Want to Improve Collaboration? Close Your Email.

One of the most serious problems in organizations today is our (ab)use of email. There’s no question that email has fundamentally changed the way people work and how people collaborate. However, now email is often thought of as a scourge: leave the office for a week, come back to 500 emails waiting for you, of which probably 50 require action and 10 are very important.

In terms of communication, Email is usually the first resort. Sadly, that means that email is now also most people’s primary means of collaboration. But here’s what email collaboration looks like:

Created by Manny Wilson

Not exactly the cleanest business process. Not pictured is the person in the middle of the process: the stuckee given the unenviable task of aggregating all of the changes made in the various silos into the “master document”.

Here’s an idea: Try Something Else!

So, as a first step towards improving collaboration: don’t use email. Sounds simple, but of course the difficulty is in the execution. I’ll start with the why. There are several reasons that you should move away from email for collaboration.

• People get enough email: If you can contribute to your colleague receiving less email, I will guarantee you that they will genuinely appreciate it. So, rather than sending out another email to lose in the email, try using another platform!
• Email is not discoverable: To me, this is the most important piece. Email conversations are by definition not discoverable. So if I have a question, I could email five people; unless they forward it on, I am limiting my potential sources of answers. However, if I ask the question in a online, discoverable forum, I can still get the same 5 people to answer the question, but also add everybody else with access to the platform to the potential sources of information. As an added bonus, the knowledge gleaned from the discussion is then captured in a discoverable venue, rather than trapped in an email box.
• Email won’t help you bump into others: One of the great benefits of working in the open is that you can actually bump into people with similar work focuses and similar experiences. Working in a more open environment allows for fortuitous opportunities in order to expand social networks. And given that workforces are becoming more dispersed, this will likely become more important as face-to-face opportunities dwindle.

Executing

Let’s face it, it’s hard to get out of email. It’s been too successful in penetrating the business world. How many times a day do you have a face-to-face or phone conversation that ends with “I’ll type up an email summarizing what we just said”? Well, there are some good ways to start:

• Signal: Rather than sending out questions via email, post the question online and send out the link. It’s still an email, but the discussion and answers will be more discoverable to others
• Do Point-to-Point in the Public: We have a lot more means to talk point-to-point in public nowadays:  Wiki User Pages, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. Communicating on these is a good first step because they are all more discoverable then email.
• Get out of your comfort zone a bit: Working in the open is a new, weird thing, so it’s not unusual that you would feel strange doing this instead of email. But sometimes you just have to make the leap. Give it a shot.  As a colleague tells me, “If you aren’t out of your comfort zone, you aren’t doing your job.”

PS. A note about email notifications. Email works well as a notification for these other tools.  Getting an email that says to check a wiki page because it’s changed is inherently different from getting a document in an email, because you can delete the notification and know you won’t be missing information later.  If you get a document in an email, you will likely keep that email/document combo because you just don’t know if you’ll need to refer back to it.

What do you want from people?

I put my document out there for people to collaborate on, but didn’t get anything

One of the most common shortfalls in collaborative projects is under-participation. People just can’t get other people to contribute to their work when using a collaborative environment, be it a wiki, blog, discussion thread, or whatever (the technology here really doesn’t matter). Aside from the problem of not thinking about who you want to collaborate and rallying your crowd, the most common problem is that people starting a collaborative project don’t really think about what they want from the participants. Rather, people tend to concentrate on what they don’t want from participants. (As an aside, a lot of people tend to think of over-participation as a more serious issue…I’ve yet to have that problem in my experience; Someday I hope to see it).

Seriously, What Do You Want from Me?

Fear not! In many cases, this problem can be solved fairly easily with just a little bit of thought from project leaders. Most importantly, you have to think about exactly what kind of input you actually want from the crowd. How do you go about doing this? Well, start with specific questions.

An example: imagine you walk into a bank and the loan officer asks how they can help you, what would your response be? “I’d like to get some advice on a mortgage”. However, when we approach collaboration in the workplace, we don’t ask questions like that: usually, it’s more like “What can you tell me about loans?” This question is unlikely to get you the answer you want and/or need, especially because you probably have a specific questi0n and/or problem that you want an answer for.

So What?

Basically, most people just want to know what you expect from them. People are busy and usually have enough to do. So, be specific in your requests (a common complaint in email). The best thing to do? Start with a specific question. If you want to know if a wiki solution could help solve a problem, don’t ask me what I know about wikis. Tell me about your problem, so that I might be able to provide information in a useful context! Your results are likely to be better. When you start a collaboration project, be specific in what you want from somebody: posting a long document on a website and saying “comment” or “review” (or nothing at all for that matter) isn’t likely to return you the right answers. There’s a lot of power in asking your colleagues “Does the section on Topic B make sense” or “Am I missing any key steps”.

