Business communication improvement is typically taken as the improvement in the communication content. We talk about the improvement in the communication systems which can give a sustainable long term advantage to an organization - what works and what doesn't!

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Excel Through Business Communication
How To Benefit From Using
Business Communication?

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● Motivation
● Business Communication Roundup
● How To Choose a Tool
● How To Implement
● Anti-patterns
Agenda

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Motivation

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Communication is Omnipresent
● Consequently, an
improvement in
communication may
affect many areas of
your organization
positively.

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Perspective

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Communication Evolution

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Email Is Badly Broken
Many organizations have
people who receive 100+
emails everyday. How much
productivity can we expect
from them?
- Context switching time
- Fatigue
- Sheer amount of time wasted

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Communication is Vital Everywhere

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Expert Advice
Experts differ widely …
… and often go wrong

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Jacob Morgan and Wendy Troupe explain:
“If you asked ten executives to define
Enterprise 2.0 or Social Media or Social
Business, you’d probably get ten different
answers.”
“Right now, we’re in the early stages of
this category and people are just not sure
about the potential. “
“Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 are still
very new and part of an ill-defined space
— a space whose internal boundaries
remain fuzzy.“

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Grand Success
● For long proponents put forth great
arguments in favor of using ESNs.
However the benefits were perceived
mostly as intangible.

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Few Statistics
● However, Andrew Borg
published research
findings of 629
companies (Nov 2013)
which show impressive
numbers

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Grand Failures
● CIOs voted Enterprise Social
Tools as the most overhyped
technology of the year 2013

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Grand Failures(Continued)

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Why Diversity

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Motivation Of This Talk
● Email is broken. The challenges are real
● Great benefit awaits you - if you manage
to dodge failures
● It’s not difficult to achieve it - No rocket
science
We need a different mindset to deal with
it
● Lets cut through the hype and use
common-sense
- That's what successful companies do

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Business Communication
Round-Up

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Business Communication Round-Up
External World
HO
Branch 2Branch 1
● With external world
● Within branches
● Internal to a branch

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Tools to Fix Email
Tools
● Gmail
● Shortmail
● Limiting number of recipients
● Group email ids
● MS Exchange, Mithi, Zimbra
What are they??
● They attempt to fix email system
where it appears to be broken
● Sometimes, it's about imposing
some rules
● Sometimes, it's about adding
intelligence

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Document Sharing systems
Tools
● Dropbox
● Google drive
What are they??
● Ability to share documents with
others
● Not all documents have the same
access rights
● Documents may be versioned

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Task Management System
Tools
● Asana
● Trello
What are they??
● Focuses on improving the accountability
by providing better task management
and infrastructure and views
● Central unit is a task, tracked by status,
due date

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Project Management thru Collaboration
Tools
● Basecamp
● ActiveCollab
What are they??
● Project Management Systems
which helps you to track project
progress through collaboration
● Central unit is a project - within
which tasks, discussions and
schedules are tracked.

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Knowledge Management Systems
What are they??
● Creates a long term knowledge asset for
the organization
● Let employees create knowledge
content and classify it based on
taxonomies. Emphasize on knowledge
curation
● A continuous challenge is converting
tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge
and encouraging people to share it
● Tools - Varied

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Customer Relationship Management
Tools
● Salesforce
● Bitrix
● Zoho CRM
What are they??
● Catering to communication needs
of marketing / sales
● Maintain a database of leads /
opportunities at various stages, and
communicate with them

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Customer Support
Tools
● osTicket
● Zendesk
What are they??
● Ticketing systems, which allow
customers to raise tickets and
internal team to access, work on
and close those tickets
● Each ticket has a unique id, and
status updates are made visible to
the customers through emails or
portal

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Enterprise Collaboration
Tools
● Confluence
● Mediawiki
● Google docs
What are they??
● Let’s team of employees
collaboratively create
documentation that is of use to the
organization
● Employees are given RD/RW
accesses to different parts of the
collaborative documentation

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Enterprise Social Network
Tools
● Yammer
● Jive
What are they??
● Attempt to replicate the success of
social media within an enterprise
● “Facebook for enterprise” approach

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Intranets
What are they??
● Internal portal for employees
enabling HR and communication
● Typical communications channels
are email, chat, PM
● Integration with other enterprise
tools

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Comprehensive Tools
What they are?
● A single tool usable across different
purposes
● Possible either through extensive
configurability or inbuilt flexibility
● The only contenders to take away
the catch-all aspect of email
Tools
● Sharepoint
● Kommbox

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Choosing a Tool

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Understanding Your Needs
● Communication is an important element of organisational culture
● Communication styles, philosophies and expectations vary highly
○ From geography to geography
○ From sector to sector
○ From organization to organization
Do you understand what will work / what will not work in your organization?

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Small is Beautiful
● Choose a tool that is
○ Not hard to configure
○ Can assist in your immediate usage scenario
○ Can grow with you
Do not fall into the feature trap.
Understand the philosophy of the tool.

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How Many Tools?
Using a single comprehensive tool has benefits vs
using multiple special purpose tools
● Cost concerns
● Integration concerns
● Data fragmentation concerns
● User confusion concerns
Counter View

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Implementation

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Create Consensus
● Organization-wide consensus of
how the tool will be used
● Create champions in different
departments

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Top Management Support
● Active Support from Top Management is crucial
● You cannot leave it entirely to the employees.
There needs to be a clear mandate about using
the tool.

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Adopt Quickly
A low-scale implementation has larger
chances of failure.
Adopt quickly in the organization
Experiment on pilot scale (optional)

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Monitor and Change
Easy to make changes early enough.
Change the direction as warranted
Champions to monitor the use and
benefits

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Antipatterns

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The “Feature-heaviness” Antipattern
• The CEO wants the organization to be cutting edge (sometimes
due to the hype surrounding ESN) and a small group gets the
responsibility to choose the enterprise collaboration tool. The
group creates a long list of features (wiki for something,
discussion forum for something else, task management for yet
another thing, etc.), and recommends a tool which is the most
feature rich. The company ends up spending high amount of
money in the product and expensive consultancy that is needed
to configure the product.
• Further, the organization finds it tough to get its employees use
the tool because of its complexity (see the Confusion anti-
pattern), and the implementation fails. Bertrard Duperrin warns
organization against taking such feature-centric approach

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The “Confusion” Antipattern
The product features create a confusion in the
minds of end users. For example, when a user
wants to add a piece of knowledge, she gets
confused whether she should create a discussion
in the discussion forum or create a wiki page. In
the absence of clear guidelines, the users would
use their own discretion which will eventually lead
to the “conflict” antipattern. The confusion would
create a heterogeneous use of the tool and
ultimately the exercise becomes fruitless.

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The “Conflict” Antipattern
CEO asks the employees to use a tool and the
employees start using it. Many people from
different departments try to figure out the
tool and make the best use of it for
themselves and their departments. When
these efforts are not coordinated,
expectation mismatch between the
departments emerges after a while. If not
corrected in time, this results in
fragmentation in the way it is used and
ultimately the whole purpose of using a
common platform is lost.

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The “Disinterest” Antipattern
● The CEO asks a team to evaluate a product.
Unless there is a committed product champion
whose KRA aligns with the product use, the
product remains unused. The people say they
want to evaluate it, but they never find time to
do so. Without a commitment from anyone and
zero push from top management, the steam
runs out.
● Many times it happens because nobody wants
to take the initiative. Everyone wants someone
else to start, or maybe that the tool would bring
about some magical improvements on its own.
It doesn’t, and the implementation dies out.

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The “Overuse” Antipattern
With a zeal, a collaboration tool gets adopted. Everyone
puts in a lot of updates and there is a lot of interaction.
People are happy about the successful implementation
and some examples of collaboration happening over the
platform are seen as success signs. The conversations
on the platform start slipping into a more casual mode,
and signal-to-noise ratio starts going down. A realization
slowly dawns that people are spending way too much
time with the collaboration tool and they get less time
for work. By this time, the tool is so much embedded
into organization’s work patterns that it could be too
late to return.

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The “Misfit” Antipattern
Some times, the failure is attributed to a misfit between the
organizational culture and the tool. Many experts profess that the
“social” effect needs a near flat structure in an organization, and no
topic should be a taboo. Many organizations find it difficult or
impractical to make these changes. Many times, the social principles
seem to contrast with something that is deeply ingrained into the
organizational culture.
When misfit occurs, the quality of discussions / updates that happen
over the ESN is perceived as low, and they seem to help no one. For
some time, companies push the implementation with the hope that
something may come out. But eventually, in absence of any good
benefits, the implementation dies. The two sides (one promoting
change in company culture and the other opposing it) keep debating
endlessly.

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Happy
Communicating!

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Contact Us
sales@kommbox.com
www.kommbox.com