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Your Story: Throwing new tools at a communication problem?

I'm working on a (likely non-43 Folders) piece about a topic that seems to keep coming up whenever I talk with people about how their team plans, collaborates, and generally communicates with one another. I'd love to hear from you in comments if you have a contribution to make.

What’s your story?

Do you have a story about a time when your team or company tried to solve a human communication problem by adding a new tool? In your estimation, how did things turn out?

 

Yours doesn't need to be a horror story to be included here -- there are certainly ample examples in which a thorny problem disappeared by introducing a bit of high (or low) technology to the mix.

But, the anecdotes I hear from worker bees often focus on the frustration they felt when a wiki, a new CMS, a mailing list, or some other tool was introduced into an ecosystem that was suffering from a more fundamental communication problem. A lot of people tell me that this makes matters much worse all around, often amplifying the complexity of the original problem, in addition to piling on burnt cycles that were committed on getting everyone up to speed on the new "silver bullet."

If you have a minute over the next week or so, please share your story here. Redact details that you think need redacting, but please consider telling me how things went for you and your group. And, if you feel like a whole or partial solution to the core problem ever did come along, that would be great to know, as well. Already documented this someplace else? Know of someone else who did? Links to relevant stories are also greatly appreciated.

If things pan out, I may be contacting a few of you offline for more details, and conceivably, an interview or two. Thanks in advance.

Darrel Girardier's picture

Wikis and Facebook

I will keep this short and to the point.

We attempted to integrate a wiki as our centralized point of information. We set up an rss feed so people could then notified of what info had been changed. We were hoping this could eliminate the "to all" emails.

It didn't work. The employees found the wiki confusing. I think that is in part because wikis are so flexible and sometimes overwhelming to people.

What did work for us was Facebook, and here is why. We hire over 600+ college students to work for us in the summer and we have to train them before the hit the ground in June. We figured that about every college student had a Facebook account and that was easier then forcing them in to some sort of corporate training forum. We set up Facebook groups by positions and asked the employees to join the group. So far it has been a huge hit and has cut my e-mail from summer staff by 2/3.

 
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