The December 2006 San Francisco Bay Tertulia welcomed Dr. Terri Griffith, Professor of Management at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.Her talk, titled Knowledge Transfer and Virtual Work: A Brief History of this Universe, centered on studies of how teams – both virtual and co-located—operate in the real world. Dr. Griffith reviewed previous studies on presence effects, team structure, the issue of team size, the role of monitoring, and group processes and discussed her recent research on team performance.
Her most recent study, (Griffith & Sawyer, 2006; Sawyer & Griffith, 2006) measured team-level performance. It explored the question -- Is face to face attendance at a community of practice event important? The study worked with a company that was spending 40 to 50 million dollars for community of practice meetings where members come together for a week and sit in on lots of presentations. About 40% of the members of a practice attended one of these meetings over a 2-year span. Were these meetings effective? Did the knowledge ecosystem matter? The answer was yes, those that attended the community of practice meetings performed better.
Another question explored was, when people in these teams have more knowledge, does the company make more money? Again, yes. Not only does customer satisfaction improve, but revenue goes up as well. Any one point increase in customer satisfaction is worth about a million dollars. Each team showed a 1.5 point higher customer satisfaction score than did teams that did not participate in community of practice events.
Notes and the PowerPoint presentation of Prof. Griffith's discussion, are available on the New Ways of Working website at: http://www.newwow.net/members/node/168
