Turned Off

Just before Christmas, I read where VW was turning off email after hours for its employees. Then today, I read how this may be a trend that is catching on.

This is an interesting phenomena that speaks as much to individuals’ commitment to work – and “situational awareness” as it does to the state of enterprise communications.

First, let’s look at individual communication habits. How many of us begin our day as Seth Godin discusses in his blog by checking our incoming mail? This can accomplish many things including: filling us in on what happened since we last checked, providing breaking news about performance, or alerting us to some critical timing event. It also conditions us to be in “response” mode as opposed to initiation mode.

Now let’s look at enterprise communications. In the mid 90s, “portals” were all the rage to communicate with employees – a PULL methodology. Let’s put up a website, segment our content and our people will come find the information. When we realized this wasn’t working, we started shifting time-sensitive communications to email; this way we could broadcast – a PUSH methodology – to our employees. Really, really important communications will be marked urgent. That will get their attention.

Killing email is the resultant backlash. This is a clear indication we are PUSHING too much information at our people and they have resorted to other means of communication (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, etc.) to avoid the deluge. But, at the end of the day the technology is only as good as: 1) responsible use policies, 2) personal communications discipline, and 3) effective content.

Every new technology views itself as “THE disruptor” and will render all previous technologies obsolete. What is required is for us to: 1) think of what information we need to PROVIDE to our people, 2)  determine the best medium to use, 3) establish protocols, 4) develop the appropriate content for the medium and the message, and 4) measure effectiveness.

This discipline will result in employees who possess the knowledge to proactively reach their goals using all of the knowledge at their disposal.