Blog

Many of our clients were anxious about the options for interpersonal greetings in a post Covid workplace. We assigned an intern to solve it for you and thanks to the magic of a whiteboard we got this:

Do with it what you will.

CollabSystem is an inclusive technology organisation. We aim to offer women the same gendered experience that they get elsewhere on the internet. To our mind that is no more evident in the responses women receive to their posts in social media and collaboration tools. You know, That Guy, The Man in the Comments.

To support the consistency of this experience for women, here is CollabSystem’s Four Step Guyde to Being that Man in the Comments.

Step 1: Invalidate

The critical first step as that Man in the Comments (hereafter TMITC) is to invalidate whatever the woman has said. There’s no reason to start with this. You could agree or even acknowledge with a woman’s perspective, but that wouldn’t be the invalidating and gendered experience most women are used to receiving.

There are three tiers of invalidation:

1. Pseudo-smarts: this is where the man projects greater expertise to cast doubt on the woman’s opinion. For example saying ‘It’s more complex than that‘
2. Play the Woman: this is where the man criticise the woman’s capacity to have a point of view. For example, ‘if you understood this area, you might understand better’. This comment is best saved for highly qualified women, particularly those who invented or discovered the area under discussion.
3. Denial: just deny the woman’s opinion outright. Traditionally this involves any sentence beginning with ‘No‘ or ‘You are wrong’

At no time is the TMITC’s qualification to invalidate the woman’s opinion at all relevant. After all, they are the TMITC.

Step 2: Gaslight

TMITC’s specialise in denying reality. Therefore it is important that in Step 2 they posit an alternative set of facts and insist that the woman accept it.

There should be no verifiable sources for these opinions besides the TMITC’s opinion. Women are experienced with this being enough for their better understanding of reality being discarded.

Bonus points are awarded if the gaslighting reflects the themes of any commonplace global conspiracy theory.

Step 3: Catastrophise

A woman has expressed an opinion. TMITC’s understand this is a threat to the fundamental order of the cosmos. It is therefore important that they engage the slipperiest of slippery slopes to plunge immediately into the abyss of consequences.

It is not enough to suggest that a woman’s opinion is dangerous. A female opinion must be a threat to societal order itself. Therefore feel free to suggest an imminent catastrophe to one or more of the following:

• The political system: government, democracy, power systems, etc
• The family unit: gender relations, any kind of marriage, property arrangements, fertility and child raising, care for the aged, etc
• Religious belief, religious institutions, values and the like
• Societal structure: safety, security, freedom, gender, bathrooms, sport, or any social topic of appeal to a TMITC
• The Economy: business, work, the markets, interest rate, growth, innovation or Bitcoin
• Mental health: Given the narcissism of most TMITC, the only mental health that matters is their own. A woman’s mental health is irrelevant here.

Step 4: Draw Unfounded Conclusions

Remember this conclusions are unfounded. It is therefore important that they are as wild as humanly possible. Is the woman a member of a leftist, feminist or anarchist conspiracy? You missed the chance to go all three and throw in some critical race theory for good measure.

Be as unfounded and irrational as you can. At this point in the fourth sentence you can begin your barely coherent ranting, if you wish. Any idea that pops into your head as even vaguely connected should be thrown into the debate at this point. Don’t limit yourself to what is socially acceptable. When your employer, the police or social media moderators read this part later it must be as damaging as possible.

Use Capitals. Misspell words and names, especially women’s names. Refer to women by pet names and made up phrases. Rely on slogans not arguments. Repeat a catch phrase you made up and only you understand. Follow the practices of your favourite demagogue in this regard.

Get on with Your Life

Having caused a woman anxiety, distress and all kinds of unnecessary pain through the first four steps of the Guyde to Being TMITC, you are now ready to get on with the rest of your life as if nothing happened. Should you meet the woman in person, you will give no thought to your internet outrage or likely consequences, no matter how much it may be front and center for her in that interaction.

