In most business organisations, email has become the standard way of sending information backwards and forwards. If a manager needs to communicate with staff, they just send an email. Sales figures, customer service reports, whatever. Planning training via email is even accepted nowadays.
So far so good – but using email as a management tool has a number of weaknesses that aren’t readily obvious.
Leaving aside that important emails will obviously get mixed up with arrangements for nights out, charity events and other trivial matters, most people have no clue how to save a document from an email. (Windows usually saves the file to a place called a temp file. When you try to explain this to people, they probably won’t understand).
As a result of this, most will just leave the attachment attached to the document and clog up the PC’s hard drive, network server space or both. When someone gets a query, they have to look at endless old emails to find information. (IT is supposed to make it easy to find things not rely on humans to remember the date they received it)
New team members are supposed to do what? A new member of staff will get a fresh install of outlook or thunderbird which doesn’t contain any emails at all and they will have to listen to a second or third hand account of why things are as they are in the workplace.
Again, a waste of time and not using technology to it’s full advantage.
How to solve this simple but tricky problem?
Why not borrow an idea from google Google, where all staff members have an internal blog.
What goes on a personal blog?
As well as the standard personal stuff, users can post minutes or meetings & away days they may attend. How to’s are all stored in one place and personal & team targets can be posted.
Of course, all this is indexable & searchable by tags and you can even set it up so that when a new post is made, an email alert is posted out to everyone.
Wouldn’t it be better if the technology worked for you rather than the other way round?
