My Big Mistake: Stop Debating the Communication Tool—It's Your Approach That's the Real Issue"
Hi. I'm Max Clark. If you've got a chat tool, chances are you've got a problem. What is going on inside your company between email and your chat tool? So we run Google Workspace and Slack.
Speaker 1:I'm going to use those 2 as references. I'm not picking on those specifically, but, you know, Slack's a pretty common chat and internal collaboration tool. So I'm going to use that throughout this. Probably the most dangerous graphic I've ever seen dealing with internal productivity was a Eisenhower matrix, and it was talking about use email if use Slack if use this if use that if and the graphic is talking about, like, speed of communication and response. And there was another one which was text and then call.
Speaker 1:And it was like, oh, you know, I need to send or do deep work and I don't need an immediate response. Send an email. I have a lightweight ask and I need somebody to see it and respond to it relatively quickly. You know, within a couple hours, use Slack. I need an immediate visibility and an immediate response, you know, send a text.
Speaker 1:It is so urgent that buildings on fire call. And that's how this graphic actually basically breaks down and works. And it doesn't solve the actual problem that you're having. And the problem that you're having is there's no organization of why you're organization of
Speaker 2:why you're using one
Speaker 1:tool versus another. Trying to have a person try to figure out and say, oh, I need a response with this. And within 2 hours, I'm
Speaker 2:gonna send a Slack message.
Speaker 1:Or this is just an FYI, so I wanna send an email message. Or I I, you know, I need immediate attention to this. I'm gonna send a text message. The basic problem that you immediately run into this stuff is then 2 months down the road, you're trying to find your conversation and refer back to it and figure out what was said and what was done and and what happened. Are you searching your email?
Speaker 1:Are you searching your chat tool? You're searching text messages? Do you even have the ability to search text messages? Where does this stuff live? It's impossible to find.
Speaker 1:So then you get into and you start reading things about, like, scaling email transparency. By the way, there's a bunch of really interesting internal collaboration discussion forum boards that have come up. So discourse, you know, classic discussion forum that's can be used for inside Teams. WordPress is p 2. There's Twist.
Speaker 1:There's an application called threads we used to run. And basically all of these are trying to say, okay, you're gonna take and move your company collaboration out of your email and you're gonna move into this other tool and then you're gonna use this tool for your internal collaboration instead of email but you're still gonna use your chat as well. Okay great. You know so now you've got this asynchronous message board that you can use that is separate from your email and so now you have to decide okay is it an email is it a message board? Is it chat?
Speaker 1:Is it text? Is it a phone call? And you can see now we've just added another dimension to it. And that, by the way, you know, this came out of this idea and Stripe popularized this in a big way about scaling email transparency. Right?
Speaker 1:So if you got email going between people, how do you use email but scale the transparency so other people can see what's going on and really capture decisions that are being made in the knowledge base. So Slack was using a message where they were create a system where they were creating and using Google Groups or Workspace comes. Comes. They're using Google Groups, and they were taking inside of Google Groups. They were creating a main list and archive list.
Speaker 1:And then based on what was actually going on in that email, the person could then c c either the main group or c c the archive group. And so that way, if it was a main group, you'd get it relatively quickly. And if it was the archive group, you could go on and you could read through the discussion at your own pace whenever you wanted to see what was going on in this archive group. Interesting system. I think it's scaled to a certain size for them and then probably, you know, implode it.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of big issues with these approaches. And the biggest one that I've seen is it's very easy to fall into back into behaviors you're trying not to enforce, which is that dreaded chat message of, like, hey, are you there? Like, if you're trying to push into asynchronous messaging and asynchronous collaboration, hey, are you there? Is a horrible message in the first place. Right?
Speaker 1:It doesn't get you what you want, and it doesn't get you where you need to be. So then you try to figure out how to fix Slack by saying, okay. Slack's only asynchronous. Turn off all your alerts. But that doesn't really work for you either because you get into a situation where now people are waiting for stuff because they've been taught if I need a response, attention or response within a couple hours, I'm supposed to put it into Slack.
Speaker 1:And so that's where it lives, and that's where internal messaging is. What we found trying to figure out how to solve this problem, and this is universal to whatever productivity collaboration system that you're using, you know, so we can insert a bunch of different things. You could be using workspace with spaces and chat, whatever Hangouts, whatever they call it now, you know, as your chat and you could be using Office 365 with teams for your chat, you know, whatever you're using. I don't care. Right.
Speaker 1:The point is, is is instead of pushing it from a urgency or time to respond, view it as what type of communication exists in what tool. Email is a fantastic external communication tool. It is amazing to communicate with the outside world. It is great to interact with your clients. It's great to interact with your partners.
Speaker 1:It's great to interact with your vendors. Things that people don't like about email, of course, because it's public that is very accessible for people to send you messages and try to solicit stuff from you or fill up your inbox with with work. But email is a phenomenal tool for external collaboration and communication. And, you know, chances are you're gonna wanna have email distros with collaborative inboxes or ticketing systems or whatever they might be. Right?
Speaker 1:It's email is great for that. That was where the stuff actually belongs. Internally, Slack is incredible. It is great or Teams. It is great having a tool.
