughts, ideas, and what you might be working on without having been asked to do so; this is a very foreign concept to most employees.  This type of sharing allows other employees to join you in helping come up with solutions for problems or identifying potential opportunities.  Of course, re-active sharing is also crucial, that is, responding to someone when they ask you to share something.  Sadly our organizations have been acting like school bullies over the past ten, twenty, fifty, and one hundred years.  We didn’t share and we didn’t care.  Not only that but we also didn’t have the capabilities to share with everyone in the schoolyard, now things are different.

As I’ve stated many times before our organizations today are taking their cues from what is happening in the consumer web where we can easily find people and information, build communities, collaborate, share, and create information at will.

For the future of work sharing is more than caring, it’s survival.

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