Productivity

Stop Losing Vital Information in the Email Sinkhole

Stop Losing Vital Information in the Email Sinkhole

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?

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Management Communication in Our New Workplace

Management Communication in Our New Workplace

Many of us have heard the lamentations of the entertainment and advertising industries as they try to cope with the new age of entertainment. In the old days the entire family would gather around the TV at a specific time on Sunday night and watch the Ed Sullivan Show or something similar, with all its commercials, then talk about the show at work or school the next day. But today the industry must deal with video streaming, binge-watching, live tweeting, PVR ad skipping, and ad blockers. The audience watches the programs at different times, so it is difficult to create a buzz.

But that is not the only industry that has changed with the advent of new technologies. Many dimensions of management in all industries have changed as well -- but the changes have crept up on us because there is no single industry group to point it out. Think about management in the days of the Ed Sullivan show. The boss would call a weekly, in-person meeting of all the staff. Someone would take notes of the action items and share it via a memo or email. Staff members would sort out details with individual meetings in offices or hallways. And the boss' work would get done.

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The Future of Email

Here is an answer I posted on Quora.


I am betting what we know of email will become more of a notification service plus a way to communicate with people outside our regular networks. 

Facebook and Google+ are our networks of our friends and family. Twitter is our network of interests and associations. LinkedIn is our network of professional contacts. And project workflow tools (such as Asana, Trello, LiquidPlanner, Basecamp, MavenLink, etc.) are networks of people in our projects. Instant Messages work for our closest friends/family/coworkers with whom we have the permission to interrupt them.

We will want more of our communications to be "in context" with our particular network. That will lead to appropriate sharing and limit the number of documents emailed once and hidden on some person's hard drive.

Gmail already facilitates this separation of types of emails with their tabs -- to keep primary correspondence separate from network notifications and from email promotions/SPAM.

This blog about AngelList says it well: No email at AngelList. Note the instances of email:

First, when we need to communicate with people outside the company.
Second, when we need to have a conversation with an ad hoc group of people inside the company. HipChat is not great for ad hoc groups that only need to discuss a single task like, “how should we negotiate this deal.”
Third is laziness and stupidity (guilty).

The challenge will be to undo the reliance on business email among +/- 30-40 year olds who started in business with email so prevalent but who are also reluctant to adopt new tools. They are today's and tomorrow's business leaders, and will set the tone for many years.