Most infuriating of all, expert TMITC practitioners know to adopt the woman’s views as their own in later interactions across the internet. Don’t reference the source. Don’t acknowledge that you dismissed the opinion. Just claim it as you own and go on oblivious.

CollabSystem is currently working on automation, using the algorithm above to automate the TMITC experience for women all across the CollabSystem metaverse and to offer this as an API service to other social media platforms. However, at present, we find no takers for the latter service as they all seem to have an excess of their own TMITCs.

Never one to miss out on a hot new technology hypefest, CollabSystem are pleased to announce the CollabSystem Metaverse, your digital world for inexplicably disappointing digital experiences.

Since EPIC Games announced its $1billion raising to invest in its own metaverse, we have started to contemplate how we would deploy capital wastefully against this exciting new trend. The continued market frenzy around the extraordinary value and dubious aesthetic of NFTs helped reinforce to us that digital assets and experiences are a space in which CollabSystem needs to play.

Therefore we are announcing a massively expensive digital work metaverse project. At this stage of its evolution, the project is too deeply confidential to explain. Further elaboration might reveal we don’t understand metaverses. The good news is that there’s little chance our customers understand them better. We can assure you that, like employee experience platforms, the metaverse will come to market with many modules and a solid if complicated subscription model.

We expect that the CollabSystem digital workplace metaverse will be the best and most richly featured of its kind with the most engaging and productive employee experiences based on our deep understanding of digital work productivity and handwaving. We will have the widest range of integrations and partners to enrich our metaverse, when we can get people to return calls.

Like all metaverses, our proposition will sound amazing and yet the experience of participating for your employees will be subtly disappointing. Just like the coffee at the coffee bar inside your office is never as good as the one from the coffee shop next door, we can assure you the CollabSystem metaverse will deliver an employee experience that is just below par, reminding employees that while you are prepared to invest in their digital experience, their experience at work will never be quite good enough to be satisfying.

The other realistic experience of our metaverse will be the in-experience purchase opportunities for your employees. We believe digital employee experiences should be richly extractive like real world employee experiences. It is important at all times while work is pouring money into their pockets that employees feel like they are somehow losing money too. To round out the CollabSystem metaverse, we have hired the world’s leading experts in gamification. We don’t know why but we are sure that engaging games, puzzles, challenges and scoreboards will be a part of our digital work haven. Every day already feels like an run through an old fashioned Nintendo platform game, including the consistent fights with the big boss. We wouldn’t want to deprive your employees of that experience digitally.

CollabSystem metaverse will be the best employee digital work experience metaverse. Sign up now to be first to adopt this extraordinarily hyped product. We guarantee we will be able to explain what it is before you use it.

At CollabSystem we spot future trends when they aren’t even there. That’s why we are proud to announce the release on our White Paper on the Future of Play. White Papers are long documents in which experts ask a lot of questions, pose a lot of hypotheses and generally avoid committing to anything. That’s really the main problem with both the future and expertise, they are ultimately hard to pin down.

For the benefits of the readers of this blog and the many interested customers of CollabSystems, we thought it was worthwhile to share an executive summary of our Future of Play Whitepaper:

Sounds A Lot Like Hard Work

That’s it. That’s the whole summary. Thousands of hours of really expensive experts working on collaboration, consultation and community engagement with the best thought leaders, design thinkers, ethnographers, and other obscure experts and all we get is that Play Sounds Like Hard Work at some indefinite point in the future. We have to be excited about this conclusion, we paid a lot for it.

