Time for E2E?
At the dawn of time, early man huddled around the fire to talk shop: sharing hunting best practices; offering survival skills mentoring; and carefully aligning scarce resources – skills that enabled our ancestors to survive and thrive.
In reality, these pre-historic “water cooler discussions” acted as an early catalyst to human evolution and created a foundation for future innovations.
Fast forward to today: Far from creating and encouraging opportunities for staff to learn from casual employee-to-employee (E2E) conversations, many organizations opt for a more regulated approach, with a bias towards formalized guidelines, endless approval rounds and top-down communications channels.
There is no doubt that the regulated approach reduces the risk of miscommunication, but it also exponentially increases the resource burden, slows the natural flow of ideas, and creates a black market for rumour and gossip.
A few weeks ago I had a chance to look at a different model that instead fostered and supported E2E communications. The practice is based on the understanding that internal communications is a facilitator of employee engagement, not a driver.
With this in mind, the communications team identified and focused their efforts on the more critical communications strategies where there was a higher risk of miscommunication (for example, Executive Communications, Financial Reporting, Organizational Change, etc).
But this organization advanced the idea further: their intranet has been turned into a tool that resembles a networking site, where all employees are encouraged to post work-related content directly to their departmental or cross-functional team pages, thereby creating small networks of colleagues coalescing around ideas, best practices and shared goals.
The inherent value could be tremendous: greater information flow enhances productivity and drives innovation, while key communications and legal resources are freed up to focus on mission-critical communications objectives.
And – for those of us controlling, more risk-adverse types (yup, that sometimes includes me) – a formally supported E2E strategy can provide your organization’s leadership with a much more transparent and consistent employee feedback mechanism than any traditional review process.
on September 5th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Hmmm. Interesting.
Speaking as the former PR manager of TeamOn.com, an ASP whose virtual-intranet technology became the basis of RIM’s BlackBerry Internet e-mail, I suppose this is all very well and good, but permit me to play devil’s advocate…
I’m a consultant now, but if I were still working full time in an office, I know how such a proposal would look to me: Oh, great–yet more demands to wade thru work stuff online in an already busy workday.
Deliver me, please, from new systems supposed to *save* me time and *increase* my productivity. I doubt I could have even *gotten* more productive, and back in my corporate career I was working 60-hour weeks to begin with at a variety of start-ups. (Not because I was inefficient, but because so much needed to be done, with only limited resources and time.)
I embrace technology as much as the next drone, but, from where I sit, this sort of sharing–and the need to read it all–promises to be a huge time sink.
For companies ** whose entire work force is in one location, ** how is this any more efficient than simply getting up from one’s desk and walking over to someone else, or getting your colleague on the fone?
I’ve been part of intranets and extranets, and IMO any truly on-the-ball communication department or team probably wouldn’t need this sort of thing, because they’d already have effective reporting and dissemination procedures in place. If they don’t, then some manager(s) aren’t doing their job properly.
Every corporation I’ve ever worked at (and they’ve all been in hi-tech up here in Seattle), as well as almost every one I’ve had as a client, already had “small networks of colleagues coalescing around ideas, shared goals, and best practices.” They were called departments, committees or “the (whatever) team.” We had regular meetings in which everyone heard about progress and new business *at the same time* and from the horse’s mouth. Everyone got to ask questions, and brainstorming flowed freely around the table. (And we always had free food!)
I’m a super-speedy reader, but I’d much rather *hear* what I need to know than spend even more time staring at a screen to digest it. I don’t need any more eye strain, and my ears can’t get carpal-tunnel syndrome.
Doing everything remotely may increase productivity, but I think it also diminishes the social bonding of face-to-face interaction necessary to maintain and grow unit cohesion, esprit de corps and cameraderie.
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However, I can see how it might be a considerable help for workforces spread over multiple locations.
But I have to wonder–why wasn’t the corporate intranet set up that way to begin with?
Steven Spenser
Principal
Praxis Communication/Seattle
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenspenser