Stimulatingcollective intelligence in companies means circulating intelligence and know-how to create transversality and new know-how. Thus, collective intelligence tools can help you to instil a corporate culture that is both more participative and transversal. All stakeholders will benefit. On the one hand, the employees, who will feel more valued and involved in the company. And on the other hand, the organisation itself, which will emerge both more agile and more efficient.
3 collective intelligence tools to boost your corporate culture
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A social learning tool
If collective intelligence is defined as "the combination of a team's abilities and skills", then naturally the subject of skills seems central. To begin with, however, it is necessary to circulate skills and abilities. In other words, a system for sharing skills must be put in place.
Please note that we are not talking about a large LMS managed by Human Resources. Often, these tools are heavy, full of processes, and still convey a very top-down spirit. HR publishes a training course, and employees are invited to follow it... On the contrary, operating with collective intelligence should involve a skills sharing system managed directly by the business lines. What's in it for you? As a complement to the HR system, it is a question of proposing a more flexible and rapid skills sharing system, and above all one that is closer to the field and more social. An "average" employee should be able to share his or her own skills or good practices in a few clicks, in the form of a simple MOOC, a video with an explanatory paragraph, so that all his or her colleagues can benefit.
With collective intelligence tools of this type, teams gain agility and increase their skills more quickly. This is how they will become the number one players in collective intelligence.
A tool for facilitating collective intelligence
It is essential to implement collective intelligence tools that will boost your approach. Because collective intelligence is something that is put into motion, that is activated! The best thing is to have facilitation tools that help you create interactions between people.
One example is an internal platform for hosting webinars. Internal webinars are an excellent way to stimulate collective intelligence! They can also complement a social learning system. Imagine, for example, that an employee would first publish a MOOC to share a skill. The following week, he or she would explain it live in a webinar, thus taking advantage of the opportunity to answer questions from peers. This is an extremely rewarding system for the 'knowing' employee, but also very useful for the 'learner' who can ask questions and benefit from very concrete feedback.
Another example of a facilitation tool is online discussion forums. This type of space allows you to ask questions, conduct polls or surveys, to encourage employees to reflect and interact on certain topics. The key to successfully setting up a discussion forum is preparation. Always have a schedule of topics to discuss, questions to ask or people to interview. And think about complementing this type of digital tool with physical meetings, co-development workshops, World Cafés, etc. Because the "face-to-face" social link is essential to collective intelligence.
A tool for proposing ideas and innovations
L'collaborative innovationis in a way the ultimate goal of collective intelligence. Because once you have decompartmentalised skills and points of view, you have to decompartmentalise ideas. All the ideas! The ones that will make your company progress, that will improve or revolutionise its products, its services or its organisation.
To put it another way,collaborative innovation is a collective intelligence process that consists of putting the employees in the field at the heart of value creation,continuous improvement, but also disruptive innovations.
Among the collective intelligence tools, there is nothing like tools that offer employees the opportunity to easily suggest new ideas or innovations. And of course, these tools should also allow you to categorise, classify and select the most relevant ideas, in order to experiment with them or even industrialise them!
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The essential characteristics of collective intelligence tools
Ease of use
Even if the benefits of collective intelligence are very quickly felt by the employee and the company, you should know that simply participating in collective intelligence, whatever the format or the tool chosen, requires time. And your employees are always short of time ! By choosing collective intelligence tools that are easy to use, with an intuitive and fun interface, you make them want to participate and you save them time.
Moreover, facilitating the user experience also means offering the most integrated experience possible. This is also known as a "seamless" experience. A platform like Beeshake allows you to offer an all-in-one experience to your users. Indeed, they can access the same platform to share their know-how, participate in internal activities and projects, or suggest new innovation projects as a team.
Ease of information processing
If the interface of your collective intelligence tools must be attractive to users, the processing of data must be just as attractive to you, the administrator. Because to manage the process, it is essential to have access to well-designed dashboards, as well as to exportable and analysable data.
Collaborativity
Collective intelligence is not just about one person sharing their opinion, skills or ideas with others. It is a way of working across the board and in maximum collaboration. Exchanges must be multi-directional, and everyone must be able to enrich the contributions of their peers, participate in an idea, bounce back or debate. So avoid tools where everyone participates in their own corner.
