Communications Nightmare
I noticed the other day that rather than becoming easier, corporate communications have become significantly harder. The dream has always been one universal way to contact people and share information that allows everyone who needs it to get it, while maintaining corporate security. Instead of creating this, we’ve ended up with a Tower of Babel in which we are forced to seek out and actively watch numerous applications.
For example, on any given day these sites/apps/programs for Corporate Communications
- The Slack Channel for my local dev team
- The Slack Channel for my global dev team
- Skype to converse with a specific team in India
- What’s App for management discussions
- Google Hangouts to interact with the Customer Support Team in India
- Corporate email
- Text from a handful of management types who don’t like any of the previous options
There are more that I use less frequently. My point is that rather than simplifying communications over time, we’ve complicated them, and in doing so, increased the likelihood that important messages will be missed.
The problem is that rather than committing to that one “killer app” which has failed to materialize, we’ve Balkanized our communications and compartmentalized our information.
What’s needed? I’d say that one “killer app”, but time has shown that’s not the solution. Better, we need to be smarter about what we use. While it’s nice to let teams choose their apps to help facilitate communications that will work for them, we need to remember that we can also be creating barriers within our organization.
The solution comes down to people making better decisions. We all need to collectively stop asking “can we” and think more in terms of “should we.”
Just a thought…