Long Live the... Corporate Communications

There were several times when I went through the same journey with different companies, which require proper corporate communication and collaboration tools, knowledge sharing, and protection of intellectual property.

The main question is - why there are so many tools and services, which one(s) to choose, and how to adopt them without huge impact and painful "corporate change management".

I should mention right away - I am not considering the 'paper-based' (or 'snail-mail') communications anymore. It's nice to receive a postcard from time to time, but I do not remember when I saw the hand-written one last time. So, let's talk about paperless communications.

Based on my experience I came up with the 'time-to-response' and 'time-to-live' communication classification:

1. Emergency (instant) communications. In case of a life-threatening situation, we are calling 911 (or other quick-response numbers). The reasons to call are to

• confirm immediate response - somebody has to answer the call right away, not answering machine with 'press one for...', not 'please leave a message...';
• confirm understanding of the situation - you are asked additional questions to provide a proper response and delegate/escalate the request
• confirm the request acceptance - "the help is on its way, to be arrived in... "
• confirm the action plan - the emergency response usually guides the caller on what to do and what not to do; they stay connected till the situation is resolved or the help arrives.

The business emergency is pretty similar - do not rely on emails or messengers! The person you are contacting might be unreachable or missed the message. You might think that the situation is under control, while nobody is even aware of it.

Following the topic of this article - what is the period, during which this communication is valuable? Minutes, or maybe seconds! It does not make sense to call emergency service and say that 'yesterday somebody had a heart attack'.

So, the first type of communication is a call with an extremely short time-to-live (TTL). It can be recorded and analyzed after the conversation, but 'after life' does not have an impact on the initial situation.

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2. Urgent (real-time) communication. If somebody does not answer our call and it is not the "end of the world", what do we do? We send a message, expecting to receive an answer within a few minutes. I can say if you are ok to wait up to an hour, or are not sure if the person is available to talk, do not call, use messenger - SMS, Whatsapp, Slack, Skype, Telegram, - whatever your respondent is using. Please, remember, that this is NOT about you or your preferences. You might have heard something like 'yes I have ICQ (do you still remember this abbreviation?), but I never open it '.

Another reason to use written communications - is being able to 'document' the conversation, keep the history of the messages and have it searchable. Although you should always be careful about sending the wrong message ('too emotional' or misinterpreted wording) or disclosing confidential information to the wrong people. This happens pretty often when multiple simultaneous chats are open on the screen.

What happens when we do not receive the response within the expected time? We escalate the request to an 'emergency status' and call the person, screaming 'Have you seen my message?! Why you do not answer?'.

The beauty of 'group messaging' is that if you do know whom to ask, you can send the question to the whole group at once instead of asking them one by one. Although, there is a risk of "opening a can of worms", where the question triggers a wide discussion beyond the point.

As soon as you receive an answer, do you need to keep it? In most cases, it is overwritten by other messages very soon. If it is something important, you have to remember the day/time of the message, search for it using a keyword(s), and/or copy it somewhere else for future reference.

So what is the TTL for the messengers? I think it is not more than a few hours (plus timezones difference for long-distance conversations). Even if the chat continues with the same group under the same channel, the topic changes pretty quickly and it is hard to keep the thread without repeating or quotation of the previous messages.

A common misuse of urgent communications is relying on them as long-term conversation storage, knowledge base, document sharing, and any other type of collaboration. There are evident issues and limitations to this type of communication:

• when joining the existing group, you do not see the history or it is very hard to follow due to mixed topics, unclear incomplete answers, or business decisions with previously discussed assumptions;
• in order to follow multiple teams/conversations, you have to join multiple groups, receiving a lot of 'noise', which is not relevant to you;
• if the message is important to different groups, it has to be duplicated and if you are a member of these groups, you receive multiple copies of the same message.

How efficient is it? How much time are you wasting on reading and answering the same question over and over? How hard is it to find the proper answer to the question, posted in several chats?

My recommendation - is do not use a messenger for anything you might need to check the next day or later!

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3. Short-term communication. The "short term" for me is a few days. If I am ok to receive a reply the next day, I'll send an email. I do not need to bother people if there is no emergency or urgency, they can answer when they are comfortable doing so. It is very professional to have a "vacation auto-response" so the sender is aware of when to expect the reply or to whom to forward the request if it cannot wait as long.

Emails are very good for long messages with attachments, and one-way awareness (newsletters, reporting, non-urgent system notifications). Emails are connected in a chain, creating discussion threads; have 'carbon-copied' receivers (although no carbon is used anymore); can be saved for a long time if needed. Combining emails with a calendar is a great way to follow up on postponed communications (being in touch with leads and clients, providing updates, etc.)

