As more and more of our collective endeavors take place on digital platforms, there is a growing requirement to ensure those undertakings are as efficient and effective as possible.

I’ve written previously about various tools that aim to quantify the collaborations that take place on digital (and physical) workspaces.  Typically, these network diagrams provide a richer and more realistic display of how your workforce interacts than the traditional org chart.

Improving team work

Can a quantitative approach also be taken regarding the quality of the interactions that occur?  That’s the quest of Spanish start-up Atta, who have developed a team-work analytics platform to help make our collaborations more effective.

“Atta is an analytic platform that evaluates team interactions and uses built-in gamification features, tailored to each individual user, to improve their teamwork skills. Employees progress along personalised improvement activities instead of one-size-fits-all training programs,” founder Merce Mulet told me.

“Atta is the first viable method for quantifying teamworking abilities in the same way other skills are measured, it has the potential to completely disrupt the way companies hire, train, manage, and fire team members at every level of their organization,” she continued.

They reason that many of us enter the workforce having been trained primarily for independent work.  To then work collectively is often a challenge, especially when many of our processes are geared similarly towards individual outputs.

The company have been working closely with researchers at the University of Barcelona to provide an academic basis to their work, with a paper due for release sometime towards the end of this year.

The Atta platform works primarily with digital collaboration tools, whether that’s the Atta service itself or third party platforms such as Yammer.  These tools provide the input upon which the analytics then does its stuff.

Initial results are very positive, with the company revealing that clients have experienced an 80 percent boost to their collaborative capabilities within weeks of using the service.  This has subsequently trickled through into a substantial improvement in the quality of products developed by that organization.

You can learn a bit more about Atta via the video below.