Learn From The 4%
Dear Leaders, Happy Monday.
I recently read “Only 4% of companies always document their processes”1
4% is tiny. Actually, it is bordering on ludicrous.
I truly believe one of the main ingredients to the secret sauce of the best companies I have ever worked in or for was internal documentation, documenting what, why, where and how.
Yes, in other words, deliberate and transparent communication.
Not just reporting and insights but the records kept, the sharing of the information and the ability for anyone to find out important information and where it is stored within seconds.
The issue I encounter with many businesses I talk to and help to shape today is:
The access to information and documents are kept in private,
🔐 Think private personal inboxes
🔐 Private chats in slack, teams, iMessage, WhatsApp etc
🔐 Or knowledge hoarding aka kept inside people’s heads, a deliberate action or not.
This is death by your own 1000 cuts!
As a business leader, you have the ability to remove barriers, improve knowledge sharing, shape knowledge flow and importantly remove blockers on projects.
Documentation is not simple, it can be complicated, (as I suggested in 20 lessons from 20 years) you need:
An easy system to learn ➡️ to use ➡️ to share and ➡️ easy to lightly personalise for each department.
1/ Basically, an easy to understand system,
2/ With a clear hierarchy.
3/ You need to understand how a tool might work, &
4/ You need to train people to follow a set of basic guidelines.
Some companies take to creating mailing lists to cc emails into, others have 500 person slack or teams channels for important updates that are blasted out and ignored versus being more deliberate in having a home of information, insights, discussion, templates and guidance.
The future of hybrid and focused asynchronous work is not bcc-ing information in form of a quick email dump into everyone’s email inbox.
A potential solution is to find the right software for you, (please not Google docs & Google’s site is a poor equivalent or open Microsoft documents or Sharepoint, this does not scale well at all) tools like Notion or Confluence are both great tools.
Confluence is the best tool I have used within companies of over 100.
Notion works perfectly well and scales brilliantly if implemented correctly.
In September 2020 I suggested there would be five key hires, two of which will be great advocates for rolling this out and helping to train and maintain, the first is the culture community manager and the second is a Project Manager.
The culture community manager will be an excellent partner, they can help to build community, engage and create standards to follow.
The PM may have gone out of fashion, however, if you don’t have someone who sole job to scope, roll out, continue to seed its success and enforce where required, you will struggle with any internal success of any project or campaign.
Use the PM and Culture community manager to reduce the friction point of one of the most reported breaking points within companies (bad internal communication and access to data).
Why not set your company, departments and people up for success, why not remove barriers and introduce a better way of working?
Why not join me in fixing the broken world of work, one step at a time?
Thanks and have a great week,
Danny Denhard
If you are looking for a professional coach or mentor, scan the below to connect me directly.
FYI: The stat was from a management report from 5 years ago.