Leveraging teamwork by Google+ in a lifelong learning perspective

Abstract

The current affordances of ubiquitous global connections, of a large number of open resources, and of social and professional networks may boost innovation in open-minded organisations through their personnel’s empowerment. Lifelong and ubiquitous learning, cloud computing and smart working frameworks are the pillars of the change that is replacing the traditional work model and transforming the way crowds of people communicate, collaborate, teamwork, produce value and growth for the entities of which they are part. All this directly involves the smart city concept. The “cloudworker” virtually works, learns and socially participates effectively from anywhere anytime, and comfortably interacts in a knowledge society built on networked ecologies. Cloud teamwork applications, such as Google+ can be, enable teams to be more productive and organisations to devote more time to their core mission. Social networking and collaboration technologies draw renewed attention on the evidence that organisations are social entities above all; as such, they can turn into whole systems of leadership and learning, that is high-performance work systems. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Google+ as a leveraging teamwork tool in learning organisations. Results show that technology is not only a means of social exchange, but it turns into the joint design of learning and organisational strategies, and into the growth of learning communities.