Optimal Performance Zone – Affectli

Death to the broken telephone: collaboration has turned strategic

Tee Smith — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 14:18:22 +0000

As kids growing up, we all played that game: broken telephone…

The more people in the “telephone” chain, the more context and information is lost, and the further disconnected we get from the original message. With each person in the link, it is inevitable that information is added, critical information is omitted, and somehow, the end result is vastly different from where it all started.

People focus on communication, communication tools, communication styles, but not enough emphasis is placed on the criticality of contextual communication in order to better – and more effectively – collaborate on tasks, projects and the like.

It’s expected. It’s preached. Tools are provided. And in essence, they are vital components that determine an organisation’s ultimate success (or failure)… but the question begs: Are organisations doing everything they can to achieve what we refer to as Hyper Contextual Collaboration?

Most organisations rely on email as their main form of communication. I have made no secret of the fact that I detest email and elaborate more on this in a recent blog titled: Ridding the world of email. Besides the fact that it’s so time consuming, more often than not, it is missing key information and does not include the right people.

Experts will tell you that the hardest part of communicating effectively, is in knowing how to contextualise the content. Contextual Communication provides the recipient with specific information so that assumptions are not drawn, as well as places meaning into the message. More importantly, it provides a platform for a true dialogue to take place.

Organisations with a strong customer centricity focus are doing well when it comes to providing context when dealing with their customers. However, are they applying the same focus on their most valuable assets, their staff and key stakeholders? Are they doing enough to help make their people as efficient as possible, and in turn, maximising their ROI?

Equally important is the need to provide Contextual Collaboration tools to ensure that groups of people are moving in unison and in sync towards a collective goal. But what happens when a critical area of the business requires attention or an urgent action? How many channels do employees have to navigate through to ensure they get access to all the relevant information and notify the right people timeously?

Data security then also becomes a major issue, and factors to consider include:

What if someone drops the ball and forgets to relay an important piece of information?

Or when someone leaves an organisation – albeit suddenly or even foreseen?

What happens when someone new steps in and is required to pick up where their predecessor left off?

Assuming information hasn’t been lost, misplaced, archived or deleted in its entirety, how long does it take to provide factual, contextual information to sufficiently equip that individual with everything they need in order to carry out the task at hand?

How many people have to stop what they’re doing, and lose momentum while they get the new kid on the block up to speed?

Besides the potential cost implications of a project setback, what are the cost implications to an organisation to get back on track?

Communication and collaboration has turned strategic because at the core of it, data is currency, time is money, and in some instances, could even be a matter of life and death. If organisations were sufficiently equipped with tools that bring their People, Processes and Systems closer together to realise their Optimal Performance Zone, what would it mean to their bottom line?! It’s simple: It would result in a more connected, effective and accountable workforce that would ultimately deliver an increased ROI!

Have you considered how much inefficiency there is in your organisation, and what it would mean to your bottom line if the issue of Hyper Contextual Collaboration was addressed?

Here’s some more food for thought:

86% of employees and executives cite a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures. (Source: Salesforce)

97% of employees and executives believe that a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. (Source: McKinsey)

Knowledge workers spend an average of 14% of their time communicating and collaborating internally. Studies show that internal collaboration through social tools could help increase productivity by as much as 20 to 25%. (Source: McKinsey)

The average worker spends an estimated 28% of their time managing (internal) email and an additional 20% of their time looking for internal information, or tracking down colleagues that can assist with specific tasks. However, when the appropriate social media tools are adopted, this can reduce the time by as much as 35%, with additional value being realised through a faster, more efficient, and more collaborative approach. (Source: McKinsey)

It’s with these very basic principles in mind that we have spent the past 15 years building and developing AFFECTLI into a product that brings Contextual Communication and Contextual Collaboration together to provide an organisation with Hyper Contextual Collaboration tools.