Speaker 1:And by the way, okay, Slack, Teams, threads, Twist, p 2. Don't care. Right? It is amazing to have a separate and protected collaboration system that is just for your internal team to use. External people don't have access to it.
Speaker 1:Teams allow you to connect with external people. Slack allows you to do Slack connect and connect with external people. I mean, Zoom will I mean, all these tools are trying to push for more utilization and more usage. I would say be very careful of exposing your internal collaboration communication tool to outside parties creates other dynamics. Maybe it's not what you want.
Speaker 1:You probably wanna keep those very separate with pretty good walls and delineations between them. Okay. So now you have an internal collaboration tool. The internal collaboration tool should be the same as, like, you know, if you actually had an office, if people were walking around their office and, like, running into each other in the hallway.
Speaker 2:If, you know, you saw each
Speaker 1:other at the water cooler. Right? If you wanted to stand up at your cubicle or your, you know, your shared desk space and, like, just randomly chat with somebody. If you're in line for, you know, coffee, whatever it is. Right?
Speaker 1:Collaboration. Chat tools are great for that. They're great for ad hoc culture building, interaction, team building, trust building, you know, sorts of things. They're not good for work coordination. They're not good for knowledge base.
Speaker 1:I use those words very specifically and intentionally. If you're in a collaboration or chat tool and you start getting into a point where you're talking about work, this is a project. This is a task. This is a deliverable. This is something we have to figure out and make a decision around.
Speaker 1:All of that belongs somewhere else. You need a 3rd tool. That third tool can be a project and task management system. It could be something like Asana. We use Asana.
Speaker 1:That's why I say Asana. It could be an Asana. It could be as basic as Google Docs and Google Sheets. You could, you know, implement, you know, a decision tracking system, an agreement tracking system inside of Google Docs. It works great.
Speaker 1:It shares and drive. You have access to it. You can have memos and meetings and responses and people can comment on it. And now you have a living document that is not only is a document that can track what was done to it. You have a unit of work that can be measured or maintained and you also have the ability to store it as a knowledge base for the future.
Speaker 1:I didn't invent this methodology by the way. After struggling with this for years and talking to lots and lots of people doing corporate strategy consulting this was pointed out to me as we're trying to solve the initial issue of, like, you know, when is it an email and when is it a chat and when is it a text message? And the whole point of all this is if you're in that mentality, it's just wrong. Just trust me. We've seen the light.
Speaker 1:We've crossed over. You know, we've crossed over the bridge. It's much better on the other side. External communication tool, internal communication chat tool, work management slash knowledge base. And you could use Notion.
Speaker 1:You could use Confluence. You could use Google Docs. You could use SharePoint. It doesn't matter what you do. The important thing is that you're actually capturing and making it easy for people to understand where they're putting things, why they're putting it there, and then how to retrieve it.
Speaker 1:Because, like, if you come back to it and you say, oh, what do we do for this project, for this client? Where do we find that? Well, you know, you shouldn't be searching your email and you shouldn't be searching your chat. You should be able to pull up the document for that project for that client. If you're looking for, hey, we made a decision regarding our q four strategy for sales.
Speaker 1:Where does that live? It doesn't live in email. It doesn't live in chat. It lives in your knowledge base. It lives in your work management platform that has a decision associated with it.
Speaker 1:So that way you can go find it and you have this single point if you're on OKRs. If you're on EOS, you don't implement EOS inside of email or OKRs inside of Slack. You implement EOS or OKRs inside of its own tracking system. Right? So again, that could be Asana.
Speaker 1:That could be Google Docs. That could be sheets. That could be air table. Whatever you choose to use for that, that's where it belongs and that's where it's supposed to live. To wrap this all up, point with this is if you're struggling trying to figure out how to deal with your email because your email is overwhelming, you're looking at email management systems, email overlay platforms on top of your email in order to make your email better.
Speaker 1:You're probably going down the wrong path because you're trying to solve the wrong problem. You're missing is you're solving a symptom, not the actual, you know, root cause. Dig down a little bit deeper. What you're gonna find is the root cause is that you're just running too many different systems with no rhyme or reason of what's going on with one system or another and why it should be in one place or another and where stuff is stored and how do you retrieve it and how do you find it. And here's the big thing again, as you onboard new people, how do you teach them where to find things when they need to find it in order to work out of it.
Speaker 1:Right? Because this is like the holy grail. You wanna be able to hire somebody and efficiently onboard them and not only be able to efficiently onboard them, but to make themselves sufficient. So that way they can go out and find stuff themselves without having to constantly refer to and ask questions in your chat or email system, which then, of course, just spirals and circles. And you have no knowledge capture, and you have just an internal disaster on your hands.
Speaker 1:I'm Max Clark. This is what we've learned about how we've solved our collaboration and work management knowledge base. I highly advise if you're going down this. Take a look at it. Think about it.
Speaker 1:Implement these things yourself. Stop looking at it as a time to tool matrix. It's not a time to tool matrix. It is a this type of stuff should fit in these box. If you have any questions, comment below.
Speaker 1:You think I'm completely wrong? Comment below. I'm telling you, it's been fantastic for us. I would never do it another way after now.