Let me ask you - how many unopened emails do you have in your inbox now? Does it make sense to read anything sent a year ago? Half of the year? A month? Probably only in case of referring to something very specific or related to the current (read 'new') conversation. Otherwise, it's easy to 'select all' and 'move to trash' without any impact (besides freeing up the storage space and faster loading of the remaining ones).

Besides unopened (read 'ignored') emails, the problem for such corporate communications is having difficulties with 'long-term' collaboration. I believe you have received such requests as 'Can you re-send me the most recent document? My copy is outdated'; 'Can you merge my editing to your document?'; 'Who made these changes? They are wrong! Do you have a previous copy?'.

An interesting observation I had as CTO - when somebody is leaving a company, there is usually a request to redirect or share their corporate email account with the direct manager. The managers never had time to check these emails and did not want to (except again for a special investigation or following particular client relations). For some period of time, the accounts are deleted in spite of valuable assets there. (Yes, I had requests to restore some of them a year later, which were in most cases impossible.)

So, emails are a non-urgent non-collaborative communication tool with pretty limited usage and timeline.

My recommendation - is do not use emails for anything you might need to have available for a longer period than one week OR need to be shared with other people without keeping multiple copies.

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4. Limited-term communication. What is 'limited-term' and how is it different from the 'short-term'? The most important thing here is 'time limitation'. It might be different for different cases but still have defined a defined 'expiration' or 'end date'. This type of communication is referred to the Tasks and Projects. Pretty often, young businesses and small teams use messengers and emails to manage their projects. They are always facing the problems, described above. This brings a lot of mess, wasted time, miscommunication, and, as result, business slowness and frustration on every level.

There are many tools, free and relatively cheap, which make task management effective and pleasant to use - Monday, Asana, Trello, Wrike, Jira, and many others. It does not matter which one to use as long as the whole team is 'onboard', understands the collaboration concept, the difference between the tools used, and keeps their own assignments up-to-day with the defined workflow.

Why are there integrations between Task Management and Messengers or Mailing? The answer is - that these tools have different purposes and different TTL. They let you know about assigned tasks or progress in the real-time or short-term, according to the defined frequency (e.g. daily). Notifications have a shorter life cycle than limited-time collaboration! With most applications you can adjust settings for the preferred communication channel and who should be notified.

Following the subject of this article, the 'limited-term' communication lifetime is limited to the active status of the project or task. All the related conversations, decisions made, and progress reports are valuable till the task or project is over. Afterward, it can be a 'lesson learned' exercise or post-factum cost analysis, but for most participants, their attention is switched to a new one. And the new project might overwrite the previous information - we need to know how the system works now, not how it worked before. The same with special cases - when the bug is fixed, the details are not important as soon as it is not happening again.

So, the task or project management tools are perfect for teamwork and collaboration, they provide a central point for prioritization, resource planning, progress tracking, inter-team dependencies, and issue reporting.

But these tools should NOT be used for instant messaging or any non-relevant conversation! I saw the 'Call me' message in the task comments. How important is it to keep this within the task? Or do you expect to have a call from everybody, who reads this document? I can accept the 'According to the call with ... on ... the decision is to ...' - and it is important to have the record about who and when, as the decision might be changed later.

For limited-term communications, it is very important to have version control on documentation, design, and source code. These items are changing during the life cycle and it is important to have the tasks integrated with the document management, file sharing, and code repository, as these assets remain after the task or project completion.

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5. Long-term digital assets - document storage. Any company has documents, which are referred to over and over again. Such as corporate policies, onboarding procedures, manuals and guidelines, and standard forms for equipment usage or vacation requests. These documents pretty often reside on somebody's shared drive and the link provided to every new employee. I am not surprised to see the corporate documents stored on HR's computer and emailed to everybody who needs them. And of course, there are no instructions on what to do with the documents (print, sign, scan, upload, email back, deliver the hard copy), which triggers the same questions every time. What I am really surprised about is why people are lazy to write proper instructions once, thinking that it is a waste of time; and not lazy to keep the repetitive conversations and answer similar questions over and over.

In the big picture, the Knowledge Base and Document Management are not a 'direct communication' as there is no targeted 'message receiver'. Although, as there are authors and contributors on one side and readers/audience on another, it is similar to 'broadcasting' of corporate content.

So file sharing (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) is great for reducing the necessity of sending copies and manually merging changes. Simultaneous multi-user editing is amazing for collaboration and accelerating business processes.

What is missing? Number one is a documented history. Some systems provide versioning if the file with the same name is loaded and replaced with the newer one. But it cannot answer the questions of what was changed, by whom, and why. If the files were moved or renamed, all the references and direct links became broken as the system does not track such changes.

