Why do we need an app for collaboration?
Executive summary
A digital tool to increase performance
Since a group’s collective intelligence and performance to a large extent is determined by the quality of the team debriefs, or reflections, within the group, improving the quality of debriefs is essential. By conducting team debriefs using a digital tool, a team can benefit from the anonymous mode – to avoid social processes – and from parallelism – to secure that all perspectives are included in the discussion.
Executive summary
A digital tool to increase performance
Since a group’s collective intelligence and performance to a large extent is determined by the quality of the team debriefs, or reflections, within the group, improving the quality of debriefs is essential. By conducting team debriefs using a digital tool, a team can benefit from the anonymous mode – to avoid social processes – and from parallelism – to secure that all perspectives are included in the discussion.
Why do we need an app for collaboration?
How can an app increase performance in teams?
On average, we spend 80% of our working hours cooperating with others, a number that has doubled over the last 20 years. Thus, organizations’ cooperation qualities are becoming increasingly important. At the same time, we know that cooperation is difficult and that there are costs in efficiency and performance when people work together. For this reason, organizations need to improve their teams’ abilities to cooperate, or in other words, their collective intelligence.
A powerful tool to increase group cooperation and performance is the concept of team debriefs. A team debrief is a session in which the team’s performance is discussed. Research shows that debriefs increase team performance by 20-25%. As organizations become more digitized, it also becomes interesting to investigate if we can move the debriefs to a digital platform and by that help teams to improve their cooperation abilities and performance.
Why a digital tool?
There are several reasons for using a digital tool to support teams. Some are associated with general benefits of digital tools, such as the ability for people to work at different points in time, or the ability to work together despite physical distance.
We further argue that a digital application increases team performance based on two critical functions:
- Anonymous mode
- Parallelism
Anonymous mode – to avoid obstacles caused by social processes
The first benefit of using a digital tool is the anonymous mode. When we communicate, we identify ourselves with what we say. This means that the way people react to what we say will affect how we perceive ourselves. We feel that their reactions are connected to us as individuals. This makes us vulnerable when we voice our opinion and potentially limits what we choose to communicate. Furthermore, when we communicate, we tend to be more positive to things said by people we like, and more negative towards things said by people we dislike. Thus, our evaluation of what someone says is subconsciously biased by what we think of that person in general.
These phenomena highlight the fact that social processes affect what we say and do, and how we perceive what other people say. This means that, when we discuss something with other people, not all ideas, thoughts, and perspectives are brought up. This, in turn, means that the best ideas sometimes get rejected because of who came up with them, rather than due to the actual content.
Hence, a digital tool where input is anonymous, can help people voice difficult thoughts. If the tool was not anonymous, these aspects might not be voiced due to fear of being exposed. Also, anonymity helps people focus on the quality of submitted content, without influence of the status of the person posting the content.
Parallelism – to secure all perspectives are included
The second benefit of using a digital tool is that it allows for parallelism, i.e. multiple users working at the same time. Part of this benefit comes from the mere fact that people can write input at the same time, saving valuable time. However, more vital is that people can write and share their thoughts without being influenced by other team members. When we do things in parallel, each participant can stay within his or her own perspective for some time, think about it and enter it into the tool. The tool allows for all perspectives to be saved and discussed, one after the other.
The digital tool can also help steer the discussion in a direction based on importance, instead of who speaks first. In a group discussion, every group member has a different perspective on what needs to be discussed. Without the tool, if one person in the group starts talking about his/her perspective, the rest of the group must choose if they want to continue focusing on their own thoughts, or switch focus and start listening to the person who started talking. If they keep focusing on their own thought, they will have a hard time listening to the person talking. If they start listening to the person talking, their own perspective potentially gets lost.
