This week I’m going to talk about a few opportunities for improving workplace efficiency through better communication. One of the biggest drivers behind this blog is a search for efficiency in the workplace. Too often we find ourselves performing the same tasks again and again without ever stopping to analyze our actions. Some of my most cherished successes at work have been creative automations inspired by a desire to avoid repeating a mundane task every quarter for the next five years.
One-off messages lose value over time
Traditional workplace discussion options like email or written memos tend to be context-free and one-way communications. Messages sent with these media can be meaningless if revisited a few months later. Your e-mail chain with a coworker in another country benefits you greatly today, but it won’t be around later to benefit teammates who didn’t see it or hear about it. The people who support or replace you in a few years won’t be able to extract any value from that conversation either.
Collaborate in public
Today there are big opportunities for you to streamline the communications of everyone in your organization. Take advantage of forums, blogs, wikis and any other publicly viewable and searchable tools you can find. When your notes and work are all public, the ground you’ve covered might not have to be revisited by anyone else for a while. Contributors can accomplish more by building on your existing body of work than by duplicating it.
Check back later this week for some in-depth ideas on how to improve the value of your work. We’ll look at attaching persistent discussions to static pages, re-purposing email as an alert system rather than a conversation medium, and the critical importance of simplifying your communications.
