German companies overcome E2.0 challenges.

The best quote from my visit to the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt was shared by a community manager who works in a large French tel-com.

I am prepared to be surprised.

We were talking about his E2.0 initiative which is now gaining momentum and is on the path to success.  I loved this mindset.  It is incredibly healthy and self-aware.  Read it over again.  It is a profound statement that allows for the humility of surprise, with the professionalism of preparedness.

How does one prepare to be surprised?  I guess you have to experience many surprises to prepare for another one.  I experienced some surprises here.  Yes, I expected to learn a lot.  I expected that there are differences between the US and European E2.0 marketplaces (I spent a short time working in Europe many years ago).  But I’m not sure I was prepared for the all the interesting things I learned.

After spending some time with Prof. Dr. Joachim Niemeier today, I have a new insight into some of the challenges that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have in the German market. I learned that over 70% of the German workforce works in small to medium size companies. And that when companies grow to a certain size (about 30-40 workers) they can form workplace councils — which are somewhat similar to the unions that we have in the US.  But there’s a difference.  Typically we think of US unions that collectively negotiate for truckers, auto workers, or steel workers.  But Germans companies have unions for office workers.

Unions represent a very interesting collaboration challenge.  On the one hand, a union is a workplace community.  Workers share a common fate and collect their interests in the form of a collective voice.  This, in theory, is quite aligned with 2.0 concepts.  But in reality these worker councils and E2.0 are a tricky mix.  Workers councils leverage their power to negotiate nearly everything in a workplace.  This can create a naturally adversarial relationship between workers and management.  Enter E2.0 tools that are designed to level the conversation-playing field, and you can see there are big problems here.

But wait, there’s more.  Much more.  The union leaders are not so keen on having E2.0 tools since it can result in eroding their power and give more power to the workers that the union represents.  Managers in small companies can also form owner-councils.  This can help them negotiate with the workers’ councils — and may also be threatened by the shift in power too.  In other words — there are decision makers on both sides that are threatened by E2.0.  So in order to implement E2.0 tools in these environments, you have to have shared agreement by all the decision makers before you proceed (even before you pilot this).  Oh, by they way, negotiations that are made between the workers council and management can impact workers who are not represented by the council too.  So for example, if the union agrees to a flex time arrangement and a 5% pay raise, then these apply to non union workers too.  <jaw dropped> Are you serious? </jaw dropped> Yes.

But wait — in Germany you cannot make performance assessments of your employees based on digital information that you collect about them.  I asked the good professor to explain by posing this question:  Let’s say I hire two application developers to write code for me.  One of them writes more code with fewer defects and is better documented.  Both place their code in our source code repository which happens to provide me with information about these details.  I’d like to reward the programmer who has earned it.  But I cannot.  I cannot discriminate against the other programmer based on the digital data that I have collected about them.  But, the professor tells me that I can use qualitative measures. — You mean I can reward the better performer if I find her more friendly?  Yes.  And if I track which salesperson sells more product, then that data cannot be used either?  No.

I must admit to being really taken aback by this description.  I don’t know if I got all the facts right, but I did get the sense that business is different in Germany.  Most E2.0 vendors probably are unaware of just how different the German workplace is.

But now for the biggest surprise of the day — and it was a positive one.  I gave a talk called “Preparing the Workforce for Enterprise 2.0″ (I’ll share details in another post.)  After my introduction, I asked the participants of the mostly full room about them.  There were very few E2.0 vendors and consultants in the room.  Most participants were working in some European company that was already implementing Enterprise 2.0.  Some were planning to implement E2.0.

Whereas the E2Conf in the US was quite well represented by vendors and consultants in the E2.0 space, the E20 Summit in Frankfurt was filled with corporate clients — mainly Germans, but some French, Italians, and other too.  (This is due to the way Kongress Media markets their conferences.)  Sure, this was a much smaller conference in total size, but it was very interesting to meet so many people who are implementing E2.0 as their full time role.  Learning just how challenging this can be gave me an added appreciation for the fantastic work that is going on here.

I was unprepared to be as impressed as I am.

Tagged as: behaviors, conference, culture, Enterprise 2.0, event, expert, workplace