A Blog as a Resume

So I stumbled across this article –I think via Twitter–and have been meaning to dedicate some digital ink to it ever since. I think that this is a pretty great idea and, admittedly, is one of my reasons for blogging (albeit mostly to expand my own social network and do some personal thinking). I’m not saying that blogging is the answer to job search woes; however, I think the author makes some excellent points and does hit on some effective points.

Complementing Your Resume

I think the most important thing that a blog can do for a job search is as a complement to a resume. Let’s face it: you can only squeeze so much about yourself into a resume. What better way to complement that sheet of paper with a running log of original thought and commentary on issues that you are both knowledgeable and passionate about? It demonstrates dedication–and rightly so, as writing a blog is a lot of work, especially if you are doing a complete job with it. Even blogging two times per week is good for an additional few hours of work per work.

Raising Your Profile

I think that when paired with other social media tools such as LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, you can use a blog to network with other people in your field. Social media tools allow you to make connections to other similar people, even those who might find your skill set matches a need somewhere else. And more than that, given that most jobs are obtained through social networks rather than formal listings anyway. Blogs offer a good a mechanism for discussion and communication, and a good avenue for expanding one’s own network.

The Main Risk

Here’s where I think the author misses the boat on talking about blogs and searching for a job. To me, it’s not worth highlighting that it’s not a good thing to get into “You don’t want to get into political arguments, or include anything racy, or write about religion and politics”. I don’t say this because this is not an important topic; just that most people–especially those savvy enough to want a blog to share their thoughts–don’t need to be told that employers Google prospective employees. Frankly, having a blog can help you improve your “Google-ability” by returning your thoughts and work. (My Google search is covered, however, as a dude named Justin Frank pwns all my search results)

To me, the risk is that there is a distinct flavor of meritocracy in blogging. Put simply, blogs expose your thoughts, so it’s important that you blog about what you know. Exposing your thoughts on a topic should really only be done if you can effectively share ideas and insightful commentary. That being said, there’s a certain degree of confidence that comes along with blogging.

What You Can and Can’t Learn from an Open Collaborative Workspace

One of my favorite parts about open collaborative tools is the ability to observe the evolution of collaborative projects.  Platforms like wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and even discussion forums enable any observer to come in and view the history of any given article, compare versions, and review the progress and process of that page.  But at the same time, it’s important to remember that there’s a lot of work that goes into a collaborative projects that can’t be gleaned from simply watching the changes to wiki pages. So in the name of getting my thoughts down, here’s an incomplete list of some things that you can learn and what you cannot learn from outsider observation (I see some follow up posts to this topic in the future).

What You Can Learn

Who’s literally made the change to the page: You can certainly measure raw, quantitative participation: i.e. Justin has made 20 edits or has posted 7 blogs or has tagged 14 items with 24 tags.  This has a place in evaluating collaborative projects, obviously: in most cases of open collaboration, more participation is better.

You can tell literally what–qualitatively–a user has contributed to the project. The transparency of contributions means that you can see exactly who and when an idea or contribution was made.  So I can see that Justin added 2 paragraphs of content to the wiki page and 3 blogs worth of ideas today.  While this in isoluation is not really important, these contributions can be qualitatively evaluated.  Likewise, you can see who is playing a more facilitative or leadership role in projects.

Social Networks. Certain elements of social networks become visible when you look at collaborative projects in open environments.  Social bookmarks reveal who is tagging content for a project, thereby linking those participants.  Blogs with comments clearly link people to their thoughts, but also to the people behind the contributions at some level.  Similarly, you can discern the strength and weakness of links by looking at actual participation.

What you can’t learn

However, there’s a lot of work that goes into collaborative projects that goes unnoticed and undetected, even in an open collaborative environment.

Triggers, positive and negative.  One of the most interesting aspects of projects that is simply not visible to the outside are triggers for participation.  You may be able to literally see that a person who should be a prolific contributor only contributed once to a big collaborative project; however, what’s not visible is why they haven’t paricipated.  Technical hurdles? Lost interest? Managerial interference? Too Busy?

Rallying. As I’ve said before, collaborative projects require a good amount of leg work behind the scene in order to get off the ground.  So while some of these are visible–blogs, announcements in the wiki, etc–many are not.  Without actually engaging the participants of the projects, you cannot, as an outsider, understand the work done behind the scenes.  So I can’t tell that the project’s leader called colleagues on the phone from 5 different organizations, visited 3 seperate offices to build the network, and spent 3 hours talking to leaders face to face.  All of this activity is important to the success of a project, but it’s not really visible from the outside.

