Collaboration Optimization - Solution Overview

Overview

Modern corporate communication methods are increasingly reliant on instant real-time collaboration solutions, such as Teams, Zoom, or Slack. While these solutions can prove advantageous, inconsistent usage and lack of effective adoption can lead to employee frustrations and ultimately the possible use of uncompliant or “shadow” collaboration tools.

The Collaboration Optimization library pack allows you to measure the actual usage and adoption of a chosen real-time collaboration tool, detect shadow collaboration, engage with users for further context, and identify resistance to change.

Use cases and problems being solved by this solution

This pack is ideally designed to be used in an environment with an installed and established collaboration tool, such as MS Teams, Zoom or Slack, with generally high usage and adoption across the organization. This pack addresses those behaviors and issues that fall outside the general band of usage:

The identification of highly engaged, or “champion” employees who can be of great use to you, as they can act as evangelists for the product, driving adoption amongst their colleagues, or even as a testbed for new features or accessories
The identification of non-engaged users, who can be targeted with campaigns such as the one included with this pack to try to ascertain reasons for their non-engagement, or to offer training etc. Various measures are collected to help you determine potential reasons why this group are not engaged, including device performance, application stability or a preference for using email.
Many organizations, and employees, use more than one collaboration tool. This is not a problem in itself, but it can be useful to see to what extent this is happening and to get an idea of which other tools are being used.
The flipside of this is where employees, or groups of employees, are using “shadow” or non-approved tools to communicate together. This can be a potentially serious security issue for a company, depending on what is being used. Alternatively, you may identify a group of early adopters using a tool which should be used more widely in your organization.

Intended Audience

The pack is particularly focused on the following roles in an organization: Service Desk Service Owner Product Education department Corporate Compliance - for dealing with “shadow” IT applications

Nexthink Persona Insight - a brief overview

This pack is built on the concept of Personas introduced in the Persona Insight pack.

The aim of understanding a Persona is to be able to identify which of the employees within your organization are exhibiting a particular behavior – be it using a piece of software, accessing a specific domain, consuming a certain amount of resources, whatever it may be; and then to drive an action based on that Persona.

This idea is split into two concepts:

Persona Traits – these are the “building blocks” that measure an individual construct – in this case the amount of time that a specific collaboration tool is used during the working day. The key point on Persona Traits is that they are measured between 0-10, so for each employee you can see not only that they are exhibiting a trait, but by how much they are exhibiting it.

Personas – Personas are made up from one or more traits and are generally binary – you are or you are not. An example of a Persona in this case would be an employee who is exhibiting very low usage of the specific collaboration program mentioned above.

Personas and Persona Traits identified in the Collaboration Optimization pack

By specifying a chosen, or target collaboration tool, you can measure the usage and level of adoption of this application across your organization. Four personas are identified: Champion employees – Employees who are fully engaged with this application are identified as “champions”. Champion employees can be of great use to you, as they can act as evangelists for the product, driving adoption amongst their colleagues. Non-engaged employees - Employees who are non-engaged with the application are also identified and various measures are shown to help you determine why that might be, including device performance, application stability or a preference for using email. Other / Shadow collaboration tool users – Those employees who, whilst they may use the target collaboration tool, have indicated a preference for a different collaboration tool. This can take two forms; the use of an “other collaboration tool” - an application supported by the organization but not in general use, or the use of a “shadow” collaboration tool - an application that is not approved by the organization’s IT department.

Pre-Requisites

The Collaboration Optimization pack utilizes Focus Time for score generation. This feature was introduced for Windows clients in Nexthink v6.29 and for macOS clients in v6.30.

Therefore, for Windows only clients this pack can be installed on Nexthink V6.29 (On Premise) or 2020.5 (Cloud). For Windows and macOS clients, Nexthink v6.30 (On Premise) or 2021.1 (Cloud) will be required.

The pack also utilizes the Digital Experience Score 2.x, so please download the latest version of DEX for your environment if it is not already installed.

This pack is built on the concept of Personas introduced in the Persona Insight pack, however this is a standalone pack and Persona Insight does not need to be installed for this pack to function.

Pack structure

This pack is constructed in a similar fashion to the Persona Insights pack. Whilst this is a standalone pack, some familiarity with the concept of Persona Traits and Personas may prove useful when configuring this pack.

Scores

There are two scores included in this pack. One score measures the focus time of the applications specified in the categories mentioned above. The second score measures and summarizes the first score to define the personas used in this pack. The main advantage of this approach is as follows: In order to change the threshold for non-engaged users for example, the score value (by default, “4”) can be changed once in the summary score query, and this will take effect for all metrics and dashboards that reference it.

Metrics

The metrics are separated into folders according to the dashboards that reference them. Due to the summary score system employed in this pack, in most cases the metrics do not need to be modified to adjust the thresholds of the information they provide.

Dashboards

There are four dashboards included in this pack.

Overview

This Dashboard gives a summary of your landscape, showing your key employee activity in this area along with the technical deployment and stability of your collaboration tool landscape. This is a summary dashboard, more detailed information can be found using the other dedicated dashboards in this pack.

Champion employees

This dashboard shows more detail on those employee “champions” who are fully engaged with your target real time collaboration tool. Champion employees can be of great use to you, as they can act as evangelists for the product, driving adoption amongst their colleagues.

Non-engaged employees

This Dashboard provides more detail on the employees who are not engaged with your target real time collaboration tool.

Landscape

This section shows the number and ratio of non-engaged employees, and also the Digital Experience score of their devices. The number of non-engaged employees is listed by region and worker type and their Digital Experience and Focus Time are tracked over time. There is also a breakdown by operating system

The next sections provide more information on the possible reasons for non-engagement with the collaboration tool.

Non-engaged employees with high usage of email client

One possible reason for employee non-engagement with a collaboration tool could be an over-reliance on a (possibly more familiar) email client. Obviously some roles have a higher reliance on email use than others but this section will show you those non-engaged employees who have exhibited a strong preference for the use of an email client (using Focus Time). As you try to move employees away from email and into more real time collaboration, use this dashboard to identify the employees to contact and think of using Engage Campaigns to advertise the benefits of real time collaboration.

Performance and Stability

Another reason for non-engagement could be due to a general poor performance of the device or specific application instability of the collaboration tool in question.

Taken together, this information might provide your support teams with some additional information on why the employees listed are not engaged with the target collaboration tool.

Other / Shadow collaboration tool users

This Dashboard provides more detail on those employees who, whilst they may use the target collaboration tool, have indicated a preference for a different collaboration tool.

This dashboard differentiates between two types of behaviour:

The use of an “other collaboration tool” - an application supported by the organization but not in general use.

The use of a “shadow” collaboration tool - an application that is not approved by the organization’s IT department.

Campaigns

There are two campaigns included with this pack, targeted at two different employee personas.

Champion employee campaign

As heavy users of a collaboration tool, it is mutually beneficial for these champion employees to have the best experience possible. As a result, recipients of this campaign will be offered additional hardware (a dedicated headset, an external HD webcam etc) to make them more comfortable when using the application.

Non-engaged employee campaign

The second campaign is designed to be targeted at non-engaged employees in order to ascertain why it is that they do not make full use of the target collaboration tool provided. It may be this application is not something they use every day, the first question will ask them to confirm this. A multiple choice question will follow to help determine the cause of their non-engagement. If you can understand this as an organization, you can take action if necessary. The final question asks whether respondents have a preference for a different collaboration tool, and if so, which one(s). If you are informed that a sufficiently large subset of employees prefer to use a different collaboration tool, then you have a choice to make as to how to proceed.