Improving Communication within the Digital Workplace
Nowadays, every actor (small, medium or large corp) wonders what transformation needs to be taken concerning the digital workplace they want to provide to their employees/collaborators… This thing that everybody carries around like a second shadow of ours, also known as a smartphone, has had a major impact on our everyday habits and behavior, both in our personal and professional space. These devices run our everyday lives, from making friends to listening to music to communicating all around the world, to watching movies.
Lately, people came to realize that this virtual sphere would reshape the workplace and would appear as a challenge for organizations as seen below. From this observation arose the necessity for organizations to provide physical and digital tools required for better collaboration and communication within this virtual sphere, which could be called the “Digital Workplace”.
From what I realized when I started working in an organization was that it became difficult to identify the frontier between what belongs to my private space and what belongs to the professional space. This is one of the issues that motivated me to write this post. I am convinced that this is a major challenge that has not been solved yet. Many organizations have tried to force their employees/collaborators to use in-house tools or corporate-specific tools at work in vain.
This software usually differs from consumer paradigms and significantly strengthen user resistance, since the latter expect to use similar tools as those they use inside their personal space. Organizations cannot ignore the impact of social networks on our perception of technology. Most millennials expect all technologies to fit the model of having one version and that is always up to date, which is available everywhere through the cloud.
Not only physical tools are being used interchangeably personal and professional spheres, but software too. For instance, you could find yourself in situations where your Skype account is used for both purposes, as well as your WhatsApp account, Facebook…
Having this constant switch can be a risk for both the organization and the individual. On the one hand, sensible information flows from one space to another. And on the other hand, individuals might feel trapped in a space where the distinction between both spheres becomes blurry. This ain’t easy to solve… and I believe current software’s are not capable of solving it. From my experience, I realized that such an issue usually concerned communication tools (WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype, Gmail, Outlook…). Communication tools today are not adapted to productive and continuous communication. On the one hand, you have chat messages, which can get quite messy because people tend to send lots of nonsense through chats channels (cat pictures…). On the other hand, you find the email that lacks structure (the sender is sometimes not clear, chains of emails sometimes can get lost…).
Our solution… Takeo
There is definitely room for improvement. As a result, a friend and I decided to take a perilous journey to figure out a better way to communicate within an organization. We came up with the Takeo project. Productivity software that targets young professionals who complain about the inefficiency of email as well as “pollution” (= notifications, ads, …) and the distraction of social networks.
The Model
Currently, the focus of most business communication applications lies in intra-team communication, which results in the use of e-mail for inter-team communication. Takeo tends to replace e-mail by making it easy to communicate with non-team members. The below schema illustrates how inter-team and intra-team communication is taken care of by Takeo through the use of identities.
Takeo is a user-centric intra- and inter-team business communication application that enhances productivity through intelligent communication streams and task management. Users can access it on most devices (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Web) through platform-optimized apps. Additionally, companies can create bots through easy-to-use APIs and Takeo also integrates with existing solutions.
It did not tend to replace the chat, instead, its goal was to provide a whole new experience to email users as well as to bored chat users getting overwhelmed with unnecessary chat messages and notifications. Every day, we are bombarded with unnecessary information and it tends to end this. Time management is a key factor in any sector. Communication tools today are not focused enough on good time management, as well as quiet communication. These are not adapted to productive and continuous communication. Takeo’s focus lies in enhancing productivity. A problem with other business communication apps such as Slack is that it is a time-eater and distracting. We wanted to design a clear flow from communication to tasks and therefore prevent distractions. We decided to focus on these aspects when developing Takeo.
Through our interviews with professionals in the start-up sector, messy communication has proved to be one of the main issues. We find communication tools such as Slack, Rocket Chat or HipChat that try to address this problem, but their “chat” aspect adds a lot of noise to conversations.
Takeo is the place where the user has all its communication taking place in a structured way. Our purpose is not to replace current social media, because Takeo is not supposed to be used as chat apps like (WhatsApp, Facebook…). Instead, Takeo wants to make it easier for people who don’t like social media to get rid of all these apps and start communicating in a way that suits them best, without being disturbed every minute because of notifications popping up and news feeds.
The model is quite simple; you have users, organizations, and bots. Each user has what we call Identities, these identities are the combination of user_id and organization_id. When a user signs into Takeo, his “personal identity” is the first identity he gets assigned to. Then, if the user wants to “enter” an organization, this will be considered as a second identity, which could, for instance, be “developer at Uber identity”. Note that I used the word “enter” and not “logging in” since we want to create this virtual space the user enters when using Takeo as a tool.
Users
Users have a unique profile managing all their interactions (personal and professional) on Takeo and still, there is a clear distinction between different types of interactions. Takeo is supposed to be an ego-centric app, meaning that all the app revolves around the user.
We consider 3 types of users inside Takeo, “Me, Contacts and Foreign”:
- Me, my personal identities and personal organizations
- Contact, the personal identity of the contact and their organization identities
- Foreign, the only visible information you get from this type of user is the display name
Every time someone creates a group, this group is in fact a “bot”, which can be considered as a user that is shared among many other users (those in the group). The bot is like a user and is inside an organization, which forms an identity, but a bot can only have one identity.
Topics, Takeo’s main building block
Topics are the most generic data structure in Takeo, they basically replace the classic e-mail we are all used to. Topics are used for doodles, forms, simple conversations, todos… Takeo was designed such that the user has to create a new topic each time he wants to assign a task, create a doodle, send a form to fill in … or just start a new conversation. The idea is to allow the creation of several topics but to find a balance between topics and content inside topics (messages for instance).
What about the structure of topics, how are they organized? Each topic is grouped according to the user or user group, for example, if Alice has 4 different topics with Bob, these 4 topics will be grouped. The advantage of multiple topics is to avoid polluting a conversation with unrelated stuff. If Alice creates a Doodle with Bob, the Doodle may “disappear” in a new conversation through forking the topic.
There are several types of topics. For now, it would be the following Topics:
- Sharing contact details = basically, we start a topic so we can share our data with a user
- Company Feature = plugin
- Doodle / Meeting
- List / Tasks
- Forms
- Todo’s
Fundamentally, a topic is a relation between users. The topic is a generic building block whose responsibility belongs to the user how he wants to use it. As a todo-list, like a chat, as a task, as a kanban … we designed it as such that it would be to the user to choose.
Prototype
We had a prototype running on the web and mobile. The stack was the following:
- Front-end (Web): ReactJS
- Front-end (Mobile): React Native
- Back-end: NodeJS
- Server hosting on Heroku and static files on S3 buckets
The prototype looked like the images below.
Conclusion
The management has a crucial role to play. In order to benefit from the productivity gains generated by the virtual workplace, they must be aware of the latest trends and technologies. They should keep in mind that part of the annual budget should be allocated to training the workforce to use the latest technologies likely to positively impact productivity within the organization. Nevertheless, identifying when to invest and in what technology is a complicated task… because it is expensive and time-consuming. Such decisions have become a strategic challenge over the past few years.
Drop me a message if something is not clear!
