At work weāre making a collective effort to get better at responding to messages in a more prompt manner.
Iām sure my boss Matt appreciates the helpful countdown timer I attached to my most recent email to him, then.
Or maybe Iām doing it wrong?
At work weāre making a collective effort to get better at responding to messages in a more prompt manner.
Iām sure my boss Matt appreciates the helpful countdown timer I attached to my most recent email to him, then.
Or maybe Iām doing it wrong?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Last year I shared a video called Conference Calls in Real Life, and this week the folks that made it have published a follow-up!
Presenting, for your viewing pleasure: Email in Real Life
I read a lot.
I have a reading list of blogs and other websites in Feedly that I read throughout the day, every day.It includes everything from traditional news through to cartoons.
Often I find something that I want to share on this blog. I
quite often share links here to other articles, but I always try do it in the
context of providing my own commentary and thoughts on the content. What Iām
getting at is that sharing links on here is not a quick, one-click process,
because I donāt want this blog to be merely a long list of links to other
peopleās content. Iām much too egotistical for that.
Anyway, the result of all this is that over time I build up
a handful of flagged articles that Iāve been intending to share but never got
around to doing so.
This is the first of what may become a semi-regular feature,
where I spew those forth with (in the interests of time) only a sentence or two of comment instead of the full-blown article I was originally planning. Enjoy!
In mid-January Facebook hit the headlines with (and receivedĀ decidedly mixed reviews on) the announcement of their āFacebook at Workā offering,
which is essentially a walled-garden version of Facebook with access restricted
to those in your company. Aside from that important distinction the list of
features seems pretty much on a par with the larger Facebook we all know.
With this product offering Facebook joins an enterprise
social network marketplace that already contains some big names: Microsoft,
IBM, Cisco and SAP amongst them.
I can see the benefits of these platforms in terms of
collaboration, messaging, and the like ā but Iām certainly glad that my
responsibilities donāt include the realization of those benefits for my
company. The scope of the behaviour change required to make the most of those
tools falls into the category of āculture shiftā in my mind, and that stuff is simply
not where my expertise lies ā itās a task that goes way beyond technology and
business process folks like I.
Where I work, weāre now on our second enterprise social
network. Weirdly, the first one hasnāt actually gone away ā everyone has simply
stopped talking about it (and we all stopped using it long ago). The
implementation of the first one ā I feel ā was probably driven by technology
folks. I say that because from a technical perspective it works great, but
nobody ever told me what it was for. Apparently Iām not alone in my confusion,
because it never really saw any significant usage.
Things are looking a little better for the new one. For one,
itās integrated into our enterprise learning environment. At first that seemed
weird to me, but now that I think about it that makes perfect sense: learning
and development in the modern enterprise is increasingly something you do at
your own pace (to a certain extent), in your own office with the door closed
and headphones on. Itās crying out for something to bring back some of the
social aspects that are lost now that technology has begun to make
classroom-based training sessions a thing of the past, and I hope our training
teams pick up this ball and run with it. Additionally, thereās a movement
underway to build on our corporate culture and do a better job of leveraging it
for the benefit of our customers. Open, social communication that transcends
our geography is an important part of that cultural evolution too. The time is
right, then, for a platform to make this happen.
Nevertheless, people were burned by the failure of our
previous platform to gain traction, and thereās a healthy amount of skepticism
out there. Again, nobody has really told me what the new platform is for or
given me examples of how I could use it to my benefit.
A quick conversation with my boss about this last week
brought me to an important realization. Why am I waiting around for someone to
tell me what this platform is for? Iāll decide what itās for! Iām even starting
to think the lack of guidance and instruction might be a deliberate choice made
in the interests of organic growth and buy-in fuelled by self-realization
(although, frankly, I still think itās the wrong choice if thatās the case).
I plan to encourage my team to shift some of our non-time
sensitive group communication out of Outlook and into the social space, and I
sincerely hope it catches on. I think that would be a good starting point for
us, and as I said at the top, I really do see the benefits of a platform like
this. Iām putting my own skepticism firmly aside in the interests of trying to
steer my group toward the realization of those benefits that this platform
could represent. Weāll see how it goes!
Hopefully I wonāt be around to see the
introduction of a third enterprise social network. I wonāt be so generous if I
am.
If you’re a regular reader you may or may not have already guessed that I typically write these posts in advance and then set them to publish on a schedule. It’s not really a hard and fast rule, but if I have a couple of posts to publish in a week then I’ll usually schedule them on a Tuesday and a Thursday at the start of the workday here in the Mountain timezone so that they catch the end of the workday in Europe.
The reason I mention this is because the post I published yesterdayĀ āĀ Voicemail: A Beginner’s GuideĀ ā was actually written last Sunday before I left for my business trip. As it turns out it was extremely prophetic because I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with other leaders from my workplace talking about our culture and how we become better at leveraging the values we already hold, ensuring that the work we do for our internal customers (all my customers are internal) translates correctly and has a positive impact on our end-user customers.
The session was excellent and hugely valuable, and I’m not doing it justice in my description.
I mention it mostly because the overuse of email and the underuse of the phone became something of a common theme, as did intentionality and using your own behaviours to drive the right behaviours in others.
Great minds think alike, hey?
If you’re a regular reader you may or may not have already guessed that I typically write these posts in advance and then set them to publish on a schedule. It’s not really a hard and fast rule, but if I have a couple of posts to publish in a week then I’ll usually schedule them on a Tuesday and a Thursday at the start of the workday here in the Mountain timezone so that they catch the end of the workday in Europe.
