Open communication
Communication is the oil of the knowledge engine! It can be open or closed and both are usually in use, yet open communication deserves a better place in today’s digital world. What are the differences?
Open communication has two types of participants:
Active participants – members of a project/team communicating on a topic in a dedicated topic channel and thread.
Passive participants – members of the project/team who do not participate in the conversation, but have access to both the communication channel itself and its background.
It is recommended to use open communication as much as possible in all corporate governance and project communication, as it has many advantages:
- all-in-one: such communication usually includes online editing of files and ad hoc meetings.
- synergies: you never know where the help can come from!
- all passive participants can inform themselves in a proactive way before joining the thread/discussion and onboarding time is reduced.
Example of open communication: chat in the Teams topic channel. The Teams channel offers another advantage: it is possible to organize both spontaneous and planned meetings directly in the channel, where everyone can see the meetings in the context of the conversation – without any additional effort.
Closed communication has only active participants: i.e. person A sends an email to person B or person A corresponds in the chat app directly with person B. Although emails have CC and BCC fields, which formally serve the function of engaging the passive participants – this is an ineffective and slow way of doing it because emails are not grouped by topic, and as the volume grows, emails that come in as a CC are often ignored completely.
There is a nice video comparing emails with topic-based channel chats:
Closed communication is not evil, but it is necessary to understand the difference and the benefits of open communication, – and use it!
There are 3 reasons why open communication might not work in your company:
- Wrong structure of communication channels.
- Old habits and inertive behavior.
- Full moon phase.
While not much can be done about the moon :-), other 2 reasons can be pro-actively approached:
- communication channels should be simplified and restructured
- company leaders can set an example and start fostering open communication themselves.
If you would like to learn more, a training session, showcasing most options and best practices with MS Teams, could make sense for your organization. Here are the topics covered:
- Theory: principles of open communication. 1:1 chat vs. channel chat.
- Theory: what communication channel to use when?
- Practice: using MS Teams chats.
- Practice: connecting knowledge assets with communication.
- Theory and practice: Meeting in channel vs regular meeting.
- Practice: leveraging more technical options, – approvals with Teams.
- Practice: work with several MS accounts using Chrome profiles.
- Your topic or pain point, – let me know what is it!
