Channelling comms

Even I can remember a simpler time when the only communications you received at work were memos to your pigeonhole, the company newsletter, the operating manual (all actual printed documents), and whatever was said in meetings.

Then came email, then came social media.

I’m certainly not saying “those were the gool ol’ days” before we had electronic comms. There was very little you could really respond to or with in those old days. Company comms were one-way and the mode was “inform” (I might say “tell”). And for good or ill I’m pretty sure we had more in-person discussion as a consequence.

Email was a breakthrough, but it created its own problems: I’ve many times in the past seen those guides or heard those talks about how to manage “email overload”. It takes up a vast amount of people’s attention – and I’m astounded by how strongly it has held its place in the face of the rise of the more ‘social’ chat channels and tools we now have.

The situation today is not so much “email overload” as “channel confusion”. You could well have a situation such as the following now:

Everyone uses email for everything. You’re in multiple distribution lists, you have to watch a few functional inboxes, you get emailed directly 1-2-1 and CCed on all sorts of long chains. Company comms reach you via emails. So do alerts from all sorts of company processes and IT systems. Not to mention everything that reaches you from the outside world via email.

But you’re also now using various social/chat channels. If you’re in the Microsoft universe this includes Teams (in its various forms), Yammer. If you’re a sales person using Salesforce.com you may be on Chatter, their chat channel. If you’re an engineer it may be Slack or Hipchat. Various other systems have channels of their own for specific purposes – perhaps your staff appraisal system has its own channel for communication and also work stacks for appraisees, appraisers and HR personnel.

Company comms uses them all.

And at any moment any department might decide to start using something else – you might not even know.

There are legal and records management issues when different information and messages are spread unpredictably across different channels. And for all that users push to have their own fave tool, IT will push back against complexity and cost.

Well, communication and collaboration matter to us in KM. And if anyone is going to get a grasp of this, it may as well be us, with the involvement of the user groups and functions. We have to decide what is for what and what is for who.

There’s unlikely to be a perfect solution, but there can be better or worse outcomes and these outcomes have different risks, costs and payoffs.

If there’s a coherrent group with a much stronger need to communicate inside that group that with outsiders, and an equally strong preference, then it makes sense to define a channel, a user group and a use case to fit it. Those are my examples of sales on Chatter and software engineers on Slack. Then you have to determine what are the use cases for everybody and how are they best served. Maybe not email, maybe Teams for everybody internally, with email as the person-to-person external channel? And you don’t have to use everything – you don’t need to find a use for Yammer unless, of course, there really is one.

Today’s “email overload” is “channel confusion”. If you want, as KM, to enable the communities that have a need to share to work optimally together, you have to help them make choices about which is for what, and which is for whom.