Structure your communication

Most of us have experienced a situation where constant e-mails hamper the management of personal tasks and prioritization. Instant messages from different apps keep on beeping, and the context is often lost. And similarly, most of have faced the question from a colleague “Did you see the message already? What should we do about it?” and answered with “What message, where?”. There is only a thin structure in our communication. 

The most common communication tools are not constrained by a system or organisational dependencies. Everyone has at least one e-mail address so it is easy to use in any environment. Whether there are many operators in different companies or sending an update to the family of your weekend plans.

Let’s add to the picture the several different instant message apps. The communication flow quickly comes overloaded. People are constantly losing their focus, because of the never-ending messages.  Did you know that app overload can cost companies 32 days of productivity a year? Or as much as one hour per day? Check out the blog post by Valerie Bolden-Barret

E-mail usage is unmanageable on many levels

But easiness and convenience isn’t the be-all and end-all in communication. If there is no structure in communication it is only a matter of time before it spirals out of control. This uncontrolled situation can happen on many levels, on a personal and on a team and organizational level. 

Some of us are excellent at organizing e-mails in folders by projects, tasks or date. But even if everyone could be this organized there would still exist as many structures created as there are users who create them. It is also a question of time, could the time spent organizing emails be spent on something more productive?

Multiple apps fragment the conversations

Many organizations face the problem that communication is fragmented, from one person to another or to a group of recipients. And visibility to people not in the mailing list is, quite logically, non-existent. You have no way of knowing if something is going on unless you are included in the email chain. For new users or employees this an even bigger issue, the only way of knowing all of the histories is to ask a colleague to forward everything related to a project - not very efficient.

Is now the time for communication transformation?

There is a trend to spend massive amounts of money into digital transformations and still, 75% of employees feel disconnected. The feeling is caused by a huge volume of communication and internal silos. Chris McGucan is hopefull in his blog post that 2019 will be the year of communication transformation. He suggests that the transformation requires the adoption of the new technologies enterprisewide. See our earlier post on how Hailer transforms communication to more activity-centric approach.

Hailer has proven to reduce eMails from 20K to 3K annually. Would you love such an improvement?