Workplace Communication Redefined
By Henn Ruukel, CEO of Fleep, a business messenger platform built by members of the team behind Skype. Fleep offers a communication tool that integrates email and work chat, providing a contemporary solution for internal and external business conversations.
There's no denying that the modern workplace demands active, fluent and effortless communication. However, it's a saturated market and many business communication tools are ineffective, crowded and antiquated. It's crucial that businesses choose the right communication platform, one that gets rid of distraction and strengthens conversation. Integrate the wrong one and it may very well result in discorded communication and impassable barriers to productivity.
Despite advances in communication technology and the growth of IM culture, email still dominates the space, making communication clunky and difficult to digest. Right now, most businesses are compelled to use at least one communication platform other than email. The future of work communication is evolving quickly and email alone just can't keep up. This can be attributed to multiple causes, including remote working, cross-team collaboration and industry expectations.
Remote working, a trend supported by increased connectivity worldwide through accessible Internet and cloud services, makes the physical location of a workplace less important than the online space where its conversations exist.
More often, work and valued creativity happen through cross-team collaboration than through individual efforts.
Expected industry adaptation and agility require teams to be ready for instant communication, whether they exist in the software management industry, manufacturing or even construction.
While email remains engrained in business communication, its permanence has created a certain online messaging etiquette that desperately needs to evolve to keep up with the kinds of messages and two-way communication required in today's enterprise.
Focused, Simple Communication
New communication platforms often aim to solve two major problems in the traditional user experience of email, while not entirely eliminating it:
Email is a very crowded space with a multitude of spam and unwanted solicitations; one has little to no control over who crowds the inbox.
Email by its nature is message-centric and does not naturally have support for 'conversation'; there is little control in the flow of an email exchange. You can't leave the conversation, change the conversation, or immediately add to the conversation efficiently. We have an overload of messages, grouped together in a format that's difficult to digest.
In order to fix this, workplace communication tools must optimize for two things: de-fragmentation and focus. Optimizing for de-fragmentation means looking for ways to avoid fragmented conversation. Communication around one project can be disjointed and split amongst email, an internal chat service and a task management service.
Instead of experiencing fragmented conversation, users should be able to transition each work conversation and method of communication into one, succinct thread, making participation seamless and simplifying readability.
Work communication methods should also make sure that users maintain focus, rather than distract employees. One way that communication platforms can encourage focus is by eliminating online chat indicators. These indicators create the false assumption that if someone is 'online,' then they aren't busy and should be eager to respond to incoming messages. Instead, it's better to use 'seen by' indicators which show you when your message is actually read, indicating that you now have the user's attention.
Keep on Communicating
We are living at the verge of a shift in business communication—a shift driven by the reasons mentioned above and enabled by advances in technology. Smartphones, broadband internet and cloud services are changing the way we communicate with each other.
With this shift we will continue to see new integrations within platforms—video calls, text messaging, and instant messaging, amongst others. Today's workforce must adapt to align new communication expectations and culture around these channels.
Something has happened to 'chat culture'. When mobile phones first appeared, we saw a period of overuse and misuse. Now, the culture around mobile phone use and the norms around calling others has evolved. From expectation management to the speed at which to expect a response to our messages, chat culture is normalizing in the same fashion as mobile phones. Overall, I think our messaging culture has become much shorter and direct than its ancestor, email, mainly to save readers time and maintain their attention.
The challenge remains in aligning new messaging expectations and traditional email to create an improved business communication culture. We must be constantly working to advance this convergence, enhance productivity and reduce unnecessary noise in the workplace. Mindful innovation and continuous progression have allowed us to optimize work communication methods, but it is up to businesses to utilize and take advantage of these tools.
