Forbidding email is not a solution*

There's been news flying around that some companies are abandoning email. Atos Origin for example is going so far that they are forbidding email totally according to Computer world. I've seen many similar news from other sources also, claiming that big bunch of emails are waste. I have to say I second that, majority of emails are waste. There's no question about that. What's worrying me, is the proposed solution to that problem.

In organizations, there's natural demand to communicate clearly to large groups. Often the sender of the message can't be sure whom all would benefit from the information in the message. This causes, that many of the emails have receivers who are not interested about the subject. This then starts to cumulate, when people in the mail chain start to answer and will not drop anyone out from the mail chain, due to they are not sure why the people was there in the first place. From both of these, there comes the waste.

Solution for the waste problem doesn't go away with new tools like social networks, intranet feeds, wiki's and instant messaging chats although the problem does change a bit with these tools. With these people need to themselves tune in to the forums they think are relevant for them. This will cause at the end that people are tuning in to all news sources they think might be relevant for them. This then will cause the same information overflow as with email quite soon. And at the end it might be, that people will use even more time with these new tools than used with traditional email for example.

Don't get me wrong, these new tools, IM, Social Networks, Wiki's and whatever are really essential for any company to communicate better. These just will never replace email. There is a need and place for all of these. Problem isn't in any of the tools, but with the people using those. With short and effective trainings, people would learn to use right tools for right communication. There are always subjects that go best with email or social networks and subjects that require more rapid feedback either face to face or with IM.

Also there's the second thing. Tools rarely work when forced. Tools which are irrelevant will die away when there are better ones available. Tools that add value, will find the way to be used. For example forbidding the use of email, will make people angry and frustrated. Offering better tools for communication and letting people to find the benefits themselves, will cut some of the email communication automatically.

The real problem with communication, isn't in any of the tools. Noise is the real problem, not email or any other tool. Learning to cope with noise is a skill that should be taught and learned in all organizations. It's a new skill in a history of mankind, but it's a really important skill for the knowledge workers of today. And noise isn't going away anytime soon, but it will keep increasing, because sharing information is getting easier all the time.

Solution to noise is always changing the behavior of the people, not changing the tools. Offering new tools and ways to use old tools can help with noise, but only if person understands and agrees that noise exists. In modern organizations everyone should learn to cope with noise and at some point also to reduce the noise they are making. And at the end, even noise isn't the real problem, it's the lack of skill to cope with it.

* Title was changed from "Don't blame email for the noise" to the current 1.12.2011

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

How teleconferences really work - how they differ from f2f meetings

I've been in big companies for long enough to have quite good understanding how teleconferences really work. The idea is the same than in face to face meetings, people get together for a reason or another and discuss their way forward. But teleconferences have so many other additional aspects compared to f2f meetings, that you should be aware of those when participating one.

Here's a basic setup for a teleconference. People phone in with their mobile phones, computers or teleconference phones. Quite often there is also online presence so people can actually see the same presentation in their screens if they are with computer. At first it seems to be quite the same as face to face meeting, where people would all be together in the same room.

Basic setup of online telco meeting

In reality the picture below might look like more realistic setup. There's three people in the same green room, two people in other location in the grey room and rest are individually located in different places. People in the same room will actually have their own co-operation and discussions ongoing during the meeting. This happens even without words, since people communicate so much with only gestures. Most often there is also real discussions ongoing in these rooms either concerning the meeting subjects or not.

How people are often set up for an online telco

But that's not all. There's actually way more communications ongoing in teleconferences than there would have ever been in face to face meetings. When people are sitting with computers, there's possibility to chat with others even they are not in the same location as you are. This possibility wouldn't be there for f2f meetings. It gives a different twist for discussions, because people can co-operate more on the background. Responses and issues raised might be result of communication already happened and not raised first time for discussion as spoken once. That makes it easier to raise concerns, when people have backed up their items with checking with some other participants in the teleconference.

How online communication tools are affecting online telco

Still there's lot more on teleconferences than just the communication happening for the meeting subject. When people are busy, alone with the computer and in a meeting, there's a strong temptation to do other things at the same time. Many people do check their mails or RSS feeds during these meetings. And some might even check the social media for latest happenings. Meeting subject will not get full attention from all the people in the meeting all the time. That just never happens.

Then there are the other disturbing things to online telco's

You can't prevent people on doing these things at teleconferences. This is the nature of teleconference. There's lot of good on it also. People often hate meetings and quite often for a reason. Online teleconference is a half of a meeting. It saves time from people not needing to travel and not needing to pay full attention. This all comes with a price, because not having a full attention, just means that meeting results might not be as good as with face to face meeting. That's the balance you need to consider when running a teleconference and not face to face meeting.