Gone are the days of the broken telephone; he-said-she-said; misplaced or omitted information, documents and the like… We have worked tirelessly and systematically to deliver a tool that ensures that the right people get the right information at the right time – every time – with our fully auditable Hyper Contextual Collaboration (HCC) platform that drives accountability, and increases the Optimal Performance Zone (OPZ) of any organisation, resulting in a sustainable business with a competitive edge.

If you are interested in improving the effectiveness of your organisation’s HCC and OPZ through the adoption of our proven toolkit, AFFECTLI, please feel free to reach out to us for a demo on get in touch.

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Ridding the world of email: Collaboration has turned strategic.

Tee Smith — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 14:19:03 +0000

In 2020, there were a reported 4.03 billion email users, and a staggering 306.4 billion emails sent every day. Email users have since increased to 4.147 billion in 2021, and are predicted to increase to 4.4 billion by 2023. Despite the fact that it makes email the most popular means of communication, it by no means makes it the most effective.

Whilst I fully appreciate the place it has in this modern world we live in, if you ask anyone who knows me, has worked with me, or currently works with me, they will tell you that I absolutely detest email. Here’s why…

In an earlier blog where I delved into The AFFECTLI OPZ philosophy and referenced my friend and mentor, Dr Robert C. Maybery, who has mastered the widely known, respected and trusted Peak Performance Management system, it boils down to a shared passion and vision – optimizing efficiencies within the workplace that help people work smarter – not harder.

Why? Simply put: Time is money and inefficiencies cost organisations millions of Dollars in lost productivity and revenues.

Dr Cal Newport is a computer scientist who recently released a thought provoking book, “A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload”. Whilst he may have pipped me to the post on that one, it is encouraging to see peers and subject matter experts share my passion on the topic because we have spent the past 15 years developing Hyper Contextual Collaboration through the engineering of our platform, AFFECTLI.

In an article published earlier this year in GQ, Dr Newport references the increased stress and work pressures created by the fact that the average worker only has a total of 75 minutes within their work day where they are NOT checking in on their mailbox. That’s 75 minutes out of an 8 hour / 480 minute work day – or rather – 15% of their work day – that they are productive and focusing exclusively on the job they were employed to do. Granted! Some of that time spent is relevant to that particular employee’s function, but it remains significantly marginal.

He goes on to reference in his book that the human brain isn’t wired to jump between “executing work tasks” and “managing an always-present, ongoing, and overloaded electronic conversation about those tasks.”. It goes without saying that the added work pressures of electronic conversations results in further workplace inefficiencies.

If you’re still not convinced that email results in a significant loss of productivity and revenues to an organisation, here’s more…

Adobe conducted a survey in 2018 among 1,000 office workers in the USA, and found that they spent an average of 3.1 hours a day on work email, plus 2.5 hours per weekday on personal email. That equates to 5.6 hours of valuable time each day JUST to manage emails!

In 2019, the average wage in the USA was $51,916.27 per year.

Assuming the employment contract was an average of 40 hours per week, this equates to a cost of $24.96 per hour; $139.78 per day; and $36.341.76 per year – 70% of an (average) annual salary being paid to skilled workers to manage emails, or $20,017.76 per year, assuming that working hours were ONLY dedicated to work-related emails.

But then the rabbit hole of cost implications goes even deeper when you consider the negative side effects and cost implications to an organisation when…

- Excessive emails add unnecessary stress to employees and result in a loss of productivity.

Research by Campaign Monitor revealed that in 2020, the average office worker received an estimated 120 (work related) emails per day, and Templafy reported that a mere 40 emails are sent per day. It goes to reason that a mere 33% of emails are estimated to be relevant to individual employees. And we have all found ourselves in the position whereby you find yourself wasting valuable time filtering through unnecessary emails to establish relevance, making sure that the right people are addressed, copied or blind copied onto mails to ensure that the correct people are being kept in the loop, actioning tasks and meeting deadlines.

- Disjointed conversations that don’t provide context.

