Collaborative climate in Romanian enterprises

A few weeks ago, I invited about 100 friends to participate in an online survey on collaborative climate in Romanian enterprises. I also asked them to forward the email to friends and colleagues. Vladimir Oane, Bobby Voicu and Cristi Manafu wrote on their blogs about the survey. The response was great – 278 people answered the questionnaire. Many thanks to all who participated! You were incredible!

As promised, all of the results are available for anyone to use. You can download the bar chart report (in English) and my interpretation of the results (in Romanian). Just drop a comment or email if you want the complete raw data to process for yourself (the answers are, of course, anonymous).

If you’re busy, here’s a snapshot of some results:

• We really want to share knowledge (91% of participants enjoy sharing knowledge).
• We think that our organizations demand the results of knowledge sharing from us, but don’t give us the support or the tools we need.
• We can communicate more openly in our team than in the organization as a whole, but the overall collaborative climate score is lower for the work team than for the organization. This is one of the most intriguing finding of the survey.
• There is a scary disconnect between the way managers view collaborative climate and the way their subordinates see it. Managers are much more optimistic across the board. Do you think that’s due to “rose-tinted glasses” that managers wear, or to a more positive environment for managers?
• 78% of managers think they are encouraged to express opinions even in disagreement with their superiors, versus only 60% of general employees. Why do you think that is so?
• The size of the firm you work in doesn’t seem to matter at all!
• Between the ages of 25 and 35 we become much more pessimistic about collaboration.
• 40% of respondents are NOT able to find out what similar work has been done in the past when embarking on a new project. This means that a huge amount of work is re-created from scratch, instead of being reused.
• 45% of respondents find that multiple people in their organization are working on the same problem independently. Again, a huge waste of resources. And the problem is more acute for large companies, compared to smaller ones. What’s surprising is that the medium-sized companies (50-100 employees) are the worst off. Perhaps because they’ve outgrown purely informal collaboration, but have no procedures in place?
• Only 64% of respondents organize regular meetings with the purpose of sharing knowledge. Most of the knowledge sharing is performed via informal discussions (87% share knowledge in this way).
• 40% of the participants are NOT able to keep their colleagues up to date with work trends and important news.
• We don’t seem to feel that we’ve learned a lot working in our firms. Only 79% think that knowledge sharing has helped them learned; only 50% think that most of their expertise was gained within the firm. We perceive that knowledge sharing has more benefits for the firm than for us.
• We all think we are great at knowledge sharing and collaborating, but work with dense loners and knowledge hoarders (77% of the participants accuse their colleagues of preferring to work alone).

For more in-depth analysis, you’re welcome to download the reports.

Office 2.0 apps and usage in Romania

Last week, I was invited to talk about Office 2.0 applications on the IT&C show at the Money Channel. Their archive seems to lag 1-2 months behind their live show, so don’t hold your breath waiting to see the show :D

I took advantage of this opportunity to add to my understanding of apps in the Office 2.0 area that are being developed and used in Romania. Here’s a round-up of the people I talked to and our discussions:

• Mircea Goia put together a vey well-researched round-up of Web 2.0 presence in Romania on Read/Write Web. The article was written mid-June, so it is still fairly up-to-date. This was my starting point. His focus was mostly on social networks, while I was more interested in enterprise collaboration. Two of his apps fit my profile: Metromind’s BluoCMS and Soft32’s ZuluWriter. I contacted both of them. I also wrote to Mircea, who was very responsive… but, unfortunately, in a different timezone on the other side of the globe! I couldn’t get his input before the show, but look forward to discussing in the future.
• Vladimir Oane of Metromind was a joy to talk to – a wealth of ideas. We wondered why Romanian customers prefer paying a large amount up-front in order to own the product rather than going with a subscription-based model (even when the software they pay for will be outdated long before their investment pays off!). He insisted that the limiting factor in usage of Office 2.0 in Romania is culture, not technology – a point with which I fully agree. East European education methods and work ethics have been strongly individualistic and competitive for a long time. Collaboration has always been present, but more in the form or familism or cronyism (for ex. “suflatul la ore”) than in the form of open cooperation. However, “we build our tools, then they shape us“, (to quote a favorite Stowe Boyd theme). Our culture has been determined by the tools we have been encouraged and allowed to use, as much as by the assignments we have been given and the results we have been measured against. How quickly can culture cange when you introduce new tools? It is very likely to depend on how assignments and evaluation change, as well.
• Lucian Todea of ITNT/Soft32 has one of the more interesting projects around: ZuluWriter, an online word processor and document manager. Gotta love their homepage! Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant at the moment. The functionality as hinted (not yet implemented) seems to be quite promising in the tagging and content sharing area.
• Zoltan Lorincz of Mindomo has the only fully-developed Office 2.0 application that I am aware of at the moment (in Romania, of course). He is based in Timisoara, and he openly told me he doesn’t expect Romanian client anytime soon. Mindomo is a (feature-rich) mindmapping application, and mindmapping itself is somewhat of a novelty to most Romanian corporate settings. A pity.