Interrupted Conversations

I am not sure about you but I miss the days when wireless technology did not interrupt every conversation. I liked it when I could walk up to someone and have a chat with hardly any interruptions.

Unfortunately, today anyone might have a wireless device connected to their belt, hidden in a purse, stashed somewhere in their pockets, etc. It is like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off at any minute. When it comes alive, it causes the person you are chatting with to get that funny twitch in the eye, their trigger happy hand searching for the device, eager to pick it up.

Actually, it is not so much technology that I dislike but the manners people have. For example, when having a conversation with another person their wireless device might start ringing/vibrating. The type of behavior I expect is to quickly silence the device but, no, they hold up the index finger (signing that I should wait while they handle the interruption) and start the new conversation. Where is the respect? Was I not talking to you first? Have you heard of a clever technology called voice mail?

This situation does not confine itself to one-on-one situations. It happens at the movies, grocery store, at the gym, etc. Even conference rooms. Now, one would think that when you are in a professional environment that you would leave your wireless device either at your desk or turned completely off. Nope. There are countless times when I have been in a meeting and several of the attendees have cell phones ringing or vibrating one or more times during the session. Generally, these interruptions are not business related. My guess is that 7 out of 10 times, it is family and friends.

Have we become so trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to immediately reach for the device as soon at it comes alive? Beckoning to its every call? Drug addicts in need of our next instant fix? I certainly hope not but it does seem to be a part of our culture now.

As for me, I leave my cell phone on vibrate. If I am having a conversation with someone and either the desk or cell phone rings, or my instant chat or e-mail pops up then I ignore it. It can wait until I have finished with who I am talking with first.

If you get that nervous twitch to answer your phone before we have finished our conversation…I’ll walk away and you can read about why I acted the way I did when you get an e-mail with a link to this posting.

Corporate Blogging Experiences

Introduction

I have been on a quest lately to improve communication within the corporate space. I have been primarily focused on using the latest social networking technology - namely, blogging technology powered by WordPress. I thought the following might be worth sharing in case it is of use to others.

Background

Five months ago, I instigated a movement at work by setting up a blog for my team which then blossomed company-wide (well, not really but I’ll explain more in a bit). I did this because I wanted a way in which to capture what I was working on as well as see what others were doing within the team. The idea was each of us is doing interesting things so lets share it. For example, maybe the problems that I am solving apply to something another person is working on and visa versa, maybe I learned a new way of writing code, or maybe I learned a new software trick that made what I do faster. I see blogs as a way to capture these nuggets of info that can be stored for future use as well as be easily searchable. It also serves as a way in which to record breadcrumbs of information allowing someone who is following your trail to easily pick up where you left off. If nothing else, blogs help foster a community. A way to make the job just a little bit more fun and interesting. That is the idea anyway.

To help build a foundation for those new to this type of software, I have given a tech talk, written documentation, created screencast tutorials, and provided many links for reference within the walls of the company. I spent a lot of time and effort making this possible because I believed in what I was doing and I also believed that the company get would become engaged.

In addition to the educational materials mentioned above, I have also been very active amongst all internal sites (which are roughly fifteen in total). In my team alone, I am the most active blogger posting things that I learn and develop on an almost daily basis.

To me the idea and its implementation was helpful and streamlined. However, the experiment did not turn out as I had planned.

Experiences

The problem was no matter how hard I tried to educate the company and its employees, only a handful made use of it. They would much rather stick to e-mail - which is overused in my opinion (see my post on Corporate E-mail Pitfalls for more info). The paradigm shift from e-mail to blogging (or anything that supports syndicated feeds) seemed too complex versus the status quo.

Because I view blogging as a way of life, I had no good answer to their objections. I view blogging as something you should want to try it out. The value is not necessarily realized by watching but by doing. This is HUGE hurdle to overcome because people need to get their jobs done and blogging can be considered wasted time.

My motivation stems from my use of what I write because if no one reads what I write then I will. As time rolls on, I might forget certain details and having a blog is an excellent way to go back in time and dig up something that I’ve done and might need to do again. That alone has saved me many times that the benefit far outweighs the cost. Even better, once you have written about it you can easily send a hyperlink to someone who might be asking you for advice.

Though I wish my passion for blogging had been shared by my company and fellow employees, I can not say that my experiences were purely positive. Out of the fifteen sites within the company today, only two of them are active. The rest have been abandoned. By this I mean that management has requested that all employees write weekly reports once a week that summarize what they have done, what they plan to do in the coming week, and any outstanding issues they might have had during the week. These reports can be useful but most are just badly formated noise. This counts as abandonment with no real involvement.

I remain optimistic, despite my particular obstacles, and hope that over time people will become more involved.

Lessons Learned

• Choose software that is easy to configure, maintain, and use. My choice, as mentioned, is WordPress, but there are others out there that might suite your needs better.
• Make sure some basic blogging guidelines are in place and people are aware of them.
• Appoint a champion early on to lead the effort and do not take this lightly. Not only do you need a champion but one who has the official blessing and approval of management. This needs to be made known company-wide.
• Start education early. Get people engaged and pick leaders from the various teams within the company to help you spread the love (so-to-speak).
• Provide plenty of tutorials and examples. Make it really easy for those who are stubborn or resistant to change to jump in. Anything you can do to lower the learning curve, the better.
• Do not let management mandate what people should or should not do. Any time there is a management mandate then it feels more like work and takes a bit of the fun out of it. This needs to grow organically.
• Actions always prove louder than words. Lead by example. Give people something to aspire to but don’t make it so daunting that they will be easily discouraged.

Parting Thoughts

Check out an article by Path & Vinegar called Egos and Silos and Social Media. Food for thought.

Tags: WordPress, WordPress MU

Protected: White Fence Farm

Corporate E-mail Pitfalls

Where I work, the corporate policy for all communication is through the use of e-mail and e-mail lists. I like to think that tech companies are in the know and willing to embrace new technologies such as wikis, blogs or anything that supports syndicated feeds. The problem is that there is a varying mix of people and wisdom of the masses can sometimes fail.

Here are a few problems I have with e-mail and e-mail subscription lists:

1. Suffer from poorly constructed subject lines. Lets face it, many people do not know or care to take even the slightest bit of effort to construct a subject line that would be easily searchable and convey the general purpose of the message. Some simple tactics would be: Writing sensible email messages and Getting the Subject Line Right.
2. Suffer from randomly formated message bodies. Ever get a message that is part HTML and part text? Maybe you get people who like to use different colored fonts and font sizes. How about header and footer images, or even background images? Yeah, now were talking. It’s a kaleidescope of fonts, colors, and images while you try to find the real content.
3. Generally have bloated signatures. Sure, it might be nice the first time around but if I have to converse with you multiple times it gets monotonous really fast. Lets not forget about people who feel the need to add cheesy graphics as either part of the header or footer of their e-mail message. Then there are always those touched individuals who love to add famous quoted material either in the form of a single line or an entire paragraph to their signatures. Yeah, thanks buddy, but I really don’t care! So think about what your e-mail signature says about you before setting it up.
4. Difficult to follow message threads. Think of the multiple reply and forward messages not to mention the splinter reply and forward messages based off of a related reply or forward message (i.e. “re:re:fw:re:fw:Check this out”). Even that last sentence alone should make your head hurt. Mine does.
5. Do not have the ability to catch up on any historic conversations unless you ask people to forward their mail to you (which isn’t going to happen). Obviously, there is some history that took place but good luck learning about it!
6. Can have e-mail lists (which is like a subscription to content written by many people of which you can also contribute to). E-mail lists alleviate some of the problems of personal e-mail but are cumbersome to gain access to (either via a web interface or a complete dump to your inbox). Many times these lists are not even archived which, again, means no history.
7. Allow the user no choice on what they want to listen to. With personal e-mail it is difficult to turn off the spam once you have given out your e-mail address. Yeah, you can set up filters but wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn it all off with a click of a button or simply unsubscribe? Same goes for e-mail lists. No choice. It’s all or nothing.

My solution has been to push people away from this overused format and use blogging software to help foster communities of interest. Progress has been slow because it is hard to get people to open up and take a bit of time to jot down what they learn to reduce the strain on e-mail (example: Personal vs. Corporate Blogging).

I am curious. Has anyone else had luck changing corporate mentality? What are your successes and failures?

Protected: Partially Unpacked