Lessons from New York Smokers.

I just spend this morning in Manhattan giving a workshop on Enterprise 2.0 and Workplace Video along with Livio Hughes of Headshift and Linda Orton of Intelligent Video Solutions. An upcoming post will be about the workshop itself. This post is just about my impressions of walking around downtown Manhattan and that it reminded me when I first learned about Enterprise 2.0 concepts 20 years ago.

Manhattan is more than a location; it’s an environment with a vibe, an energy with its own personality. Much like the ocean wave is more than a large collection of moving water drops, people hustling up and down the streets form a great human mass of constant motion and energy. It is stochastic and chaotic. Some people walk in pairs or small groups talking to each other as they meander slowly. Many walk solo, with some fixed destination in mind. The solo walkers find their own pace, but seem to be encumbered by the groups.

But then there was the smoking. I’m not a smoker. Never was, never will be. But many of the people who walked ahead of me during my short trip to Manhattan were smokers. I didn’t care for it. But it reminded me of one of the most important workplace lessons I learned about 20 years ago.

I was just finished with college and worked at Xerox Corporation in Webster, NY. I was a knowledge engineer – which was a fancy term they used for someone involved in their Knowledge Based Systems group. The KBS center was formed to unite the best thinking in Knowledge Management techniques with the world of Artificial Intelligence. Unofficially, our group was set up to compete with Xerox PARC. Some in management were upset that PARC invented technology that Xerox failed to capitalize on, and they wanted an alternative think-tank in the company that would target more tactical issues that the business faced – like supply chain management, inventory planning, sales territory configuration, and other mundane business needs.

I worked on a small team with other young technical folks and we build systems for the business. There was on guy on the team who was a smoker, Eric.  About five or six times a day he’d take his break, and puff smoke into the otherwise pleasant air that came off nearby Lake Ontario. Eric was not the lead developer, though he was very skilled. He was always more informed than anyone else. When someone had a question, he’d know about someone in some other group that we could ask and get help. The reason he was so well connected was simple: he was a smoker. Smokers developed an informal employee social network. They spent nearly an hour a day chatting with other smokers in other groups about all sorts of shared interests. Eric was pretty junior, but he hung out with some of the more senior managers too – those who smoked, that is. Eric knew about people and initiatives that we never heard of. He was our eyes and ears, and was invaluable to the team.

It occurred to me then that workplaces need social networks. At that time, our notion of social networks was more like a discussion newsgroup. We did not have profile tools and follow-lists. But we did have on-line communities. And it seemed obvious to me that either HR needed to get everyone to smoke, or we needed some other way to get people to learn about their work environment in a stochastic, social manner. Since getting us to smoke would drive our health insurance costs up, I figured that online workplace communities will be a must-have for large organizations.

Companies set up all-hands meetings, corporate softball teams, weekend charity projects, and many other event structures that are designed, in part, to get people to “gel” together. This is solid business thinking too. Organizations want people to work together effectively. In fact, a recent private study conducted by a colleague of mine in the health-care industry found that the most important element to preventing a particular type of accidental death in a hospital setting is tied directly to how effectively the floor-staff has gelled. The better they are as a team, the higher the likelihood that someone will notice and correct a common procedural mistake that one of their co-nurses made. The hospitals who commissioned this study are now trying to figure out how to get their floor staff to feel like a team. Who would have thought that a weekly pizza lunch and a bulletin board with family pictures could save lives?

I don’t care for smoking. And I’m happy with the quality of life in my quite suburb outside of Boston. But walking in the smoke-filled energetic streets of the big city reminded me about the lesson of breaking corporate tribalism and getting to know people from different ranks and files of the organization. Enterprise 2.0 types of online social networks make this gelling easier, especially when you work in multiple locations. And it’s smoke free.

Tagged as: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, workplace