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Business Practices That Refuse To Die: Email Trees (Video)

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Why do we regularly torture ourselves with endless email trees that are branched off, creating 14 separate discussions and CC: everyone and their dog? It drives us mad yet we find ourselves being sucked these holes each week. We contort ourselves to fit this time-wasting model of communication and despise it every time it happens.

We can end the madness by using collaborative technologies and work in a way that works for us, not us for it. We can save time, confusion and frustration.

Those of us who have been using collaborative technologies understand  this.  But it is not an easy concept to teach other in a way that it has a lasting effect – so they change the way they work.  The real challenge is how do we explain this to other people?

I hope this video helps you explain how we can work so much better and really upgrade the way we work.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqA_YKeboc’]

As I was making this video I thought of other business practices that I wish would die.  Do you have ideas, too?  If so, let me know in the comments and I will put them in my bucket list of videos to make in the near future.  Thanks!

How To Avoid Becoming Irrelevant – Change is a’Come’n

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Face it: it is very likely the way you work is outdated and much less effective than your competitors – um, I mean your peers’.  Why?

We watch the rise and fall of businesses.  Each week it seems an “established” company is going under, is filing for bankruptcy or is being purchased for a fraction of what it once was worth.

In the book The Innovator’s Dilemma Clay Christiansen took a look at why businesses rise to glory and then fail.  (Fascinating book – it needs to be on your MUST read list.)  He points out that as the consumer’s values change a new business is there to take them on.  They fill the niche and in time they have a successful company.  But soon the customer redefines value – again – and the company doesn’t change with it.  They keep filling the original value (because some people stay there).

A great Forbes piece was recently written about this.  The author writes, “..with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both (Google and Facebook) might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.”  Web 1.0 is overtaken with Web 2.0 is overtaken with Social is overtaken with Mobile is overtaken by…?  What’s next?

So it is with the way we work.  The way we have worked in the past is not sufficient for today – or tomorrow.  It is mandatory that we change.  If we don’t, as our companies morph they will place a greater value on work habits we have not developed, styles we have shunned and strategic thinking we are not capable of.

It doesn’t matter how smart, how charming or how innovative you are.  If you don’t change the way you work to match what is needed, none of that will matter.  The companies that fail have incredible people in them.  But that doesn’t stop the company from the nose dive.  We have all seen brilliant people fail at business – all because they were unwilling to change.

There are four main possible outcomes for you:

1) You don’t change the way you work.  Others do, as does the company.  The company grows and your skills are marginalized along with your paycheck.

2) You don’t change the way you work and neither do your peers in the company.  The company is incapable of following the trends and the company suffers a less than pleasant fate.

3) You upgrade the way you work but your peers do not.  You find a company that is ready to move in the right direction.  You join them and sadly watch your former company fumble.

4) You upgrade the way you work, become a champion and influence your peers to the do the same.  That culture drives the company in the new direction.  You are the hero.

Be the hero.

Increase Trust: Don’t Give Your Employees Vacation Time

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No joke: I firmly believe many employers should not give their employees vacation time.  They should completely pull it out of their HR benefits packet. While they are at it, they should also take out sick days as well.  Why?

– It will be two less pieces of information the employer and employee have to keep track of (which could save the company a ton of money).
– They won’t have to play the ‘bad guy’ and enforce it.
– Employees won’t stress about whether or not they can take a day off anymore.
– It will be a draw for prospective employees.
– Your employees will trust you more and they will be more productive.

What?!  A draw for prospective employees? Employees will trust you more?!

Absolutely. Take out vacation and sick time completely and replace it with a new policy I call, “Need it, Take it” which is just three short sentences:

If you need time off, take it.  If you are sick, stay home.  Just continue to do amazing work.

Intel approaches this.  The group that I was in when I worked for them told us to take about three weeks of vacation, but there wasn’t an official way to keep track.  If we were sick, we should stay home.  If we needed to leave early, we just did it.  What matters is if we were getting our work done.

The next step is to completely get rid of the word VACATION.

But, when bringing this up I invariably get the objection: Employees will abuse it!  Of course that is an objection.  Probably because they don’t trust their employees and they made some bad hiring decisions.  But if you hired people you trust, there is no need to keep track of vacation or sick days or (unless they are in a production environment) when they come to work or go home.  As long as they are producing the desired results they should be given the flexibility.

In theory, I don’t think many people will disagree with me.  But when it comes to actually doing it, there are very few who will take that step.

But Evernote did.  And it has worked really well for them.

Think about it.  Less accounting. More trust. Even more work accomplished?  So, what’s stopping you?

 

Why Email Still Dominates the Workplace and Your Life

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Careful.  This one will make you nervously laugh because chances are (unless your Luis Suarez) you feel the same way, too.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) surveyed their employees & contractors over a year ago.  The results came in, but I don’t know if many people noticed the comedy.

A question near the beginning asked how they feel about email.  The answer was a resounding, “We can’t stand it.  It is a time waster.”  Then, another question at the end asked (paraphrased), “What is the best way to communicate information to you?”

The answer? Overwhelmingly EMAIL.

Ask yourself the same questions and, if you are like most people, you will probably have to admit that you would have answered the same way. (You may nervously laugh now.)

So why do we do what we hate doing?   In an earlier post I said it was because of emotion and habit.

HABIT

In the comments of the above post, Spencer asked, “How is it that email continues to dominate the work environment as the power app? Why is that not changing?”

Good point.  If we look at this problem logically, we notice that those entering the workforce don’t use email nearly as much as we, who are in the workforce, do.  So, reason would stand that in a few years, because they bring their habits to the workforce we will rely less on email.

