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How can you manage employees when the capabilities at their fingertips are constantly changing, and the effects of those changes are unpredictable? Users have less and less time to learn from one another. And unlike virtually any other technology we’ve known, AI-enabled digital tools are designed to change by themselves—continuously. To help, the author has devised a framework—STEP—that consists of four interrelated activities: (1) segmenting tasks for either AI automation or AI augmentation; (2) transitioning tasks across work roles; (3) educating workers to take advantage of AI’s evolving capabilities; and (4) evaluating performance to reflect employees’ learning and the help they give others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning new technological skills is essential for digital transformation. But it is not enough. Employees must be motivated to use their skills to create new opportunities. They need a digital mindset: a set of attitudes and behaviors that enable people and organizations to see how data, algorithms, and AI open up new possibilities and to chart a path for success in an increasingly technology-intensive world. This article lays out the basic principles of developing a digital mindset across the workforce, drawing lessons from Philips, Moderna, and Unilever. INSET: The Elements of a Successful Employee-Training Program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lately, people analytics—using statistical insights from employee data to manage talent—has gotten a lot of hype and even won mainstream acceptance. Yet most firms lack an understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance in their organizations. Why? Their analytics examine only the attributes of employees, when people’s interactions are equally, if not more, telling. Research shows that a lot of employees’ success can be explained by their relationships—something that’s the focus of a new discipline, relational analytics. The key is finding “structural signatures”: patterns in social networks that predict who will have good ideas, which employees have the most influence (it’s not senior leaders), which teams will be efficient, which will innovate best, where silos exist, and which employees firms can’t afford to lose. This article describes what indicators to watch for and how most firms already have the raw material they need to build relational analytics models: the “digital exhaust” from their internal communications. INSET: What About Employee Privacy?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To identify the value that social tools can bring to companies, the authors split employees at a large financial services firm into two groups, only one of which used an internal social platform, and observed them for six months. Those who had used the tool became 31% more likely to find coworkers with relevant expertise and 88% more likely to discover who had useful connections. Internal social tools can help employees make faster decisions, develop more innovative ideas for products and services, and become more engaged in their work and their companies. But companies that try to “go social” often fall into four traps: They (1) assume that Millennials will embrace social tools at work; (2) struggle to foster personal interaction that builds trust and promotes knowledge sharing; (3) fail to recognize how learning occurs on social tools; and (4) focus on the wrong data. The authors offer advice on how to avoid these traps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Harvard Business Manager is the property of manager magazin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral visibility should be a central concern for scholars of organizing. We attempt to set the cornerstones for the study of behavioral visibility by considering the social and technological contexts that are enabling behavioral visibility, developing the concept of behavioral visibility by defining its various components, considering the conditions through which it is commonly produced, and outlining potential consequences of behavioral visibility in the form of three paradoxes. We conclude with some conjectures about the kinds of research questions, empirical foci, and methodological strategies that scholars will need to embrace in order to understand how behavioral visibility shapes and is shaped by the process of organizing as we catapult, swiftly, into an era where artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and social tools are changing the way people work.

Copyright of Harvard Business Manager is the property of manager magazin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A recent practice turn in the communication and organizational sciences has led many researchers to study work in practice. In this chapter I suggest that studies of work practices in organizations would benefit from conceptual clarification. To do so, I organize this review around three central questions: (a) what are work practices? (b) what role do work practices play in the process of organizing? and (c) how can scholars build theory from empirical studies of work practices? I suggest several ways in which the concept of work practice can be clarified to provide coherence for communication researchers.

The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of computer-mediated communication. In this chapter, we argue that social media are of important consequence to organizational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were difficult or impossible to achieve in combination before these new technologies entered the workplace. Our review of previous studies of social media use in organizations uncovered four relatively consistent affordances enabled by these new technologies: Visibility, persistence, editability, and association. We suggest that the activation of some combination of these affordances could influence many of the processes commonly studied by organizational communication theorists. To illustrate this point, we theorize several ways through which these four social media affordances may alter socialization, knowledge sharing, and power processes in organizations.

The article presents a joint interview with business researchers Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi. It focuses on a research project they led which found that effective managers tend to reiterate important requests using more than one communications medium. They discuss the extent to which this is a deliberate strategy, and differences they observed between managers with and without formal authority.

The article discusses the pitfalls of using prototypes early in the product-development process. Frequently, early prototypes are followed by more refined ones without due consideration having been given to unresolved ambiguities that the predecessor model obscured due to its simplicity. The author recommends that such questions be settled early in the development process.

The article discusses several aspects of intercultural communication in multinational organizations. Topics discussed include roles of communication in information sharing, building trust and finding common ground, deficiency in educational system affecting organizational interaction and strategies for maintaining work practices integrating distinct cultures.