The reason I mention this is because the post I published yesterdayĀ āĀ Voicemail: A Beginner’s GuideĀ ā was actually written last Sunday before I left for my business trip. As it turns out it was extremely prophetic because I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with other leaders from my workplace talking about our culture and how we become better at leveraging the values we already hold, ensuring that the work we do for our internal customers (all my customers are internal) translates correctly and has a positive impact on our end-user customers.
The session was excellent and hugely valuable, and I’m not doing it justice in my description.
I mention it mostly because the overuse of email and the underuse of the phone became something of a common theme, as did intentionality and using your own behaviours to drive the right behaviours in others.
Great minds think alike, hey?
This week Iāve been travelling for work. I left Calgary early Monday morning, and I returned home late last night.
On Sunday night as I was preparing for my trip I briefly considered setting an āout of officeā email alert and changing my outgoing voicemail message to advise people of my unavailability. I quickly dismissed this plan though, for the simple reason that I really wasnāt all that unavailable. Sure I was away from my physical desk in Calgary, but I rarely work from there anyway. And sure my calendar was full, but thatās not unusual either. Setting up unavailability alerts would have been a misuse of the tools available to me.
As I was thinking about all this, it put me in mind of a post I wrote about seven months ago titled Weird Workplace Etiquette. In it, I complained about the fact that nobody just picks up the phone and calls me without first sending me a message (or worse, booking some time in my calendar) to ensure that Iām going to pick up the phone and talk to them.
Now that Iāve had some time to think about it, the reason seems obvious to me. We can lay blame firmly on voicemail. Subconsciously or otherwise people hate it, because everybodyās had a bad experience with it. Think about how it normally goes between a couple of busy people ā you leave a voicemail for me in which you ask me to call you back, I call you back and get your voicemail, and so it continues ad infinitum.
Happily, this is pretty easy to fix in my opinion, and the ROWE course I took not too long ago teaches us the way: itās merely a matter of breaking some bad voicemail habits that almost everyone has. Even more happily, you (mostly) donāt need other people to read my advice ā you only need concern yourself with what you do. If you do it right, others should fall into line.
Read on to get started!
Everything starts with your outgoing voicemail message. What does it say now? I assume itās something along the lines of āIām sorry Iāve missed your call, please leave me a message and Iāll get back to you.ā To be blunt, thatās not good enough.
Firstly, youāre not sorry youāve missed somebodyās call. You were busy doing something more important than picking up the phone, and thatās OK! Apologising for it is a meaningless platitude and everyone knows it, but more importantly it sets the wrong tone for what weāre trying to accomplish. Youāre a (wo)man of action, not the kind of person who spews forth wet apologies for failing to be idly sitting around by your phone when somebody somewhere kind of vaguely hoped thatās what you might be doing. If anything, you should apologise when you are available to answer the phone!
Instead, your outgoing voicemail message should reflect that yes, you were too busy to take the call and also yes, youāre too busy to engage an endless game of phone-tag. Instead of asking callers to leave you āa message,ā be specific about what youāre looking for from them.
āYouāve reached Jason. Please leave a message detailing how I can help you and by when you need a response, and Iāll get back to you as appropriate.ā
The same goes for when youāre leaving a voicemail for somebody. Just because their outgoing message is vague doesnāt mean the message you leave for them should be too. Think about how you want somebody to react when they listen to your message. Do you want them to immediately get to work on what youāre asking of them, or do you want them to have to call you back and speak with you first so they can find out what you needed? Tell them what you want, and tell them to get back to you once they have it!
Iāve been using these tips for a little while now and I have to say theyāre working well for me. Voicemail is a vastly improved experience as a result ā although itās still under-utilised, because people still do all they can to avoid using the tool at all if they can at all help it. Most people never even get to hear my outgoing message and come to the realisation that Iām changing their lives for the better.
Regardless, the more I think about it the more I think I may actually kick things up a notch. Long-time readers may recall another post on this blog from the distant past in which I talked about how people (me) canāt possibly hope to read, understand and respond to every email they get in as timely a fashion as they might like. Email, in a typical workplace (certainly in mine) is a vastly overused tool. Voicemail, though? Thanks to everybody shying away from it, a voicemail is out of the ordinary and will get somebodyās attention. If I can do voicemail well, it could become a fantastic method for making my messages to people a higher priority than everyone elseās.
All Iāll have to concentrate on is not using it for evil.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
A couple of days ago I blogged about some weird workplace etiquetteĀ surrounding phone calls that we seem to have developed into our culture where I work.
One or two people mentioned this video of what a conference call would look like in real life and I don’t think I’ve shared it before so, enjoy! Happy Friday, everyone!
I’ve noticed some strange etiquette that seems to be plaguing my workplace.
It’s been going on for a long time, but now that I’ve explicitly noticed it it’s really starting to bother me. It’s this:
Every phone call seems to be preceded by an IM or an email, asking if a phone call is acceptable. If the call initiator feels that there’s going to be more than a few minutes of content, then it’s not at all unusual for them to book the call in a half hour slot on your calendar, often with conference line information included so everyone can avoid the “what’s the best number to call you at?” pre-conversation. Sometimes that meeting invite is also preceded by an IM or an email asking if it’s acceptable to set up some time.
Does this happen in every workplace, or is it some unique etiquette that’s grown into the culture of just mine?
I’ve been as guilty of this behaviour as anyone else in the past, but I’m working to stamp it out now.
Here’s the deal: if you want to call me, just call. If it turns out you’re doing so at an inopportune time and I’m busy with other things, my voicemail will give you some appropriate options. And the best number to reach me at? That would be the one that appears beside my name in the corporate directory.
What strange etiquette rules exist where you work?