Do you consider your team, your division, or your organization as groups that communicate effectively? Is your organization utilizing virtual collaborative tools efficiently to stay connected and engaged? Is this team-centric data telling you that your team is engaged and collaborating successfully?
With the number of virtual workplace settings increasing, are your strategies to observe behaviors and capture this type of data working for you? Either in or out of the office, many decisions are data-centric. In a virtual space there is more data available, which presents an opportunity to consider improving team communication utilizing sociomapping®.
What is Sociomapping?
Sociomapping is an end-to-end facilitated experience led by a certified sociomapping guide. It addresses the topics of team communication, cooperation, and leadership and decision-making. It includes:
development of a survey topic and questions specific to your team,
administration of the web-based survey,
guided review of real-time data in a 3-D heat map, and a
detailed results overview to develop action or training plans.
From a socio-technical perspective, it is a data driven model that reveals hidden behaviors and trends in your team’s workplace communication. The analysis provides a picture, literally a 3-D drawing, of how well your team is or isn’t communicating.
You may learn that your team remains dependent on older, less advanced applications rather than new virtual collaboration tools. This kind of information is gathered through the sociomapping process. It gives you the decision-making information you need to create training or re-training programs. You can adjust change management strategies and develop individual and team performance improvement plans.
Where Sociomapping is Used
Sociomapping is not just for large companies or specific industries. It is used in academia, healthcare, aerospace, and economic, social, and political science. Sociomapping delivers a 3-D rendering of how a team interacts. It notes behaviors and potential or actual hurdles. The tool does more that measure team dynamics alone. It also provides insight into the use of virtual office tools, identifies where groups seek information, and more.
Keeping individuals and teams engaged and empowered in any environment is a top priority. However, knowing if your audience is actively engaged may be a challenge. Through effective facilitation and simple questions delivered by a virtual survey, sociomapping illustrates where team strengths lie. For example:
Team communication – identifying most and least effective relationships
Collaboration via virtual tools – identifying if groups employ single or various solutions
Higher Performing Teams
Through sociomapping, team and organization leaders learn how effectively or ineffectively their teams use their virtual work tools. As a result, this process helps identify coaching and training opportunities. And this solution does not have to be a one-time exercise. Recurrent use shows if team health and behaviors are improving, remaining the same, or trending elsewhere. Survey results show a communication and collaboration health picture and can contribute toward proactive team development. This results in higher performing teams, even in today’s new virtual work environment.