Take a project, for example… Each department has their set of tasks in order to achieve a set goal, and along with that, will have their own independent email trails tracking documents, progress, conversations and relevant information to the task at hand. But what happens when something goes wrong, or a critical piece of the puzzle falls through the cracks that results in a negative impact on the project as a whole!? The task of gathering and working through the disjointed sets of information to identify where the problem lies is not only time consuming, but could also be detrimental to the outcome of the task at hand – especially if it’s of a time-sensitive nature that could adversely affect a sale, or lead to a breakdown of vital equipment that results in a manufacturing plant needing to be shut down while the problem is being attended to.

- Loss in conversations, tasks and files.

When an employee leaves an organisation (and even more so, a disgruntled employee), vital information pertaining to business including tasks, files and conversations could potentially be lost forever.

- Sensitive information can be compromised.

We’ve all made that blunder at least once, whereby the incorrect person was included in an email that was not intended for them, and of course, we know what the implications of “leaked” confidential information can result in. The financial and/or reputational damage to an organisation could potentially be catastrophic.

- Informed decision making is compromised due to a lack of the information.

Within various departments of an organization, groups of people work within silos and rely on disparate systems pertinent to their job function. For Managers and C-suite executives to make informed decisions that drive their business, they rely on multiple reports from the respective departments, and assuming there has been no human error in the reporting, and that all reports are delivered timeously, those individuals are still left with the task of consolidating and working through multiple sets of information to arrive at a departure point.

“If you design workflows that allow knowledge workers to spend most of their time focusing without distraction on the activities for which they’re trained, you’ll produce much more total value than if you instead require these same workers to diffuse their attention among many different activities. This latter course is often the more convenient option in the moment, but rarely the most productive in the long term.”

– Dr Cal Newport : A World Without Email

Collaboration has turned strategic and here’s why…

Dr Newport said it in his book, and I´ve been working with my team for the past 15 years to address this major inefficiency within organisations – and that mission was to create Human Centric technology that designs workflows, drives contextual collaboration and communication, and ensures that the right people get the right information at the right time. We refer to it as the Hyper Contextual Collaboration (HCC) approach as a critical and significant cost-saving tool for any organisation.

When we introduced one of our clients to AFFECTLI’s HCC functionality, one of the matrix focals was to measure how many emails we could save the client every month. Their implementation included a NOC of 400 people and 3,000 users, and within the first 30 days, we were able to reduce these by a staggering 14 million emails.

Naturally, we don’t achieve results like this on our own – we engineer with the best-of-the-best underlying technology, components, engines and partners that offer the right functionality to bring our vision to life, and we take great care in choosing partners that we respect and trust. One such partner that is integral in our HCC approach is the Rocket.Chat engine that has been integrated into our platform.

Rocket.Chat is headed up by CEO and co-founder Gabriel Engel who I’ve come to consider a great friend and highly respected visionary. Not only does his technology meet our exacting demands, but he shares our vision on strategic, contextual collaboration and equally important, our stance on data privacy.

It has to be said again: Time is money and inefficiencies cost organisations millions of Dollars in lost productivity and revenues. And since we’re in the business of making people more efficient, more effective and organisation more productive, perhaps the added context to my aversion to email for more than a decade is clearer now…

If you’re looking to save time and money through the adoption of Hyper Contextual Collaboration within your organisation and improve workflows that drive contextual collaboration and communication within a secure platform, please feel free to reach out to us for a demo or to discuss your needs for a tailored solution by emailing get in touch.

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The Affectli OPZ – Insights to drive sustainable excellence

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 17:54:29 +0000

“The ability of an organisation to “stay in the game” can only be achieved through the demonstrated ability of its key people and consistency of performance.”

– Dr Robert C. Maybery

We have spent the past 15 years building and proving a resilient, easily integrated Human Centric technology ecosystem called AFFECTLI. Our mission at the core of the design and engineering of what we do is to help organisations increase their efficiencies, and on that note, would like to introduce you to The AFFECTLI OPZ philosophy.

The AFFECTLI Optimal Performance Zone (A-OPZ) is made possible through the ability to streamline organisations and increase the relationship between People, Processes and Systems (PPS) , making organisations more resilient and effective on all levels.