It requires special tools and user actions to find copies of the same file in different folders. And if the files have the same name but actually are different ones, somebody has to open both and compare. If the files are too big or have a special format (graphics eps or psd for example), they have to be downloaded to the local computer and require a special program in order to be previewed or edited. After modifying the raw files and creating a common compressed format (like jpg), the original ones very often are forgotten to be loaded back or new files to be shared with the team. As result, the next designer might need to start all over.

There is no way to label or categorize files (Mac's color coding does not help at all). Searching is limited to the text files only and to the exact matching words or phrases. I usually receive 'nothing is found' or a long list of useless 'matches'.

On top of these issues, each user has their own vision of 'the best' folder structure and file naming. (see the Naming INconvention or Preventing FILEure ) One of the companies I worked with, assigned a dedicated 'librarian' who was responsible for creating new folders and keeping the notes about the documents on the shared drive.

I cannot ignore security issues with file sharing. The author has to share each file or folder with the specific users and/or grant access to the external ones - partners and contractors. How often this access is revoked? If the option used is 'whoever has this link', nobody knows to whom it was sent or forwarded. I was speechless when in one company I found the administrative passwords to all corporate systems, including accounting and finance, inside a text file totally open to the public through the common shared drive.

Even if you believe that the shared documents are secure, as soon as the 'read-only' access is granted, they can be copied (sometimes the whole folder or drive with everything in it) and used without your permission.

A couple of important points about 'long-term communications'. First of all, they are not 'forever'. If the documents are outdated, they are useless, regardless of how long we keep them. Secondly, if shared documents are not used for sharing and collaboration, this is the dead-end as well. For example, if each user creates their own copy to 'avoid modifying the original one', or somebody overwrites the original without letting others know - both scenarios bring frustration and force people not to use file sharing.

This means that long-term communication requires extra administrative efforts, process definition, and participation from everybody.

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6. Intellectual Property - Corporate Knowledge base. Going back to the proper long-term digital asset management, the criteria is - any important corporate document, business decision, strategic planning, business documentation, technical documentation, including user manuals, how-to, FAQ, and so on - anything, to be accessible and valuable at any time, regardless the current tasks and projects. Such information should be stored at the Corporate Knowledge Base, which has:

• advanced access management with easy granting/revoking to the group or role;
• flexible searching and navigation;
• simple cross-reference to the related documents;
• seamless version control, which does not require extra efforts for a user to modify or revert changes;
• robust collaboration - simultaneous multi-user editing, in-line commenting and change approval;
• integration with all other types of communications - messaging, real-time notification, mailing, task management and file sharing.

Many task management tools also have options to attach documents. But very few are really rich in the functionality above (Confluence, Notion, SharePoint, ZohoWiki, GitBook, Papyrs). My goal is not to compare them, but to describe the necessity of using Corporate Knowledge Base for every company and every team, regardless the size, age and industry.

The main difference between the Knowledge Base and Long-term storage is the usage. When the form is filled or an image is placed, you do not need them anymore. Although when you read the corporate policy, study the user manual, or learn system architecture, you keep using them, even from your memory. And coming back to refresh or find specific topics.

That is why I classify the documents, belonging to the corporate Knowledge Base as 'never ending'. Yes, they have to be updated or replaced when needed; or retired if not applicable anymore. But overall, corporate knowledge base is the unique intellectual property.

Having this property in a single head is a big risk for the business. And having this knowledge partially 'distributed' among multiple people brings gaps, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding, as well as 'not being in sync'.

Be sure that the efforts to gain knowledge, establish and grow business, and define operations and products, are not lost by accident or with somebody leaving the company.

As for security, the corporate knowledge base can be copied partially. But in contrary to the shared folders, it cannot be copied all at once, and doing it piece by piece is time and labor-consuming; plus noticeable and preventable by proper security monitoring systems.

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Summarizing the classification of the corporate communications, based on the time-to-respond and time-to-live criteria, the suggested usage is:

1. Business emergency / instant communication (phone call) - no response wait time, conversation time-to-live extremely short (seconds);
2. Urgent, real-time communication (text messaging) - response within minutes, time-to-live during the conversation;
3. Short-term (email) - response time within hours/days, time-to-live - week(s);
4. Limited term (task management) - response time within the critical path (delay with a single request might impact the whole project); lime-to-live - during the task execution or project deployment;
5. Long term (storage or file sharing) - response time upon request; time-to-live - as long as required and up-to-date (required, but outdated pretty much the same as no document at all);
6. Always (knowledge base) - response is not required (except may be feed-back), time-to-live - as long as the company is functioning.

With all the confidence I can say that proper usage off all six types of communication, mentioned above is a criterion of corporate 'maturity'. If any of them are missed or misused, this should be addressed as soon as possible from the executive level to the 'performing' one.

Please, feel free to contact me if your organization needs assistance with proper communication or business process optimization.