Work from home is missing a key ingredient: serendipity

Why a chat-roulette like technology can be a disruptive way to change the way communication flows at work

While sitting at your desk, one of your colleague invites you for a coffee. It has been a while since your last break and you feel that it could be refreshing to go for a walk. Getting to the cafeteria, your colleague meets her former boss and she introduces her to you, spending very good words around the work you are doing on the specific program. She gets very curious and asks a few questions as she has been invited to an LT meeting for that program.

You have the opportunity to show your knowledge while positioning a couple of key points you were discussing with your manager. Once back alone with your colleague, she tells you that she was a fantastic boss, they kept a very good relationship and she is currently hiring in that department. You continue your coffee conversation as usual. At night while commuting back, you look for her on LinkedIn and send a connect that gets immediately confirmed back.

In different flavors, this was a very common scenario in a previous COVID-19 working environment. Commuting together, getting a coffee, going for lunch, or sharing the elevator were opportunity of “serendipity” events characterizing the way the information was flowing in the organization, besides formal occasions.

Frans Johansson, author of the Medici’s effect, published in 2012 an interesting article on HBR, clearly concludes that successful career results more often from serendipitous encounters, unexpected changes in plans, and random consequences than logical explanations, recommendations, pathways, and approaches. The fact is the information continuum has an intrinsic value, no matter how able we are to structure our organization.

This information continuum is the stream of information that flows out of meetings or other formal commuincation opportunities (nodes) directly into the mesh. Less hierarchical is the organization, higher is its value.

In our days, Work From Home is the new normal. 64% of US employees are working from home now, according to research conducted by SHRM’s COVID-19 Business.

Our way of communicating with colleagues and bosses has been “completely” deprived of the serendipity effect. We communicate mainly on need or on meetings, which means that information flows only through specific input/events solving the information continuum into a mesh.

What are we missing?

From an organization’s point, this is introducing a strong hierarchical effect that risks impacting negatively specific functions, mainly the most creative ones (e.g. sales, innovation) and in a long run, it can result in a loss of business.

How to bring serendipity effect in a WFH environment?

Well, a provocative idea could be to leverage new social technology potential and equip the organization with opportunities that elicit communication out of nodes (a sort of enterprise “Randoutica”, where you promote informal communication). So bear with me and let me share with you a Proof of Concept that could bring value back to the continuum. This is not only a need of traditionally siloed organization: increasing communication is a must also for mergers and acquisitions as cultural integration is one of the biggest challenges.

A four rules game to bring back serendipity in the organization

Let’s say that MS Teams or ZOOM delivers a new functionality which connects in chat-roulette fashion, employees with the following basic rules:

Rule 1: Choice

With an AI algorithm based on specific criteria that can be crafted and adjusted based on some usage statistics based on sector and the level of cross-communication, you want to inject: in a manufacturing plant for instance you can promote communication up to -2 with a certain probability and you leave in the tails communication from -3 levels; in creative functions or to promote an “unboss” culture, equally distributing the interaction among levels would be an interesting levy

Rule 2: the Time

All employees must devolve some time to cross-communication. Also here according to the function and need this can be crafted and adjusted (unbossed organization should have an equality criterion, that could be simply 1 hour for months).

Rule 3: the Slot

This hour is split into slots (e.g.5 minutes), this to maximize the interaction. A template could be defined to break the ice and help to focus on specific organizational value (for instance, if you are running a “curiosity” campaign, the introduction could be around that.

Rule 4: the Feedback

It could be simple as a connection to the company yammer or LinkedIn. It could also help to have anonymous feedback or social rating around behavioral skills. The retrofit to the AI algorithm of Rule 1, could help to create patterns to promote specific patterns equalizing communication for organic growth, mapping relationships, and solving “Void” or “Attractors” in the network.

Conclusions

There are functions in modern organizations that cannot be fully engineered and what is not considered, can lead to material losses during contraction of the markets. Innovation is not a manufacturing process, neither is sales. Predicting trends, analyzing data, detailed processes or any sort of logical approach will not help discover things that are not obvious or logical. Bringing together people within the organization siloed departments or between different countries or cultures, it creates interactions rich in unexpected insights and opportunities which are vital to catching new opportunities in changing ecosystems. Communication digital technologies will need to evolve around new functionalities that bring back serendipity within the organization. In this article, we have explored four rules “game” that could increase communication across levels eliciting new opportunities.

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Disclaimer: Views or opinions represented in this article are personal and belong solely to the article writer and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the writer may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated.

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