For those who like more detail, we wish the White Paper had it, at least in some kind of intelligible sense. However, underneath all the touch-feely design speak, the pop-culture trends and the marxist cultural critiques we have found the following key trends:

• Work is All Consuming – noticed that there’s a lot more demands than ever and work follows you on vacation, into the weekends and even into the shower?
• Work is Going Home – now that work has colonised your home, why not all your waking hours?
• Achievement is the Only Socially Valid Source of Satisfaction – nobody cares how much fun you have. They want to see your bucket list and CV worthy achievements
• Grinding Effort Against Impossible Challenge can be Rewarding – we are told
• People don’t get Paid to Play – valid point
• Children Playing Expands the Workforce – unwinding a bunch of illogical labour market red tape that protected them from exploitation, injury and death. If every is working all the time, we don’t need to worry about their future.

The combined influence of these trends is that we can see a great deal of pressure on individuals to play in ways that look like socially constructive work. Once people are doing socially constructive work for free somebody is going to work out how to make a buck out of it (After all penis-shaped space-adjacent rockets don’t come cheap). Anything that brings back the vulnerable childhood workforce is a good thing as far as the market is concerned.

So give up any hope of fun. Embrace the #futureofplay. There’s a lot of work to do to bring it to life for the billionaire platform owners of the world.

At CollabSystem we recognise HR Analytics is all the rage. Nobody does it. Everyone talks about it. So when we heard that our clients were struggling to determine just how many days in the week their employees should work from the office in a global pandemic, we knew that we could bring our fearsome HR Analytics capabilities to bear across our customer base.

So we asked an intern to look at the question: “How many days should employees work in the office?’

The intern came back surprisingly quickly. They said none. Apparently the question you ask is important to the outcomes you get from HR Data Analytics. The intern had fixated on the word ‘should’ and years of wasteful philosophical training led them to the conclusion that nobody should have to ever work. We agreed our intern shouldn’t have to work.

We all know that when HR Data Analytics fails to provide the right outcome, you try again. So we got a new less philosophical & more mathematical intern and asked a different question: “What is the average of the answer of our client organisations who have announced return to work policies on the number of days employees should spend in the office, excluding zealots who are working their employees to death and showboaters who say all their employees can work from anywhere?” We felt this question nailed the analytical problem most of our clients need to solve.

Now, Kate, our new intern, is a smart young woman who will go far. Before she began the complex and involved work on HR Data Analysis, and watching the other intern pack his box, she asked us a critical question: “Before I start this, I think we should have a hypothesis to test. What do you think the answer will be?” As founders of CollabSystems, we are sure in our in depth understanding of our customer base and answered two days without thinking at all and relying on that great entrepreneurial instinct called gut.

After an extensive period of analysis which seemed to take Kate far from our office and racked up a great deal of expenses, Kate returned with the answer. We are pleased to share it with you now:

Two days

That’s how many days a week your employees need to spend in the office to receive magical office culture vibes of collaboration, culture and serendipity. Industry is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter which days or who else is there. It doesn’t even matter what they do or what office they work in. Two days is the answer.

We interrogated Kate on her methodology but she pointed out that data analysis using machine learning can be a black box, particularly where the number of independent variables is high. We had to agree whatever she had done with her time and money, Kate now sounded like an HR Data Analyst.

After a while and the dangling of a permanent paid role, Kate revealed the foundations of her analysis. Sadly, this wasn’t based in some time and motion study of work patterns and productivity. It wasn’t underpinned by the changing nature of work, new technologies and the transformation to a knowledge economy.

The analysis was much more simple. Kate explained that there are five days in the week. Nobody wants to commute for a half day and Fridays were a write-off already. Therefore it seemed fair to everyone to split the difference at two days. Now your employees can spend two days on video conference at home and two days videoconferencing in the office. Friday is a casual day. Now that’s maths for you.

For safety’s sake, we went to check with a number of clients, influencers and other HR Analysts before publishing our results. Everyone agreed that two days seemed like the safest compromise answer with no basis other than it falls nicely between extremes. We met absolutely nobody who objected to two days unless they were five to seven day maniacs or zero day radicals. We then spent some time making Kate the Group Head of HR Analytics and reverse engineering a bunch of complicated maths to underpin the two-day answer. Two days it is.

