Networking your embarrassment potential
In most business organisations, email has become the standard way of sending information backwards and forwards. If a manager needs to send something to the team, they just send an email. Sales figures, customer service reports, etc.
Email is instant, pretty much free and almost everyone over the age of about 10 has either heard of it or can use it. It has become the standard way to ?receive? information also with travel tickets, insurance and holiday bookings being increasingly confirmed via email.
So far so good – but using email as a management tool has a number of weaknesses that aren’t readily obvious.
Most people have no clue how to save a document that is attached to an email to somewhere else on their computer. (The default location in windows is something called a temp file. When you try to explain this to people, their eyes will just glaze over).
As a result of this, most will just leave the attachment attached to the document and clog up the PC’s hard drive, network server space or both. Plus they have to go rummaging through old emails to find something. (IT is supposed to make it easy to find things not rely on humans to remember..but that’s another blog post)
New starters are supposed to do what? A new install of standard email software like outlook or thunderbird isn’t very much use and when they need to find out how to do something, newcomers will have to ask someone (and therefore disturb them) and then listen to a second or third hand account of why things are as they are in the workplace.
Again, wasteful and not using the technology to save time ? more using it to create problems.
So what is the answer?
Well, taking a leaf out of Google’s own playbook, why not give every member staff has a personal internal blog.
What goes on a personal blog?
As well as the standard personal stuff, users can post minutes or meetings & away days they may attend. How to’s are all stored in one place and personal & team targets can be posted. Managers (or anyone else) working from home can update remotely.
Of course, all this is indexable & searchable by tags and for people with email cravings, you can even set it up so that when a new post is made, an email alert is posted out to everyone.
Now, doesn’t this seem like a much better way to make the technology work for you rather than the other way round?
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