But when they join us they also adopt the email habit and work just as inefficiently as we do.  Wha?!

Habit is not only personal habit, but also cultural habit. When a new person joins the workforce, they also join and buy in to the culture, processes and traditions of working.  And, for the most part, they are not in a position of authority to make any changes.  Thus, the habit continues. We continue to use email and love and despise it all at once.

STOPPING THE MADNESS

So, how do we stop the madness?  First, I don’t believe email will ever go away.  Just like the phone didn’t – and sending snail mail.  It will instead be pushed into a more narrow focus of function.

The change starts with you.  And me.  And Luis.  YOU must use the best tool and lead your organizations.  It will take time.  You will need to be bold.

It won’t stop until the habits of the organization changes.  And who better to lead the charge than you?

I am not advocating recklessly ditching email.  Instead, find alternatives that will work – even if they push the culture some.  You might ease in.  Although, if your culture will sustain it, drop it altogether like Luis did.  Help others (because many feel the same way you do).

Teach by example. Lead the charge.

 

Pandemic Failure – Failure Unabaited

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A couple weeks ago I gave a keynote speech at the Enterprise 2.0 conference entitled, “Embracing your E2.0 Failures” (watch the video here).  There I talked about three different types of failures, Pandemic, Catastrophic and Intrinsic failure.

At the beginning of the keynote I showed this video I created which exemplifies the most dangerous of the three failures: Pandemic Failure:

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSIMc4j5Sg’]

Pandemic Failure has three main characteristics:

  1. It runs rampant within a culture.
  2. It is obvious to most within that culture and it is often discussed and complained about.
  3. Rarely does anyone take action to make the needed changes.

This is the most dangerous because bad behavior becomes an acceptable way of working or accomplishing a task.  For example, when was the last time you were in a meeting you didn’t really need to be in, but felt obligated to be there?  You didn’t lend any real advantage to the meeting nor did you take away much.  Not that it was completely worthless – you probably did get some good information out of it – but what you did get was not an hour’s worth of your time.  You could have received it another way in only about a minute’s time.

But we too often work this way and it is acceptable.

Pandemic Failure leads to apathy and diminished effectiveness.  And this is why it is the most dangerous type of failure.  It allows for growth while at the same time stifles it and can bring down whole subsets of cultures.  It gives a false sense of security and at the same time an overall uneasiness.

Overcome Pandemic Failure

How do we overcome pandemic failure.  Like anything else, we first need to recognize it.  Then, we can’t just let it go.  We need to actually do something about it.  And it probably won’t be comfortable because it will be part of the culture.  It will take guts because you are challenging the status quo.  Everyone will be on your side, yet no one may back you.  It will be a very strange situation to be in.

Yet if you let it go, you become a victim of an annoying culture trait.  And I don’t know about you, but any time I become a slave to something that is ineffective, I feel I must change it.

So here is to all you Change Agents!

The Unhealthy Separation Between Work and Real Life

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My wife and I homeschool our children (OK, I admit it: my wife does almost all of it).  A common question we are asked is, “But what about their social development?”  I often reply, “Just because public schools are a default, it does not make that social experience a prime, healthy choice.  In fact I believe there is too much social and it gets in the way of real learning.  Too often, the social experience at a school is unhealthy and it actually detracts from learning, growing and becoming.”   Yet it is considered normal and healthy.

In the same vien, I feel that now we have an unhealthy situation at work. It accept it as the default and we believe that it is “normal” and accept it as healthy without giving it any thought.

Our work life and real life are too separate.  Too many people hate what they do.  They only do it because they want a job.   Thus, they do anything to keep it separate from the rest of their lives (which they hope is better than work).

But there are those who absolutely LOVE what they do.  It is more likely that their work lives and personal lives are more connected.  They do what they do because of a passion, not because they have to have a job.

The current separation between work and real life has given us a sense that work is bad and personal recreation is good.  Thus a chasm is created.  We loathe taking work home.  We don’t want work to interfere with our families or our TV time.  The more we separate the two the easier it is to hate 10 hours of our 24 hour day.  How does that create a healthy life?

But let’s flip that around.  Let’s say you loved what you do.  You think about it in the “off hours.”  In fact, for you, there are no off hours because everything that you read leads back to this passion that you have.  And instead of separating your passion from your family, what if you brought them in and showed them?  What if they worked with you and learned how to cultivate a passion and work hard toward that passion?  They might see you succeed and fail and learn from you.  What if you helped them develop their own passion?

Your work would revolve around this passion and it would difficult not to think about it because of how much you love what you are doing.  Although I don’t know anything scientific about this, from my own observations those who love and are passionate about their work are more successful than those who “just have a job.”  They seem happier, more content and 10 hours a day concentrated on a passion doesn’t drain them, it energizes them.

Can this go to an unhealthy extreme?  You bet.  There needs to be a healthy balance.  And I believe we, as a whole, are too far on one of those unhealthy sides.

My quest for you: Find the healthy balance.  Find something you love to do so that at the end of the day you are excited to be home not because you are away from your work, but because you lived your passion.  It is sad when at retirement a person finally gets to do what they want to do.  Do it now!

(This post came as I contemplated a comment from a post last week.  I have to agree with the comment, but I feel that view comes from the perspective that I wish we could all change for ourselves. It isn’t just about getting you back to your desk so you can pound out more code.  It is about enabling a passion.  Because they know that  if you are focused on a passion you WANT to get back to work.  They want to make it easy for you to focus on your passion.  And when that happens, sometimes you need to work out in the middle of the day and take a break from a long period of creative creation.

And as an aside, thank you to everyone who comments.  I often learn so much from you and I consider your comments a gift.)