Workplace Communications are a Mess; It’s Time to Go Back to the Drawing Board
Workplace communications are broken. Corporations have better connectivity and more collaboration tools than ever before, but office workers can spend hours a day managing messages, scheduling meetings and coordinating with colleagues. The sorry state of workplace communications is so bad that I believe it has at the very least contributed to the longest slide in U.S. worker productivity since the late 1970s.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Investors in recent years have poured billions of dollars into communications and collaboration startups such as Slack and Yammer that were supposed to “fix” the shortcomings of email and cater to a new generation of workers. But the result has been more confusion than clarity. We are drowning in information, overwhelmed by countless apps and bewildered by the number of tools we now use to communicate. It’s time to reimagine workplace communications and develop a single platform that combines the immediacy of chat, the permanence of email and an integrated suite of productivity tools that give Millennials and Boomers good reason to adopt it.
How we got here
Email has been the mainstay of corporate communications for more than three decades. It remains the only asynchronous unified system of record for digital communications, but it has not kept pace with changing work environments in which the speed of communication and collaboration has exploded.
A growing generation of Millennial workers is driving change; they want to communicate, collaborate and execute in a more integrated and synchronous manner. They see efficiency as working in the now, rather than discussing and then doing. The cumbersome and chronological structure of email doesn’t easily allow people to surface what’s most important to them and lacks the immediacy and brevity that most Millennials demand.
This generation of digital natives, many of whom work remotely, has taken advantage of mobile communications, cloud-based technologies and a wealth of powerful apps to push for change from below. In doing so, they’ve forced corporate IT departments to adopt Bring Your Own Device policies, as well as to open their once closed ecosystems to hundreds of new apps. Leaders such as Facebook Workplace and Slack have captured significant mindshare and they do an admirable job of letting coworkers collaborate. However, in my view, the pendulum has swung too far in favor of collaboration at the expense of productivity.
Sound harsh? Consider this: even though these apps are specifically designed for work, chat-based communications are still seen as ephemeral and frivolous. Once a message scrolls off the top of the screen, it is rarely seen again. And when someone decides a message or conversation is important enough, he or she will transfer the exchange to email, which remains the system of record at most corporations. Making matters worse, there are so many chat-based alternatives that communications have become increasingly fractured and disjointed. We spend more time consolidating and trying to contextualize conversations then we do executing against them. How many times have you tried to track down a message from a colleague, only to discover you couldn’t remember whether it had been sent via email, text, or group chat? How much time do you and your colleagues waste continually monitoring messages for fear of missing information (FOMI)? Immediacy is great to a point, but not if FOMI increases workers’ anxiety levels. It’s exhausting to be ‘always on,’ even when you don’t need to be.
The path forward
The market is ripe for change. One-in-three American workers are Millennials, and last year they surpassed Gen Xers as the largest share of the workforce. They’re not going to relinquish their phones, their apps and their collaborative approach to work, nor should they. But the rest of the workforce grew up with email and don’t necessarily share the Millennial way of doing things. So instead of moving forward with — and investing in — a patchwork series of tools that satisfy no one, we need to find a third way, an alternative system built from scratch that will enable us to bridge this divide.
How might we do this? Let’s start with a cloud-based enterprise communications platform and layer on a familiar and easy-to-use group chat interface. Now, let’s introduce a self- indexing tool that immediately surfaces the most relevant messages and enables users to find them later. Next add in a suite of reimagined productivity tools that let users get work done mid-conversation without switching to other applications. Finally, allow for asymmetric dialogs while retaining context and the ability to organize and assemble dialog reports. The result: a next generation communications framework that reduces anxiety while increasing efficiency and productivity.
We are at an inflection point, one that is part technical and part cultural. The way we work is changing; it’s time to harness the new tools at our disposal and organize them into a holistic system that combines the speed and immediacy of chat, the permanence of email, and the most frequently used productivity tools that give each generation of workers a good reason to adopt them.
Let’s stop talking about work and get some work done!