Ghosting Participants. Technology is changing quickly and some folks just can’t or don’t want to keep up with the latest developments and newest tools.  So, from my experience, many times there ends up being one “stuckee” from an organization or office that ends up doing the lionshare of the actual posting of information.  In this case, what looks to be a single prolific contributer may be 5 people’s contributions via a single point of entry.

The Key

As a consultant, nothing’s asked of me more than to provide best practices.  And the best practice for advising clients is that quite simply, you have to look beyond the numbers so that you can actually tell the story of the collaboration. Evaluating and understanding a collaborative success or failure not only takes leg work to track participation and contributions, but also to talk to the contituency, both active and non.

In Defense of Blogging at Work

I recently started following a colleague of mine at another firm on Twitter, and have noticed that he seems to be have had a bit of trouble starting an external blog because of some unease by his company.  My guess is that the company has two main objections: 1. They are probably a bit weary of “losing control” of the message that he might put out (Let’s be honest, does any organization really have control over “the message”?) and 2. that if it’s officially sanctioned, he might spend his time at work blogging instead of “working”.  This morning, I’ve been thinking more about the second issue.

I would bet that a lot of organizations and companies are wary of blogging during work hours.  On one hand, this is understandable, especially given most people’s perception of blogs in general (I’ll call this the LiveJournal or Xanga perception): blogs are a the opinions of someone with too much time on their hands.

However, I tend to think of this limited thinking as a short-sighted (and actually deeply hypocritcal way of thinking).  I’ll start with this: I use my blog to think about my job, my responsibilities, and as a way to put some of my thoughts into words.  These thoughts and musings ultimately are beneficial to my job because they help me think through the problems and issues that I face in my responsibilities every day.  In short, I do my thinking here to get something down on digital paper (and hoping potentially that someone else might read it and suggest something as well, but I do see value even without comments).

So what it comes down to, in my mind, it is silly to come down on a platform for thinking.  I’ll put it this way: most people probably do their thinking in emails or Word; why is it any different if I choose to use WordPress as my personal library of thoughts? A blog is just a communications tool; what you do with it is the important part and, thus, organizations should judge their worth on content rather than just blanket policies banning the use of a given platform.

I’ll conclude first by saying, yes, I do recognize the in client-service organizations, deliverables and client service comes first.  I won’t be blogging if I have to get a deliverable done or am against a deadline.  However, on days where I have time to sit back and contemplate job-related issues, why is it a problem that I do it here, where other people can see and might be able to help me develop my ideas further?  Ultimately, I think it comes down to a communications problem on the part of bloggers, including myself: people just don’t understand the purpose of blogs.  Personally, I think I now understand that bloggers should try to be more explicit in their defense of blogging, especially to wary organizations.

The College Football BlogPoll and ESPN: When do they Meet?

I love college football.  And I love college football blogs.  EDSBS is perhaps my favorite blog on the internet.  MGoBlog is one of the most professional (and dedicated) blogs I’ve seen on the net (and since I’m a Michigan fan, its sort of my other favorite blog on the internet by default).   The social network of college football blogs is strong, yet informal.  However, they even have a blogpoll, where members of the network rank their top 25 teams in college football.  Here’s last year’s results, catalogued by Wikipedia alongside the “official” polls.

So two thoughts crossed my mind today.  First, this really caught my eye today.  Hinton, the author of that post is a former freelance blogger who got a job with Yahoo as their CFB blogger extraordinaire (and he is fantastic).  For some reason, I assumed that he would stop voting in the blog poll now that he’s a pro-blogger.  I guess this is stupid because Spencer Hall/Orson Swindle at EDSBS is a journalist too and even Brian, who runs the BlogPoll and MGoBlog does it for a living.

But then I had another thought: what happens if ESPN’s new conference bloggers want to join the blogpoll?  The sports blog world is often been so vociferously against the mainstream media and the World Wide Leader specifically that it might seem counterintuitive.  But today the Big Ten Blogger linked to all of the Big 10 blogs that I read; Why is so far off, given the evidence that a blogger for the Sporting News and a blogger for Yahoo are already member, that ESPN’s folks might want to get in on the fun?  (This post started when I posed the question to my friend as to how long it’d be til ESPN posted the BlogPoll on their Rankings page.)

I guess in the end I don’t know if it matters.  I just think its interesting to watch the interplay between traditional media and blogs, and how they line is constantly getting more blurry.  For me, I guess the day that the BlogPoll and the WWL cross will be a remarkable day in the way that sports journalism works.