Teleconferences and online meetings are not that bad. It's just good to realize how those actually work to understand how to make most out of those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learnings and tips from crowdsourcing project within company

Couple weeks ago I was asked to start up a crowdsourcing type of project inside the company. I was given sponsorship from our management, but I had to recruit the people myself and organize the actual work myself. I really liked the challenge and got up to speed quickly. I had only couple of weeks to finish this and I knew I had to get couple hundred people working on this on voluntary basis.

Now that the project has turned out quite well, I wanted to share my learning's from this journey to you and to analyze and learn from those myself also better. I at least analyze better written than only in my head.

Get it up and running
The first thing was to decide how much preparations I would do before really starting the project. I had basically two alternatives, (1) create proper web or tool based mechanism to divide the the work and create reporting tool or then (2) use good old excel and email based mechanism. Due to limited timeline, I selected the latter one. Within one day from announcing the project, I already had tens of people working on the actual work items.

This was a tough choice and I believe in some cases more elegant systems would help on coordinating the work and results. Of course I had a good plan also, just the tools were ancient. I juts believed that in this situation the best thing was to but the wheels running fast. That' was the way to get more time for our volunteers and fast feedback on my methods. So off I went.

Recruiting people
Like said, this was a company internal project and it has it's own challenges on recruiting people to join. I had to get sponsorship from our management (my manager did this for me, thanks for that), but I had to convince line managers around to give this a go and then convince the actual people to join to help a common goal.

Only tip I can say about this phase is, that be honest and transparent. Tell exactly how much of a time it might take from volunteer, what's the timeline and when results are expected. Also be clear what are the prerequisites people have to fulfill to join. And remember to tell the goal of the exercise clearly and understandably. Keys to get people to join are that they understand what they work for and what they exactly need to do.

Walk trough the whole chain
Before you roll up your sleeves and put the ball running; walk the whole chain trough once. What I do first, how do I instruct people, how do I get the results back, what do I do with the results, how the results are shown, who are the key people to know about the results, when this thing will finished and so forth.

Make an easy walk trough of the most important steps you expect you will face during the project. It won't take more than 15-30 minutes for this exercise, but it will definitely help you to see whole.

Test your instructions
This is the part I learned a lot. I made the perfect instructions at first. I looked the subject from many directions, answered all the questions in advance, made pictures with explanations on those and walked through the chain with my instructions. Then I asked few of my colleagues to check those. They found some minor tweaks to those, but after those, the instructions we ready to rock. Or so I thought.

I still decided to take one more cautious step before rolling the instructions to everyone. I decided to use target group for verifying those. When the first voluntaries arrived, I gave the instructions for the first tens of people and paused the roll out for a while. I asked my target group to immediately report any misunderstanding and clarification needs from my instructions. What happened was, that within the first day, I did four major updates to my thought to be perfect instructions. I congratulated myself for using this focus group approach. It turned out I really needed it.

Do not assume
In the first set of instructions I made two assumptions, that (1) some things are common knowledge and  (2) that it is obvious that I expected people to communicate back to me with certain way. Both of those turned out to be false ones.

I learned that I should never assume, that things are commonly known, because me and my close colleagues are familiar with the subject in advance. I had to make updates to my instructions about these really basic issues. I had actually explained the harder parts really well, but then the easy ones I had failed to explain well enough.

Biggest mistake of this whole project was, that I didn't specify the way people should communicate back to me. I assumed everyone would get the idea from my instructions, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. I got contacted with so many different ways and so many different formats, that I had to use lot of time on standardizing the results together. This is where the more advanced reporting tools would have become handy. I made conscious decision to stick with simple tools and get it running faster. It would have easily taken 2-3 days of my project to develop those tools, so I still think I made the right call with excel and email. Next time I just must use more time to explain how I want the results to be communicated to me.

Emphasize possibility to ask for more information
This was a learning from past similar projects. Some people need to be encouraged to ask for more info. Some people are naturally shy and they try to find information from sources they are familiar with. This easily leads to false information due to uncertainties and misunderstandings. So I encourage to put an extra emphasis on ways and possibilities to ask for clarifying questions. Tools like email and IM chat's work well for naturally shyer people.

