I was recently asked to write a brief 100 words piece for a company newsletter, ideally funny and could I do it now. Well I came up with the following effort.
And so it began…
“Pete you like writing, write something for our Company Newsletter.”
“What would you like me to write?”
“Whatever people want to hear.”
Given such a clear brief (hell it’s better than a lot of client briefs!) I figured I was on to a winner here and kicked things off.
Strangely though thinking about what I wanted to hear wasn’t as simple as I first thought..? We all gladly ask for more communication when it’s not there, but pinpointing exactly what is the big void appears to be a bit harder.
Either way I’m out of words.
However as this is a different forum and I’m not kept to a 100 word maximum I’ll elaborate. It’s true that people will always view lack of communication as a major problem in any project, however when asked what people actually want to hear about it’s hard to pin point anything specific.
Now I believe that’s because people don’t want to hear anything specific they actually want to hear everything. We need to remember that it’s hard to know what the exact information someone needs is, as most people use any and all information they receive as a means of establishing context for their work, and indeed their life. Likewise exclusion from conversations or information is a very quick way to split a project team into silos and ruin productivity!
So I would always vouch for a principle of communicate everything you can and then make sure everything else is easy to find. People will always want to know more and it helps define their role so don’t be stingy with the communications and don’t set up a culture of secrecy unless you want things to fall to bits!
In practice this might include having an easily searchable project folder or site with all of your minutes, conducting discussions on message boards, including more people on emails or even putting key information up on a wall (one of my favourites).
GHTime Code(s): nc