Contrary to popular belief, digitisation; IoT or the 4th Industrial Revolution is not a technology issue, but an Optimal Performance Zone (OPZ) issue… As technology progresses, we need to increase the relationship between our People, our Processes and our Systems in order to increase the Optimal Performance Zone of an organisation.

One of my dear friends and mentor, Dr Robert C. Maybery, has pioneered and mastered Peak Performance Management. He is known for being very outspoken about the demands that Boards place on their Directors to deliver, noting that nothing is going to change if leaders succumb to short term Q1, 2, 3 and 4 pressures, but rather focus on long-term strategic vision and long term sustainable growth. It is this insight (among many others) that has resulted in his success as a sought-after advisor to many of the largest companies in Europe, and to some of the top F500 companies in the USA (and beyond).

Over the years, we have shared insights on how we can apply his program from a People perspective, and translate it into a digital solution that delivers the best ROI for our customers and organisations adopting digitisation through our AFFECTLI platform.

On the back of the Global Crisis of 2012, he was quoted as saying “There is no short term fix” and the same is true today amidst the global crisis we are currently faced with as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Organisations and their people have been pushed to their limits as the financial implications and mental health & wellbeing of people take a toll, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

“Today, more than ever, forward-thinking organisations must augment and invigorate a cultural transformation to extol operational excellence; far and beyond the generic focus of size and scale, diverse cash flows, fixed cost reduction, ring fencing core resources, expertise and customer loyalty initiatives.”

– Dr Robert C. Maybery

The pandemic has shed a spotlight on the resilience & agility (or lack thereof) within a number of organisations varying in industry and size. Businesses that have been able to sustain themselves over the extended lockdown periods have been forced to trim the fat, revert to zero-based budgets and rebuild from the bottom up, and some companies have had to reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant and sustainable. But it goes beyond that…

If organisations are going to rise from the ashes of this pandemic, and grow into sustainable, profitable businesses, they will be forced to work more efficiently and effectively. There is no question that PPS will need to be orchestrated in perfect unison in order to achieve their OPZ, and the only way to do that, is to adopt the right technology that simultaneously brings these 3 things together in a way that creates a transparent, informed and engaged, accountable workforce.

“Meritocratic organisations commit to and vigorously drive to imbed a no-nonsense performance orientated culture, epitomised by intentionality and highly effective decision making. This culture eschews mediocrity and resistance to change.

The many benefits include, but are not limited to, increased revenues, margin and earnings before tax, satisfied customers, authentically engaged people and significant gains in the speed to market and execution prowess.”

– Dr Robert C. Maybery

Quick wins can be achieved with the right solutions – insights drive excellence. However, even with the best people and systems in place, it will not solve the problem because digital maturity cannot be achieved overnight. A successful strategy is a steady hand on the rudder, – not a sprint chopping and changing solutions – and it requires the sustained application of PPS logic within the business to achieve best in class, increase relationships and reduce complexities – the core ethos that is at the very heart of our engineering, and the philosophy that unites the interconnected elements and logic to deliver the AFFECTLI OPZ for sustainable growth and longevity and to delight our customers.

Also important to note, is that Hyper Contextual Collaboration is another major part of The AFFECTLI OPZ model – which I cover in another Blog that will be published soon.

Simply put, AFFECTLI is a manager of managers toolkit that improves efficiencies by automating business processes through the implementation of a Hyper Collaborative Business Operating System. It is easily integrated into existing systems, or whatever technologies companies have already deployed, and delivers a trackable and auditable solution that will digitise and streamline ANY business, providing a single real-time overview of the entire organisation to drive informed decision making. In doing so, maximum efficiencies are achieved through attaining and (over time,) improving the OPZ, reducing operating costs significantly, and setting organisations on the path to long term sustainable growth.

If you are looking for meaningful intelligence to drive and improve your A-OPZ (The Affectli Optimal Performance Zone), feel free to reach out to us to request a demo or discuss your needs for a tailored A-OPZ solution by emailing get in touch.

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