So for any CollabSystem client pondering their employees return to work, the answer is two days, regardless of industry, role, workload or prevailing pandemic conditions. Two days. We can live with that (assuming we are vaccinated, wear masks and follow covid-safe protocols at all times)>

At CollabSystem we believe in being contrarian. When the world tacks left, we go right. When Google calls its employees back to the office, we still don’t know where ours are to be found.

We realised recently that there are too many posts on how to write a great blogpost that goes viral and makes your content marketing strategy fizzle like a post-hangover Alka Selzer. So we are going to share our five top tips on how to write a truly terrible post.

Step 1: It’s All About You

Nothing is more engaging than a massive ego fest. Unself-aware solipsism is so on trend right now. It is also massively revealing. The more you talk about yourself the more obvious it will be to everyone that you are a terrible person that they should avoid. Except they can’t avoid your posts coming in by email, social media streams and advertising including retargeting. You will be leveraging the power of blogging to make sure that everyone understands that you are a truly shite person. To achieve the highest level of blogging bring your whole self to it and express every vain and ill-considered thought that flashed across the inside of your skull. It is important in this to compare yourself to great minds and great entrepreneurs so use the post to put your thinking up against theirs for comparison

Step 2: Make Your Post A List

1. Nothing is more useful to people than a fucking list
2. Lists are short
3. Lists are scannable
4. Lists go viral
5. Lists don’t require complicated writing like narratives, logic or development of ideas
6. Lists don’t have to make sense or work
7. It is just a bloody list and you can even break the rules of lists and most people won’t care because they are sick of them
8. They stopped reading the list before point 8.

Step 3: Sell Your Shite Service

At CollabSystems we know that posts that sell services are the posts that matter most to our customers. Almost everything we write is a press release hidden inside a post. There’s nothing more important than the relentless assault of commerce. Don’t fall into the mistake of viewing a blog post as about sharing knowledge. Even the cleverest are just sneaky ads with hidden calls to action. Remember always be closing and check out CollabSystem’s great products as you do so.

Step 4: No Connection to Reality

Talk about Blockchain or NFTs. Discuss abstract technology that nobody will ever use. Talk about Stoicism. Allude to things that others don’t understand. Use big words that everyone needs to look up and the definitions only reference other big words or French post-modern philosophers who only use them ironically. Recommend strategies that would have actual humans scratch their heads. Whatever you do, don’t have your post relate to reality or human behaviour. Nobody reads a blogpost for practical strategies that they can apply in their work and life. Haven’t you read Goop. They are looking to be inspired by social media influencers who live so disconnected from reality they might as well be on Mars. We have some candidates to join you Elon.

Step 5: Be Repetitive

Ever read a recipe online and how it mentions that recipe name and ingredients over and over again in a long boring introduction that gets in the way of the actual recipe you want to read. That’s genius. That’s the highest art of blogging. That is called SEO. Use keywords. Repeatedly. Be unimaginative. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Try to hit the zeitgeist. Did I mention SEO. Use keywords. Repeatedly. Be unimaginative. Write about current events without adding anything to the discourse. Write about what other people are writing about about the zeitgeist. Logroll. The more on ontrend and unnecessary your post it the better. Use keywords. Repeatedly. SEO again one more time for good luck.

Step 6: Be Offensive Unaware

A truly shite post must offend those with a modicum of sanity and grace left. The simplest way to achieve this is to appreciate the role of luck, privilege and disadvantage in life. You might have been born on third base but it is essential that everyone hears your opinion about what it takes to hit a triple and a photo of your amazing car. Deny systemic issues. Use horrendously offensive stereotypes and violent, militaristic, colonialist and imperialist metaphors. Who cares about the system when your success is yours to celebrate? Influencerdom awaits you. Join Clubhouse and talk endlessly about how you understand success and that they all need to subscribe to your substack to learn more. Collect Patreon fees that you blow on champagne and caviar because your million dollar lifestyle makes it unnecessary for you to earn a living from your writing.

Step 7: Play By the Rules or Do. We don’t care. Neither should you.

You were counting the steps weren’t you? We went past the official blogpost limit of 5 because our lives are examples of unlimited greatness. Forget the rules of speling and grammar’s. Invent unnecessary neologisms in every post – we call them newologisms. Stop writing abruptly and leave people hanging because you never know how to finish a post. You don’t care about the reader so it doesn’t matter anyway.

The global expansion of working from home in the pandemic has raised significant complexity for IT Services departments. The most significant of these complexities is the absence of need for IT services. When in the home context, many employees discover that their complex work infrastructure, device and software issues are best solved by a eight year-old, either the employee’s own, a relative, or one on a Youtube tech podcast.

CollabSystem is proud to announce a solution to this IT crisis. CollabSystem Complex is CollabSystem’s Bring Your Own Home solution. CollabSystem Complex extends the kinds of security, device control, monitoring and other inconveniences of BYOD to the entire home office environment. This smart solution ensures that an employee’s own room is useless to them for work without expensive additional software, infrastructure and support services. BYOD has effectively preserved IT jobs & power when employees use their own phone or computer. CollabSystem Complex’s BYOH solution extends that intelligence to the whole of an employee’s home.

CollabSystem Complex is engineered to defeat the talents of a canny 8 year-old with a screen-time addiction. Complex security, identity management, device management, physical access interventions and encryption ensure nothing gets in or out of the home office. Monitoring and home office management ensure that nothing works without IT Support approval and engagement. Importantly, employees feel consistently surveilled in their own homes even in their most intimate after work moments. CollabSystem Complex introduces deep enterprise IT capabilities into a simple always-on easy to run consumer IT environment thereby guaranteeing incompatibility, integration challenges, bugs and system failures. IT professionals will be very satisfied with these industry leading enterprise outcomes.

Many have queried the equity of WFH. Not all employees have the same IT resources, space or other home environments. CollabSystem Complex reduces all WFH environments to the same standardised level of limited functionality removing any equity issues. We’ve achieved a low common bar inside the office why shouldn’t employees experience the same consistency at home regardless of wealth and social circumstances. To paraphrase one of our satisfied CIO clients why should employees have an technology Ferrari at home when they only have a Model T Ford at work?

Like any good BYOH solution, CollabSystem Complex extends well beyond the proper domain of work. CollabSystem Complex’s IoT integrations sniff important IoT data, interfere with personal assistant solutions on smart devices and can even crash non-smart devices like coffee machines, white goods and the homes entire electrical network with targeted electro-magnetic pulses. All issues requiring immediate rectification and support in a stressed pandemic-threatened home office environment. In particular, BYOH solutions ensure the printer never works when it is urgent just like the office.

With CollabSystem Complex, IT Professionals can rest assured that nothing untoward will occur in the home office environment. Users will still need lots of expensive IT support, services and infrastructure. With the home office environment managed effectively in a BYOH framework, IT Professionals can return to their usual challenge of finding a higher paying job elsewhere.

CollabSystem Complex: Because there’s no walnut you can’t crush with an industrial grinding mill and a thousand expensive employees.

Many clients come to CollabSystem after struggling with cloud migration of their critical business workloads. We offer solutions that no other vendor would consider. More importantly we offer a migration path that’s unavailable to other large enterprise vendors.

A recent discussion on Twitter around cloud migration captured in one tweet the secret of our cloud migration strategy – evaporation.

Most people understand that the promised transformation of moving to the cloud is a little overheated and that the process of transformation is enough to make the team steamy. We are specialists in delivering things that are intangible and likely to disappear at a puff of wind. We know that that steam is everything in a cloud migration. The more evaporation (of your money) the better your progress (for us).

