As you probably have guessed already this blog post is about communication and ideal way of it. I think all companies that are growing fast (my company is exactly this type: roughly +1 new person per day) are facing communication issues.
We exchange a lot of various information within a company: new feature releases, source code, KPIs, financial data, fun stuff - to name a few. And we use very different tools to share it: emails, SharePoint, GitLab, Excel, meetings, Skype - and the list is not complete. So the question is how not to get lost in communication. How to get the information you need at a right time.
I have some ground rules or basic approaches here:
- The one who needs information should initiate communication. Don’t sit and wine that you don’t get anything - go and take it or ask for it.
- Don’t try to unify communication tools, don’t try to put everything in one tool. Tools are made different, each serves a particular purpose (a couple of examples: email - to inform individuals about something not so urgent, meetings - to brainstorm or to learn and share know-how in a group, calls - in case of fires, wiki or blogs - to share more structural and detailed information and insights to last long).
- Make it natural as it is in real on-line life.
If first two are quite obvious and are less questionable, the third one needs some explanation. It is simple in my world - there are two sides in communication: those who send and those who receive - and the relation is many-to-many between these sides. Those who have information are responsible of sharing it: post it, tweet it and if needed promote it. Those who want to get information are responsible of getting it: follow or subscribe to it. Recently we started using wordpress for sharing within our department. And the only unanswered question - how to implement following or subscribing part? Are there any feedly like tools to use within company?
How do you share information?