This morning’s new work group meeting was tremendous fun. Five of us came together to discover opportunities to improve our organization’s internal communication and knowledge sharing strategies. Below are some highlights from our session.
Opportunity versus obligation
It’s painfully easy to turn people off when you demo a new web tool to them. In the back of the room, one of your coworkers is thinking “Oh great, another new site for me to type stuff into in order to keep my boss off my back”. Be aware of the potential for negative responses before your next demo. Take a cue from Kevin Jones and inspire positive responses: explain why a new communication tool is going to help rather than merely describing how to use it.
Feedback is inevitable, but…
We’re getting lots of bottom-up feedback in our organization. Regular e-mails from the vice presidents get individual responses. Focus groups provide opinions on selected issues from a cross-section of our community. What we’re not seeing is a persistent public forum where employees are encouraged to offer encouragement and advice on a day to day basis. If your internal communications team hasn’t asked for your opinion this quarter, does that make you comfortable? Not every teammate is going out of his or her way to share without being asked.
Impacts of the slowing economy on our community
“Nice to have” features have fallen completely out of favor on our projects this quarter. We’re seeing a renewed commitment to hitting deadlines and rejecting scope creep. Amongst the five of us there was a feeling that internal social networking and communications initiatives will be hard to “sell” to management this year.
I’m hoping we can frame our collaboration opportunities as continuous activities rather than as a project with a start and end date. We need to empower individual workers to create their own efficiencies by connecting with like-minded contributors throughout the corporation.
More sessions to come!
Our next meeting is in November. We’ve agreed to rein in our next session a bit and focus exclusively on knowledge sharing efforts. Today’s session wandered off track and into many unexplored facets of our company, but I think we’ll be a stronger group for having had this exploratory session.
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