Improve cross-division collaboration for knowledge transfer

TelCo. wanted to achieve a behavioral change in its team towards greater collaboration to enable knowledge transfer. Therefore, TelCo. brought SCG’s on-demand workforce to understand the issues currently inhibiting collaboration between units, discover management actions to improve employees' interaction and define KPIs to measure collaboration.

The key questions in the project were:

Q1: What are the motivations and incentives for an employee?

Q2: Did each business unit identify with the success of the other?

Q3: What should be the targets and KPIs to enable collaboration and interaction between the teams?

TelCo. business unit teams had spent different time periods in the company, i.e. older employees from the established business unit and new employees from recent acquisitions. The established business unit had strong domain expertise while the new employees worked on new technologies. So, TelCo. faced internal barriers in collaboration between the olders and new teams. These barriers were related to both company culture as well as the formal goals between teams. Therefore TelCo. wanted to find a way to break down the barriers and increase interaction between the teams.

TelCo. utilized SCG’s on-demand workforce to benchmark the best practices on employee collaboration, understand each team’s position on the topic, their incentives structure and performance measurement metrics.

SCG conducted a three-phase project:

Phase 1 – Key strategic goals for each team

SCG's agile workforce initiated the project by understanding TelCo. management’s goals i.e. Strategic focus, KPIs and incentives, collaboration expectations. After understanding these, an exhaustive industry case research was conducted and the key levers for knowledge-sharing and collaboration were identified. They were: ability, motivation and opportunity.

Phase 2 – Team’s perspective on current state of collaboration

In this phase, SCG's agile workforce conducted in-depth interviews with TelCo’s employees to gain a holistic understanding of the situation internally. It was found that relationships between people were good, joint projects have worked well and employees saw it easy to cooperate with the other team’s members. SCG's agile workforce identified resource allocation and prioritization of joint tasks as a challenge. This is primarily due different development cultures, additionally the goals and incentives did not encourage collaboration.

Phase 3 – Create and validate solutions based on data analysis

Finally, based on the analysis of data collected from the employees recommendation were developed utilizing a Behavioural change framework. Starting from

1. Top-level factors i.e. Organizational culture, identity and values.
2. Formal goals and incentives that communicate company values.
3. Organizational structure that encourages active collaboration
4. Existing culture and structures manifest at a behavioural level

These recommendations were then validated with employees to ensure they could be put into action at TelCo.