The 3 factors of the sharing economy in the company

When referring to the distinctive features of the so –called sharing economy – which owns most of this success to AirBnB’s founder, Brian Chesky – we need to consider 3 factors: 

1. Information in the company, common heritage to share

Let’s start from the first point: common use of the resources. 

In an organisation, information is a strategic resource, as long as it is shared within it and employed efficiently for the business. Despite appearances in many companies this does not happen.  

If everything goes well, the communication happens along parallel tracks or business functions: administration, management control, ICT systems, logistics, marketing, Human Resources, etc. Each of these functions follows a vertical communicative trajectory, from management to the operational roles. As a result, the employees that belong to the single areas often do not share data about the same client or the same project.  It is a rigid approach, based on the subdivision by standard skills in which do not play a role those soft skills that, on the other hand, could make a difference with an unexpected approach or an original perspective. 

2. Trust as handover of the access keys to knowledge

The second indication that we gain from the sharing economy is that trust is mutual.  

The sharing of information, before it can be achieved through digital tools, needs to find fertile ground in a change of mentality that involves all the human capital of the company. 

It must make its way a collaborative idea under which the knowledge heritage belongs to each employee, who is responsible for it.  So much that, on their behaviours will depend the success or failure of the business which, in the person of the manager, needs to bring out how the agreed trust  also takes the form of the handover of the access keys to this knowledge heritage.  

Indeed, drawing from the richness of the company’s information is an integral part of the pact that bounds the people to their employer. Not by chance, in contracts there is a confidentiality agreement and it can provide for different levels of access.  

Hence, sharing such richness among the members of the organisation takes on a connotation of belonging to common company’s goals and translate into the pursuit of the mission. 

3. The sharing possible through an integrated digital system 

Lastly, the sharing of information is made possible by the integration of digital tools that do not add to the software that are already present in the company, but that connect their functions and operations. Where this has happened, we have witnessed a saving of time and an increase in productivity coming from the acceleration of the processes and the ‘permeabilisation’ of the airtight compartments where the data remain partially unused.  

The importance of the 3 factors of the sharing economy in the company 

As mentioned in the beginning, about the parallel tracks on which travel the information relating to the single company’s areas, the problem is not that to have a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, but rather that to simplify the information passage between the different functions and, therefore, make all the digital systems talk with one another.  This way it becomes possible to switch from a CRM to an archive managed in cloud mode, without getting caught into bottlenecks that would slow down or prevent the efficient sharing of the information.