We need to talk about e-mail and meetings: Planning your school’s internal communication

So we all know e-mail and meetings suck right? They do. But they don’t have to. The tools don’t suck, the way you use them sucks.

Let’s talk about the issues with each, and then the solution; forming a coherent strategy for your internal communication. At the moment (May 2020), you’re probably being forced into working deliberately due to Covid, but please think about it, and do it deliberately, don’t just do whatever is easiest now, and fall back into what you always used to do.

This advice is based on my experience teaching (good communication within department, less good whole-school), and my experience of setting up this type of communication system in my current job; organising a team of scouts at a professional football club. I was fortunate that when I started I was the third member of the team, with three more following soon after, so it was pretty much a blank canvas. Obviously you won’t be in that position within a school, but now (or in a few months) is a great time to reboot things! I’m going to talk about why we hate e-mail and meetings, and then what we can do differently.

E-mail

Everyone hates e-mail. It takes up time. It’s another thing to check. It always interrupts you when you’re in the flow working on something.

The biggest problem with e-mail is that in most work places it gets used for the full range of communication:

• Big boss has written a new company strategy — e-mail
• HR or finance have something time-critical for you — e-mail
• Someone is scheduling a meeting — e-mail
• Dave has lost his favourite mug — e-mail
• A direct colleague is sending you a document — e-mail
• Christmas party need planning? – e-mail

This graph shows this issue; borrowing the idea of importance and urgency from the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, and this one shows that, in most places, e-mail is used for everything. It all just drops in one inbox, with the same level of urgency.

The issue with this is that you then need to spend loads of time triaging your e-mail inbox, either filing things, or spending ages searching, or both, and you are constantly anxious whenever you get an e-mail, because you have to act, initially, as if it’s time critical and/or important, because it might be. We’ve all been caught in that position where if you turn off email notifications you miss things (and often get in “trouble”, but if you have them turned on you get interrupted by trivial things.

Some places try to solve this by really limiting e-mail, but that doesn’t really help, because those little things still need to be communicated some how!

Meetings

They suck. So many of them suck.

Here are some common issues:

• No one in the room can change anything you’re discussing.
• You’re discussing things that cannot change.
• You haven’t got enough time to discuss things (agenda is too big).
• People in the room haven’t got the knowledge/information to discuss things (yet).

Even if none of these things are true (everyone in the room is well-informed, there’s time and decision makers are present) meetings have issues, they are expensive (work out what an hour of ten people’s time costs) and because they are synchronous (everyone has to do the thing at the same time) they are awkward and break people’s flow or interrupt lives.

Solution

The solution isn’t one thing, it’s a package of things. It sounds like adding things will make it worse, but it doesn’t, because it makes each thing much more defined and clearer.

E-mail is now for Important Things — Long term plans and strategy documents. You can check it in the morning and afternoon, and not worry about it in between. You don’t have to spend ages filing and/or searching, because you don’t have anywhere near the same volume of e-mail. E-mails don’t need to suddenly be huge formal things, but they should be more like old school memos, with a bit more substance and something to think about.

Calendar is for time based things — There should be multiple whole school calendars for different things (CPD, Events, Trips/Intervention that take kids out of lessons). There need to be clear guidelines on who can add things to the calendar (not everyone), and when (with notice, so a trip can’t get snuck on the night before). There should then be a few department calendars for planning things. Data deadlines, mock timetables, marking deadlines, set changes. It often makes sense to send a message when things are added to the calendar, so people know it’s there without checking everything every day, but they don’t need to store this message, because to check a date they already know about they look at the calendar.

IM (Instant Message) so this is the newest thing. Well it would have been until lockdown, as I’d imagine lots of people are using Microsoft Teams or similar. For me, a well used IM programme is an absolute gamechanger. The advantages are:

1. The chat format removes all the ‘etiquette’ that’s implied with e-mail. Yeah maybe it’s nice. But typing “Hi, I hope you are well?” a dozen times a day to people you see all the time doesn’t add anything and takes time. With an IM, you get straight to the point.
2. Chats are threaded, so the replies to each chat are contained together, like threads on Twitter, rather than a DM on twitter or a WhatsApp group which is one long message.
3. Because you have seperate channels, content is automatically split into topics by the person who sends it, rather than that being the job for each of the recipients. This means less time overall is spent filtering.
4. People can choose which channels they have set for notifications, so you then know that when you get one, it’s worth reading.
5. Teams integrates really nicely with other stuff, like calendars, meetings, to-do lists.
6. It works fantastically for people who are off-site, for me staff were remote most of the time, and whilst in a normal situation this isn’t the case at school, you’ll still have people on courses, who work part time, who need to arrive as school starts/leave as it finishes, who do lunch duties etc, who normally miss out on discussions, now it’s easier for them to be included.

I’d recommend the following Teams Channels, but you’ll probably think of more:

Whole School

• Urgent Messages — Fire Alarm, Kid wandering site,
• Not Urgent Messages — Planning staff nights out, I’ve lost my favourite mug
• CPD — Keep it all in one place — The organiser can post a blog or video, and people can discuss and respond straight away.

Department

• Channel per year group
• CPD — Keep department CPD in one place as above
• Social — But obviously keep it PG! You can create a poll to agree on a venue for the end of term night out.
• There is then also an individual chat feature between staff.

Files — It’s 2020. Please don’t be e-mailing files around within an organisation. Get a proper shared drive setup (that people can access remotely like OneDrive), and then people can e-mail links to that file, or share it properly, or share on Teams. The Teams/OneDrive integration is fantastic if setup correctly. It creates a folder per channel, which you can then access on your computer, and your phone.

Meetings — There should obviously be less meetings. I think most people are nodding at this obvious statement. Here’s how:

• Lots of the little updatey things that used to be saved up for meetings are now IMs.
• Lots of the bigger things are now nicely written e-mails, which people can either ponder and respond to in their own time (by e-mail or IM), or you can discuss it in a meeting, but everyone is informed so it’ll go better.
• Lots of meetings actually work better with not everyone present. If you’ve got a department meeting and you spend 30 minutes discussing year 9, those who don’t teach them are bored/distracted, could that be an IM channel, or an e-mail and a response instead?
• If multiple people need to work on a thing (set changes, curriculum planning), then it often works better to share the file, people all work on it separately (but editing the same file), whilst discussing it in an IM channel.

So there’s the plan:

1. Setup Teams — With whole-school and department channels.
2. Setup Shared Calendars
3. Setup Shared Files (Not on an archaic drive you can only see in school).
4. Send lots less e-mails
5. Have lots less meetings.

I promise you, that whilst this sounds like more, it’s much better, as each thing is distinct. It’ll take some time, some technical training, and then ongoing training (“That could have been an IM”, “Is that on the calendar?”, “Oh can you put that on the OneDrive instead of e-mailing please?”), but it’ll be worth it.

You’ll need to keep an eye on the volume of messages on each IM channel; if there’s too many in one channel then it’s overwhelming and important things get missed. Set a date when you’ll review them (a month in? at half-term?) and do some auditing and then collapse a few together and create some new ones.

Whatever you do it’s better than receiving 100 e-mails a day right?