How to get Your Business Past Email

We’re all overwhelmed by email and looking for alternatives – many businesses are interested in collaboration and social tools to set themselves free… here’s how to make these work.

New tools promise to foster collaboration and protect your IP

Products like Yammer, Slack and Basecamp promise to get your staff collaborating freely and effortlessly, whilst building up your company’s IP into a valuable bank of knowledge!

Staff under 25 don’t read their emails anyway

Many business owners are astounded that younger staff find email clumsy, primitive and slow. Whilst many staff over 40 are chained to Outlook – unproductive and frustrated… the more emails they send, the more they are embedding this behaviour! Tools like Slack and Whatsapp make email look very Victorian.

Use collaboration tools to create ongoing conversations

Emails are inevitably private conversations, no matter how big the circulation list. Collaboration tools on the other hand create ongoing searchable threads and document areas. New joiners to the company or department or project enter the thread, and leavers exit the thread. But the thread contains the valuable knowledge and your company owns it. That’s a real step forward for “knowledge based” businesses that is genuinely important from a shareholder perspective.

Here’s the first step to make it work:

We all have a very low tolerance for tools we don’t quite understand or don’t really need… our tendency is always to lapse back to bad old email. So you must ensure that the problem you’re trying to solve is going to be worth it for the users – are they going to find this sufficiently useful that they will bother?

Then insist on this…

You and your managers decide what will and will not be on email, and you then need to lead by example (nothing new there!) … all relevant conversation and docs are always and only in the collaboration tool, never on email!

If the tool is useful to people, and becomes the place where this collaboration happens then it will simply become part of their everyday work and it will boost the effectiveness and value of the business.

Find out more

We frequently work with businesses that want to foster collaboration and muster their valuable IP, but it’s hard to make this happen. If you’d like to talk to us then please get in touch.