It is critical that management choose the right collaborative communication tools for the organization. The right selection can set up effective workflows and reinforce the right culture. Collaboration tools can make a big difference in how well the business scales up. It is up to leadership to make the choices, with the input of staff, and then reinforce best practices. 

Much can go wrong if a company defaults to using just email. How often have you seen the following? A senior executive asks the management team an important question such as: What are the 4th-quarter milestones we promised the Board? What are the product-return policies we established? Then you get the following:

Anne: “the answer is on slide 15 of the PowerPoint I sent around”

Marty: “Is that in the email thread with the subject ‘Lunch Orders for Meeting?”

Fred: “I wasn’t on the team then and so was not on the distribution list”

George: “What happened to the edits I shared in a later email?”

Lucy: “Didn’t our advisor mention some suggested changes at last month’s meeting?”

The bottom line is when they need vital information your teams often lack a definitive answer and are maybe in a state of outright confusion. Everyone will spend the next hours digging up documents and trying to recreate the answer. They might still disagree when they put it all together. 

Collaborative Communications Guidelines for Success

How does a company prevent this? They establish clear communications policies and make them stick. The following are some guiding principles that can help every company.

1. Store all key documents in a set of shared folders with a clear naming convention and access permissions. There are lots of effective ways to do this, often organizing folders by department, project, or team. File names should describe the contents, as well as the stage (such as draft, board review, or final), and could include the creation or last-edit date. The owner of the file system should remove access for people who leave the team and add new members when they join. The owner can, with some file tools, remove edit permissions when a file becomes final. 

2. Limit the use of email to only external people and people outside of your team. Never email within an established team. Email is effective for reaching other parties outside the organization or the project team. A World Without Email is a great book that makes it clear that constant email checking ruins our concentration and makes us lazy, believing that bouncing back an email response is doing real work. The average worker checks email 65 times a day. 

3. Use collaboration tools for all workflows within a team. There are a wide variety of collaborative tools, many of them cloud-based, and most of them very affordable—even for cash-starved startups. They include CRM (customer relationship management), document editing, project management, wikis, spreadsheets, presentation, whiteboards, and design tools. 

4. Conduct all communication within teams within the collaboration tools. Collaboration tools such as Slack, Notion, Trello, and Confluence allow for users to add comments and questions within projects or teams, and in some cases enable the user to tag another person so the comment will show up in their notifications.

5. Always email links to the documents in the shared folders, never an attachment. If the team has to use email, they should at least stop using attachments. A wise collaboration expert once said: “If I cannot link to it, it doesn’t exist.” With attachments, many vital documents end up on the hard drives of the people who were in one email chain, which makes the documents difficult to find and hides them from other people. In addition, if team members have to use email, it is important to update the subject line to make it relevant to the current conversation, review and update the recipients (“to”s, “cc”s, and “bcc”s), and in some cases delete the clutter from earlier emails in the thread. 

6. Hold frequent, but brief, meetings to coordinate. Don’t rely on email or other communications tools for all the updates and information requests. Frequent, short meetings get to the core needs more efficiently. For any necessary interactions between these meetings, encourage some “high friction” methods such as a phone call, or just walking down the hall to knock on the door of a colleague. 

Handling Special Cases

These policies are difficult to apply because so many workers default to sending off an email. It is up to the leadership to enforce their proper use. Here are some commonly-heard questions and suggested responses:

• Is using Slack (or equivalent) better than email?  Cal Newport, the author of A World Without Email, points out that Slack and other messaging tools have the capability to distract concentration as badly as email, so there need to be rules around the use. The good news about Slack relative to email is that discussions take place within channels among teams, so the discussion can be more focused. It is easy to add and delete team members as they change. And the notification settings provide some control to the user for when they want or do not want to be interrupted. 

• What does a leader do if someone emails him or her outside the proper communication channel? It is important that the team leaders ensure adherence to the guidelines. Unless it is a private matter, if an individual communicates outside these channels via email, the leader should redirect the message by copying it into the proper channel, responding, and sharing both the question and answer with the rest of the team. 

• What if someone really needs info from a team member quickly? A World Without Email suggests that teams use a high-friction medium, such as text, for interactions needed between meetings and outside the collaboration tools.

• Should external parties be included in these rules? No, email is fine for external communications. 

• What do you use if some matter is really private? This post pertains to collaborative communications within a team. Any special cases outside of this deserve special treatment, perhaps an email or a personal meeting. 

• How do members of the group stay current with the communications flow? Team members who take the time to set their notifications will generally stay on top of the relevant communications. Notification settings can include which hours to allow; can specify how to notify, such as a mobile or screen pop-up or an email; and enable different triggers such as the user’s name, keywords, or channels the user wants to track closely.  

Examples of Collaboration Tools

Every month there are more options for collaborative communications tools to use. Some of these start out as free. Most are inexpensive SaaS solutions that are worth their small monthly or annual cost. There is no way to be exhaustive with the list, but here are some we have worked with.

• File Management: GDrive, Teams, Dropbox, Drop.

• Messaging: email, slack, What’s App, Hangouts, Teams

• Calendaring. Outlook, Google Calendar

• Project Management: Notion, Trello, Asana, Confluence

• CRM: Hubspot, Insightly, Salesforce. 

• Document collaboration: GDrive, Teams, Dropbox Paper, Notion

• Wikis:  Notion, Confluence

My favorite set of tools are 1. Slack for internal communications and 2. Notion.so for project management, file management, wikis, and light CRM.

You and your email inbox will be glad that you made the switch to collaborative tools.