Friends are the worst ones
I've done these type of projects couple of times in smaller scale and based of those and the project in question, I can tell that friends are the worst ones. Those people who you now quite well and who you do have a relationship with, easily don't obey the deadlines and read the instructions nearly as well enough as the ones you don't know in advance. Somehow the friendship status makes people to be more careless and they don't use the attention needed to successfully complete the tasks given. Of course there are exceptions to this and some friends can be even used for help. Overall I still think that friends are the worst ones in this type of projects. 

Have a realistic schedule
Before making a target schedule for your project, think about the scale. If there's 100 people involved, completing a project in 2 days is a big challenge. From 100 persons, there's easily ten  who come up with something more urgent to deal with and it might be hard to get replacement for so many in such short notice. I don't have any rule of thumb here, but just think of how long the task might take, double it and then give still some buffer. People always works in different ways and different situations.

When you give people a deadline, don't put it to the last day you want it to complete. Have it at least 1 or 2 days in advance and this gives you the possibility to be flexible, when people come to you to ask for more time. They are happy and you will still get your results on time.

Have a good plan of follow-up
As Stephen Covey advised in his book 7 Habits of highly effective people: "Habit 2 - Start with the end in mind", and so you should do here also. Always keep in mind what is the purpose of this all. Is the way people are working the important thing or do you care only about the results. Or are the results actually just a side note and the purpose of this all is to come up with actions from the results. Or are actually the meaning of all this to fix some underlying problem and you are just the step towards it.

So think carefully why it is done and what are the things you need to care for most. There's going to be problems in the way that something doesn't go as planned, or some results might not be as accurate as you would like those to be. Just try to reflect those to the purpose of your exercise. Like life in general, you can't win all the fights, instead try to win the war.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Giving an online training - thoughts on it's challenges

I'm not a full time trainer, but I've been keeping some trainings in different places. Recently I had to give my first training totally online, so that it was only me and my computer using screen sharing with participants. That training was the hardest I've kept so far. There's so many challenges with online trainings which I wasn't aware of. Here's my learning's:

Whole situation seemed really strange. I knew some of the guys online, but there was about half of them I didn't know. It felt absurd to talk alone in my room and try to get people to learn something. For me, it's so much easier to go in front of the crowd and adjust and collaborate with the crowd to get the message through. And by no means it's really easy for me to go in front of the crowd, but it's just so much harder to do it totally online without true connection to the people.

With online training there's almost no connection to the people you are talking to. You don't see their reactions, you can't read from gestures or body languages that are the guys understanding you or would they need some more explanation. Or in the worst case they might be totally bored and they would need something to wake them up.

Also with online communication,  people tend to mute their microphones and you don't even here the slightest sound of laughter, when you try to be funny or you don't hear the moment of silence when they are possibly processing about something controversial or surprising you said. It's just you, your slides and silence. It's truly scary.

You are left with your voice and slides. You can't use your body language and the space to move around, you normally have in face to face trainings. You have to try to use just your voice to get the message trough. It is really hard. I've worked whole my career with multicontinent projects and I'm really used for using online tools and telco's for communication. I still never would have guessed how hard keeping training with these tools is. All the credit for those guys who do this more regularly.

I want to highlight that keeping training is so much different than meetings and presentations via online tools. In meetings and presentations the topic is often better known, there's natural conversation, microphones are open much more and you can hear and feel more about what others are doing. So I'm only talking about the difficulty of online trainings, the other stuff is much easier.

With the experience of two online trainings I'm not a good expert to give any tips how to perform better in those, but here's what I will do differently next time:

• Setting the stage. I will try to get much more people to say something in very beginning. I'll try to get some expectations and knowledge about their competence in the area in question out before I start. That may help collaboration further during training.
• I'm going to change my slides to contain less information. Even with face to face trainings, people tend to be reading the slides when you are talking to them, I can just guess how much they are concentrating on slides when that's all they see. Maybe less data in the slides will help the people to focus on listening. This is just me guessing, but it's worth of trying still.
• I might be looking if there would be some way to get feedback during the training. Maybe vote buttons or some red, yellow, green lights for the users to be able to say when they've heard enough about subject or would like some more explanation. Even it might feel artificial, it could still give important feedback to me, to decide how to progress.

I guess it's obvious that I prefer face to face trainings and I guess everyone else does also. Sometimes still the subject is such small and focused that it's much more convenient to try to keep online training in 1-2 hours, than use many days or weeks to travel to keep face to face training. So I bet it wasn't my last training online.

I always like to try new stuff and learn new skills. This event was actually quite useful learning for me. I learned a lot about the teaching. I noticed many useful things when I was missing some important ways to communicate. From now I'm much more aware on those and I will try to concentrate on using those more wisely when I have the change.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen