Start using blogs, wikis in your organization

Start using blogs, wikis in your organization for better productivity/communications

Email is still the central system of communication for most enterprizes, from startups to large corporations. Every communication, from the most important (planning for the big client meeting) to the most trivial (fresh donuts in the kitchen) takes place through the corporate email system. The results: email overload and lowered productivity for the entire organization. Employees are flooded with emails via Blackberries even over the weekend, leading to communications burnout.

Email is just not the tool for Project teams, work updates, documentation sharing etc. That technology has been very much abused. And the constant flow of emails leads to an interrupt driven workflow – numerous studies clearly demonstrate that an interruption causes inefficiencies in delivering the projects.

The reason for this is the inherent nature of email itself:

It is only a point-to-point communication medium. The sender has to decide both the content of the message as well as  who the recipients are.
If the recipient list is too large, it contributes to email overload.
If it is too small, that could lead to communication gaps and “informational silos” in the organization, where one group in the company doesn’t really know what the other group is doing.
Another problem is that each email message is a single unit, making it hard to track conversations among multiple parties. Many email readers thread conversations, but that is done at a syntactic rather than semantic level.
Finally, putting everything in email makes it difficult to build institutional memory/history.

If your organization is small enough(20 or less), then email communications works reasonably well. The team is small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. However, once your organization crosses the 20-person mark, the communication problems will start to creep in. There will be complaints of email overload and too many meetings. And despite the email overload and too many meetings, people still feel that there was a communication problem and a lack of visibility across teams and projects. It’s time to realize the limits of email as the sole communications mechanism.

It is high time that you restructure your organization’s internal communications. The plan should be focused to make the people relying less on email and more on social media apps wikis, blogs, and instant messaging.

Blogs – for recording business Conversations

You can assign a dedicated blog to each employee and each project. People can post as often as they wish/need to their personal or project blog, but they are required to post at least one weekly status update. All blogs are visible to everyone in the company. Anyone can subscribe to the feed for any particular team or individual blog. So for example, John in IT department can follow the blog of Bill in sales, if he’s curious what Bill is up to. This results in complete 360 degree visibility throughout the organization. People can also post comments on these blogs. Someone might post a problem they are facing, and others can post comments providing suggestions. This results in automatic grouping of conversations based on topics of interest.

The biggest advantage of the blog approach is that it is a publish-subscribe mechanism. You don’t need to decide who to direct my communication to;  You just post on your blog. Anyone in the company who is interested in what you’re doing can subscribe to your blog to be notified of updates. And if someone just has a passing interest, they can always read your blog periodically without subscribing to it. This approach also breaks silos, for example, between IT dept and marketing, or between marketing and sales.

No one is required to read any particular blog, with two exceptions:

Managers are expected to read the status updates of their team members and post feedback.
People working on a project are expected to read each other’s blogs.
The blog approach will reduce email overload and even reduce the number of time-consuming “status update” meetings.  Most important, the blog serves as an organizational memory — an electronic record of your business. Conversations do not get lost in the ether but are recorded and can be searched at any time in the future by new people on a project or new company employees.

The Wiki for Persistent Information

While blogs are great for status updates and discussions around ideas, they are not the best place to put items that serve as reference material: for example, documentation, specs, reports, and so on. The problem is that blogs are in reverse chronological order, and each blog can have just one author, preventing collaborative editing. For these situations, you can use a wiki. The internal corporate wiki has sections corresponding to each project and each functional group in the company. Documentation, specs, and reports go into the wiki.

How You can us a Wiki ? You can use wikis for the following and even more:

• Documentation
• Knowledge Base
• Project management
• Meeting Management
• Encycopedia

Read Future Changes blog  for more information about wiki technology, how wikis work, how to get folks to use them, how to govern them, and how to use them to solve various real-world challenges.

Stewart Mader is founder of Future Changes, a specialist consultancy that teaches people at Fortune 500 companies, universities, non-profits, and small businesses how to improve productivity using wikis.

According to him

” The key to a successful wiki in your organization is effective adoption. Give people guidance to set their goals, training to get comfortable with the wiki, and time to build it into their daily practice. If they’re pleased with the results, they’ll catalyze further adoption by spreading the word to their peers. “

With the help of Wikis, you can manage everything important to your work, including background research, notes, URLs, meeting agendas & minutes, action items, and finished documents, presentations, and files.
Help your team make the change from using email for everything to gathering, building, and editing information on the wiki, and using email only when necessary.
Organize a living knowledgebase that people can rely on for critical information. You can also involve external people, such as customers and partners, and give them a chance to help you and each other. That ultimately enhances your reputation.

Instant Messaging for Spontaneous Discussions

Most organizatins now have people working from more than one physical location. Thus, you need a substitute for the face-to-face hallway conversations that cannot happen because someone is working from home or from another location. Email is not the best option because it is asynchronous and thus loses the spontaneity of a hallway chat.

Instant messaging fills this need. Instant messaging leads to quick resolution of many issues without spawning interminable email threads.

The effects of the communication restructuring in any organization will be immediate and very visible. They include a lot less email and almost none on weekends; better communication among people; and 360 degree visibility for every member of your team. After we instituted these changes, everyone on the team feels more productive, more knowledgeable about the company, has more spare time to spend on things outside of work.

So Start using internal blogs, wikis, and IM for corporate communication. Google has been using blogs for status reports for a while now.