Communication at Work: Can We Fix It?
Communication at work. It’s not exactly easy, is it?
Between email, chat, text, and social media, we are more connected than ever before. We send an email to get that report out and follow up with a chat message to get feedback on it. We check our tweets over our morning cup of coffee and text our coworker to tell them we’re running late. So while communication isn’t a technical problem, the demand for our attention is. We’re overwhelmed, overworked, and have little productivity to show for it. And all that communication noise we’re experiencing? It’s only going to get louder.
That’s where Umuse comes in.
We’re on a mission to tame the communication chaos in the workplace. To make it simpler and easier to communicate with the people that matter most. In short, we want to bring order to the chaos that has become your work day.
So how did we end up here? Why this mission — and why now? Well like most things entrepreneurial — it was personal. We too were inundated with messages and technology that attempted to make life easier but ended up creating a whole new category of work. We found ourselves setting aside precious time each day to sort, sift, and organize before we even got to the task at hand. But I digress — let’s back up and start at the beginning.
You’ve got digital mail.
Over the past 40 years, things have gone digital as we’ve moved from physical mail and office memos to email. With 3.7 billion users worldwide, and more than 200 billion messages sent daily, email is the most widely adopted form of workplace communication. It was the first of its kind, much faster, and beat shuffling through stacks of paper — a great recipe for adoption. Add in its open standard and you’ve got a universal way to communicate. Compared to physical mail, email provides an easy way to get business done, keep a record of conversations, and quickly communicate with colleagues anywhere in the world. Companies rely on it and employees understand how to use it.
That said, email today doesn’t look much different from the email of four decades past. We just get more of it now. Ripped directly from the memos it was replacing, most email clients feel dated and cumbersome by modern standards. Enter, Chat.
Real time. Real distraction.
Between Slack, HipChat, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark, and more — we have no shortage of great chat tools to choose from. With email being so bulky, chat is modern and gives us a new way to collaborate and get the answers we need quickly. All while having a little fun along the way.
Connecting to chat for the first time is like stepping into a whole new world of connectivity. Instantly, you can update a team or the entire company, ask a burning question, or send a hilarious cat gif. Need a quick response? Just direct message your coworker who will feel the need to respond in a flash. This new world sure seems productive. But the hyperconnected coworker on the other end of your messages may understandably feel burnt out. Aside from your pings, they’re juggling countless other chats and emails each day in an effort to keep up.
The problem is, we’re all that hyperconnected coworker in this new world we’ve stepped into. We’re sorting, sifting, and struggling to keep everything straight and to get there faster. Email was hard enough to stay on top of. Now I’ve got to keep track of my chat messages? And you’re telling me I can’t chat across providers or in some cases, teams?
All I want is one simple world where I can get my work done and stay connected without all of the distraction.
The Power of One
Our goal at Umuse is to make work simple again. We love email. We love chat. Now, we’re bringing what we love about both together into one simple seamless feed. Connect Umuse to your email and chat accounts and you can read, respond, save and search across all channels in one place, making where the communication is coming from secondary to what is actually being communicated. You get a modern approach to email. You get a more structured approach to chat. Communication simplified.
A big challenge? You bet. We’re up against nearly 40 years of behavioral baggage and we’re navigating dozens of different protocols. But in a world where the number of tools I need to get my job done is increasing and the communication noise is only getting louder, we think creating something to help make sense of it all is a challenge worth taking.
Want to see Umuse in action? Try it now.
