A New Way of Working Remotely: Email and IM Aren't Enough
Although the pandemic
has radically changed the way we work, many of us are still relying on the same
old digital tools to connect with each other.
As we move into the
next stage of the pandemic, it's time to take a hard look at how your
organization can enhance communication and collaboration now that remote work
is the norm.
The onset of
stay-at-home orders in March 2020 forced companies to use whatever tools they
had to enable employees to work remotely, often resulting in a chaotic
patchwork with inherent security risks. More than half of HR leaders said poor
technology was the biggest barrier to working effectively at the time, according to Gartner.
Email was a reasonable
band-aid, short-term solution, along with group chat apps. But since remote
work shows no signs of going away—Global Workplace Analytics predicts that up to 30% of the workforce will be at
least partly remote by the end of 2021—email and chat alone aren't going to cut
it. Organizations need more sustainable collaboration tools that solve the
pressing challenges of productivity, engagement, and innovation in a dispersed
workforce.
Email is useful, but
not great for collaboration
It's hard to imagine
working without email. Knowledge workers spend, on average, an estimated 28% of
the workweek managing emails, according to McKinsey. Email has a deeply entrenched role in
enterprise, and for good reason:
- It's familiar, easy, and
convenient.
- It's effective for
notifications.
- It's easily searchable by date,
sender, and keyword.
- It's sortable into folders.
The problem is that
email has become a crutch. We turn to it automatically instead of intentionally
using it when it's best suited to the task at hand.
Email should be used
sparingly, even in remote work, because of these shortcomings:
- It creates data silos.
- It doesn't support complex
collaboration (more on this below).
- It's a slow form of
asynchronous communication.
- It's distracting and
time-consuming, and it can crowd out your main tasks.
Most of all, email
inhibits effective knowledge-sharing, which is the foundation for strong
collaboration.
More than half of
remote employees have avoided sharing documents because they can't find them or
because it would take too long to do so, (Igloo's) recent survey found.
So is chat better than
email? If you've been at home trying to keep up with endless Teams or Slack
conversations these past months, you already know the answer.
Chat has only
shifted—or worsened—the problem
Chat apps raised expectations
when they first came into the workplace. In practice, they can be useful for
purposes such as these:
- Reducing the volume of email
- Accelerating simple, two-way
Q&A to keep work moving
- Delivering quick employee
feedback
- Enabling social interaction for
remote workers
- Launching voice or video calls
The ease of IM can be
a slippery slope, though. The digital workplace survey mentioned above, which polled 2,000
employees at medium-sized and large organizations, found that 39% of respondents
had mistakenly shared sensitive content—from love notes to private company
data—while messaging with colleagues.
Among the other
downsides of IM for collaboration—which mirror some of the pitfalls of
email—are the following:
- Trapping valuable content and
conversations in multiple different channels
- Generating noise and
distraction from overuse
- Wasting time in personal
conversations
- Creating a stressful, always-on
culture
Over half of employees
admit to being overwhelmed by the number of nonwork-related messages sent in
apps like Slack and Teams, as we found in our survey.
In the COVID-19 world
of remote work, it's more important than ever to rein in the chaos of
unregulated, decentralized IM.
There's a vital
distinction between simple and complex collaboration
Few things are simple
in the current climate, and that includes workplace collaboration. Think of
collaboration this way:
- Simple collaboration involves a few employees' working together to
create one output, such as a document or presentation.
- Complex collaboration involves multiple stakeholders' working together
on a multifaceted project with several deliverables.
How would you
characterize your most recent few collaboration experiences? Tending toward the
complex, no doubt, with the added wrinkle of little to no in-person
interaction.
In complex
collaboration scenarios with cross-functional teams, visibility is vital. Every
team member should be able to see every file and conversation, in context, on
demand. That's just not possible when you're only connecting via email and
chat.
Data silos are the
enemy of successful collaboration. The survey referenced above revealed that 1 in 4 employees use at least two
nonapproved apps to get work done, which only contributes to the all-too-common
problem.
When people can't
share information, resources, and knowledge because they're using different or
inadequate tools, there are wide-ranging negative effects:
- Wasting time and/or duplicating
effort
- Stifling innovation
- Breeding mistrust
- Hindering companywide culture
Remote work is on the
rise, so organizations must look for new ways to use their old tools to support
complex collaboration.
A strategic hybrid
model: it's not only which tools you use but also how you use them
Despite their
limitations, email and IM are indispensable in the remote collaboration
toolbox—but only if they're integrated into a central destination that provides
your employees with quick, easy access to relevant information and
conversations.
The hybrid model for
office collaboration brings together email, IM, and your intranet:
- IM or chat enables fast, direct, one-on-one or group
conversations and fosters a rapid flow of actions and ideas between
employees.
- Email facilitates more detailed, slower communications
and serves as a searchable, organizable repository.
- Your intranet is the go-to collaboration hub, tightly
integrating with employee chat apps and email to maintain knowledge and
put conversations in the context of tasks/projects.
You're not alone if
your intranet isn't exactly on the leading edge. Your remote employees don't
have to fall back on email and IM. There's another way.
Create collaboration
zones inside your intranet
Building an entirely
new intranet can be costly and complex, and it can require IT support and
buy-in. Instead, consider creating customizable department or team zones within
your current intranet. They're simple, cost-effective, and don't require
ongoing IT involvement, but they tick all the boxes for productive
collaboration:
- Providing a central destination
with easy-to-use tools
- Integrating preferred tools
such as chat apps
- Putting conversations and
essential information in context
- Improving knowledge management
- Making content easy to find
- Eliminating wasted time
- Increasing transparency
- Enhancing productivity with
shared calendars and task lists
Fully 78% of
respondents to our
digital workplace survey said that
if they could, they would overhaul their department's intranet space with
solutions designed to solve collaboration and communication challenges specific
to their needs. That's a strong indication of the demand for purpose-built
departmental zones within company intranets.
Prebuilt software
solutions enable your organization to harness next-generation intranet
technology and create a powerful destination for collaboration, all without
taking away employees' go-to tools and apps, and without the expense and large
change management exercise of a brand new intranet.
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