How many inboxes do you have?

When people reach out to you, can they guarantee that you will read your message? It often comes down to how many inboxes you have – where is the message coming in to? It may start with just your email – but which address do you check the most often? Your company may have Teams, but your biggest partner or client uses Zoom. Your developers may be communicating on their own platform, leaving leadership unaware of messages and status until it is reported.

Split communication

The cornerstone of any good company is effective communication. Projects and status have effective communication as their life-blood. I have seen many projects fail simply because people were not informed, consulted, directed or engaged.

The penalty of the number of effective communication platforms is that people can become overwhelmed or confused by the number of inboxes they need to check. Many people struggle to just keep up to date with their email inbox, and if you add in another inbox and communication method, people eventuallay reach a limit of what they can cope with, and they miss important notifications.

The problems for staff

When people are working, they need to do their job. It seems a simple statement, but now we have a new paradigm in Business 3.0 that means most people spend more of their time in meetings and managing their inbox than they take to do ‘real’ work. I know that for many, they will argue that their inbox and communication is their job. With the plethora of channels and apps that companies provide, and even worse, where employees choose to use as their Shadow IT, it can become very confusing for a person, and they risk missing an important notification.

It’s not just emails and direct messages. There are also group messaging channels where they whole team is involved, or even entire departments. There will also be messaging channels where the company (often HR or Marketing) make announcements – and these can be on the intranet or a ‘hidden’ channel that employees never check. When these types of messages are missed, it can lead to poor compliance (such as a new policy or standard), poor engagement (an event or initiative that the company wants people to leverage), or just plain apathy.

The hidden distribution

I’m sure that many of you have had an experience where there was a distribution list that you did not know you were not on – perhaps you missed some vital emails (free cake in the 3rd floor kitchen 🤣) or that there was an opportunity you missed for training or networking or social connection. There can also be entire apps and channels that employees may not be aware of, particularly if a team (or more likely, a dominant manager or salesman) has chosen to go off on their own tangent to use a 3rd party platform for file sharing or chat or status reporting.

This can be particularly problematic for employees – they don’t know what they are missing, so cannot ask to be added. This can also lead to workplace bullying where a person is ‘deliberately’ excluded from communication.

This all can lead to poorer communication, lower performance, reduced community within groups and teams, and lost information and IP.

The problems for managers and leaders

The wide range of communication media can be a challenge for managers and leaders, where their entire job can revolve around successful and clear communication – both from them to their team, but also from workers to leaders. The challenge can come when they choose yet a different medium for communication, and their teams are not actively using that channel. I have seen this before where a manager assumed that everyone was reading the comments that they were leaving on a Confluence article, asking for a knowledge base to be modified – the team were simply not monitoring that channel.

It can be hard enough as a manager or leader if you are not in the room with your team when they have a meeting, but if your team is doing work in another platform that you are not involved in, the disconnect between information and knowledge starts to increase. This means that the manager depends on more reports and status updates, and this then burdens the team.

The instant messaging feed

One of my pet peeves is the “reply all” message that has no useful content. The “thanks” or “sorry, I can’t make it” message in our inbox that everyone sees, but should only go to one person. Although the content can be found in lower parts of the message, having to wade through multiple people’s personal congratulations or thanks will dilute access to the content – sometimes it can even lose attachments where the replier removed an attachment. It happens a lot in chat systems, where an important message gets swamped by frivilous updates or chats that should not be in the feed. In one company, I reviewed a channel where two people were responsible for over 70% of all Instant Messaging – and this included GIFs and emojis, making the business channel effectively useless for everyone involved.

Policy and control

The solution can take a lot of effort – not only to battle against Shadow IT, but also to move people away from a tool that they might like or prefer, and risk losing existing knowledge and content that is in it.

• Define your business functional needs – what do you need to do? What do you need to achieve? Do people need to access notifications through their mobile? File sharing and storage, multiple channels, integration with other tools, calendars, etc.
• Define your non-functional needs – what does it need to do? Where is data stored? How do you ensure security of your content? How do you want to manage security and access? The full range of requirements from an NFR.
• How will you transfer from the old platform or tool, to ensure that content is retained and useful? What about integrations?
• Define a policy over which tool to use, for what. You may have a blend of multiple tools – Outlook and Teams and SharePoint for example. Let people know where the information is to be put, and which tool to use for each type of task.
• Encourage consistency of use of the tool. Stamp out dissenters and Shadow IT, constantly.

Alternatives

Information is the key – the communication channels and inboxes are the symptoms. If you can find an information aggregation tool that can allow people to see communication, work progress, collaboration, and news updates – then go for it. This may be dashboards for managers and leaders, but it should be to aim to decrease the communication channels, and not put yet another layer on top.