At CollabSystem we aren’t afraid of getting ourselves and our clients in a little hot water. Well, honestly, we are a bit more afraid than some social media apps that are getting shut down for their sins. However, we have no fear of steam, evaporation and we literally are vaporware. We’ve never met a trendy hot promise we couldn’t make without the faintest idea of how we would deliver.

Trust your cloud migration to CollabSystem and we will guarantee your CIOs eyes become cloudy and you will be able to see the steam coming out of their ears. After all, if you can’t trust a software vendor who can you trust?

At CollabSystem, we know employee engagement is critical, especially in times of crisis. We are proud to announce CollabSystem Journey, the ultimate employee lifecycle platform.

The Journey is Important

Our best product ideas are based on deep customer understanding. We spend hours in our conference room frankly discussing our customers. Often in those discussions, we gather an insight that defines our next phase of product development. Some of those products actually work.

We have noticed four key themes recently in the discussions our clients are having:

• Employee engagement is important but nobody seems to know what it means or how to have it
• Our clients talk a lot about ‘journeys’, usually as an explanation as to employees as why things are so tough or aren’t progressing
• Employees at our clients have an employee lifecycle. We don’t know what that means, other than its another kind of journey, because none of them stay long enough to explain it. It is clearly unrelated to the human lifecycle, because it is way shorter and nobody ever learns anything.
• None of our clients can travel while the world is locked down in this global pandemic, so they can’t possibly be on journeys as they all work from home.

Combined with some CollabSystem product genuis, these insights underpin our confidence in the transformative potential of CollabSystem Journey, as an employee lifecycle platform to deliver employee engagement. CollabSystem Journey enables employees to become highly engaged in AI-mediated digital cloud-enabled experiential learning journeys to acquire blockchain enabled credentials that are worth about as much as most crypto-currencies.

Planning the Journey

For most employees onboarding is a bewildering experience where the promise of a role and an organisation dissolves into a bewildering series of compliance training, compromises, cultural clashes and disillusionment. We recognise that this is rarely an optimal experience.

CollabSystem Journey automates this process using AI and bots to ensure that nobody wastes any time disillusioning the employee and breaking their will to live and think independently. Our UI is perfected to maximise the confusion and the sense of fear of new employees, increasing the urgency of their engagement to work out what is going on. At the end of onboarding employees all wonder how they can keep their role when they feel so unqualified.

TentPlace

We struggled to find a term for the module that is the heart of CollabSystem Journey and supports the ongoing journey of all employees. First we wanted to call it Basecamp, but our lawyers said no. Then we tried Trailhead, but apparently that’s a cloud solution too. We considered SAP (for structured AI-mediated progress), WorkDay and dozens of other acronyms, time or journey related names, but it seems our competitors are well ahead in this space and we surrendered quickly.

The intern suggested Tentplace. We all laughed. Apparently it is available, so we assigned the intern the drudgery task of making the core of our application where most of employee time is spent. Like many of those other applications, it will feel like it has been designed by someone underpaid and unloved for those who are underpaid and unloved.

The intern had the genius idea that most travel these days doesn’t live up to the experience that others are having on Instagram. Our Tentplace module makes sure employees are always aware that someone is travelling further, having more fun and making more money. While they might be tempted to just sit back and scroll, employees will continue to receive helpful comments from their friends, family and colleagues as to how they could go further as they work. Like Instagram, we want employees to really wonder what they achieved with all the time spent, other than acquaintances they want to forget, a sense of frustration and unresolved envy.

We couldn’t be prouder of the intern’s work so we told them to take a hike.

Taking a Hike

Not every employee is suited to your organisation. Not every employee is up for the journey. CollabSystem Journey is designed with this in mind.

Employees who fall behind on the gruelling death march that is your organisation will be highly engaged in a careful designed experiential detachment program known as ‘the hike.’ When the journey is complete, CollabSystem Journey will tell them to take a hike and digitially remove any record of their existence from the organisations systems.