“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow (the same Maslow who wrote about the hierarchy of needs)
Nobody minds receiving email when it is a customer placing an order for your services. Besides being good news it is actionable, auditable and appropriate communication addressed from one person to another.
When a client of ours recently did a tally of the emails in their inbox, they found that more than 90% of it was internal messages from their colleagues. While communication is appreciated and encouraged in this professional services firm, the deluge of email generated as a result is not seen as adding value. Information is shared in good faith and there is a probability that the knowledge is useful to the recipient, just not right at that moment and not mixed in with the feedback from customers.
Based on the volume of email traffic experienced (the CEO of the aforementioned firm counted 438 emails received over a three day weekend), I look at my inbox and wonder if I am unpopular with my colleagues. But the comparative trickle of email may be explained by our use of multiple modes of communication.
Depending on the velocity of communication we have a number of choices:
Fast-moving discussions are handled in an instant messaging application. This is a replacement for quick get-togethers when people are in different offices or the topic does not merit interrupting what a colleague is doing. Technically, the transcripts can be copied and stored somewhere else for posterity but most of the time it is the result of the interaction that is important and not the conversation itself.
Fleeting thoughts and questions find their way to our microblogging tool. Statements act as useful signals about what is going on and may attract comments from colleagues. Questions are asked and replied to, often with links to our knowledge platform or external sites.
Slow-moving, larger pieces of analysis are developed on our knowledge platform (which happens to be a wiki). Groups can work together to co-draft presentations or strategy papers, and pages can be tagged and linked together. Each project has its own area on the platform and we use it to store notes and prepare project deliverables. Working in this way has the useful side effect that work product is automatically shared (unless we need to react to information barriers) obviating the need for a specific “knowledge management” step in the work process.
We use email too, of course, but having a choice of channels means that email gets used a lot less. Often, an email will call attention to new developments on our knowledge platform and ask for input. What would otherwise be a flurry of email reply-to-all manifests itself as pages and updates on the wiki.
Some of our clients go even further in the effort to reduce overall email traffic and increase the relevance of what arrives in your inbox. We have helped redesign their awareness processes from internal email newsletters to subscription-style updates where the recipient has a choice of how to receive information, if at all.
Every email imposes a cost on the recipient in terms of filing. Reducing the list of recipients increases the risk that information is not communicated to people to whom it is relevant. When organisations rely on email alone it is difficult to strike a balance. Expanding the enterprise toolset to support signals and findability is a step towards improved cost and risk levels.
Applying Maslow’s insight to reflect the enterprise communication conundrum might result in something like:
“If all you have is email, everybody looks like a spammer.”
Is email volume a problem? Have you taken steps to reduce email or increase relevance of email? Are you measuring the drop in email volume as part of proving the benefits of the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 tools?
Totally agree with you, Lars. Internal microblogging, wikis and instant messaging applications are the way forward for companies.
As usual, the apps private consumers have been using for donkeys’ years are slowly, but surely, coming into the business world.
I know a few large and well-known international companies working with delocalized development teams (mostly India) who rely almost exclusively on the use of instant messaging tools such as Spark to collaborate on-going developments, and it only takes a peek at the success and adoption rate of Salesforce.com’s Chatter feature to understand how crucial the need for de-cluttering those mailboxes has become.
Although in general I agree with you, there is a significant difference between different type of business. Yes wiki and microbloging is great for software development type company, but is this applicable in for example controllers group in a large bank which focuses on day to day operations rather than projects?
I find WEB 2.0 social media one-sided, I really hope all (or at least most) of BI platform are going to better integrate some of the communication tools you describe above in their products – for example wiki style annotations in the reports or twitter style messages generated based on KPI presented in the dashboards (just imagine that you could get twitter type message every time “net revenue” is presented in any corporate report).
I agree. The problem is there’s no way my company would dream of following this. It’s the same problem that google wave had — in theory it’s great, but you spend all your time trying to convince a user base that they should make a switch out of a comfortable and reliable product to something that has more functionality.
For example, there’s a good chance I can get some of my young coworkers to log into IM, but I laugh thinking about the difficulty in persuading others to use Wikis, message boards, or microblogging sites. If this doesn’t come as an order from top down, or you have a small and energetic young company, I just don’t see how it will work.
Note: If I perhaps worked in a tech centric industry, that might be another story.
Jiri and Andrew, thank you for challenging my predictions. There are two reasons that I retain an optimistic view of my predictions (besides being an optimist).
One is that change takes time. We are not going to see hordes of people abandon email and change their habits to diligently master several new and different ways of communicating. We sometimes have to remind ourselves that email, which we now take for granted, didn’t happen overnight but underwent its own climb up the adoption curve with the same elements of grassroots adoptions and top down decree that we see with Enterprise 2.0 tools today.
The other is that I have seen healthy (sometimes rapid) adoption happen in many places, including industries that are not normally considered early adopters, e.g. law firms and banks.
There is still a case for email. And the organisations that provide their employees with a choice of communications and work tools are not just going to make it easier to find information they are going to see an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio in everybody’s email inboxes.