Communication Tools: Make Them Simple and Ubiquitous or They Won’t Be Used

As part of my current work contract, and in some of my blog posts, I’ve grappled with the ineffective and inappropriate use of the various communication tools that are available in the workplace. I’ve developed a variety of ‘tool choosers’ — decision trees and charts that identify the criteria for use of different tools. And I’ve written articles on when not to use e-mail.

I didn’t expect enormous success in using these levers for change in information behaviours. Things are the way they are for a reason. In studying the use (and non-use, and mis-use) of various tools, I’ve come to the realization that some pretty simple rules govern whether, and how, communication tools are used:

A tool has to be both simple (intuitive to learn, comfortable and versatile to use) and ubiquitous (everyone needs to have access to it) before it will be extensively used.
Most people are looking for just enough tools to manage both 1-to-1 and group communications, and both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous communications. The fewer the better as long as they cover those bases.
Most people will tolerate more than one tool in a category if and only if each offers unique and important functionality that is absent in the others.
Comfort with and access to various communication tools varies between generations, and with it their propensity to use certain tools.

These four rules are captured in the charts above, the top one for most of the baby boomer generation (most of the people I’m working with) and the bottom one for generation millennium (and for more tech-savvy older people). Each chart shows the communication tools most appropriate for 1-to-1 versus group communication, and for synchronous versus asynchronous communication. Tools that are relatively simple to use are shown with a green circle on the left side; tools that are relatively ubiquitous are shown with a green circle on the right side. Tools that are both simple and ubiquitous (the ones most people prefer to use) are in bold.

I’ve recently come to realize that virtually all business communications are conducted with these simple ubiquitous tools, and that, no matter how well marketed, or how extensive the available training, tools that are either complicated or not available to everyone on the businessperson’s ‘mailing list’ just won’t be used.

When part of your job is to sell people on using complicated and/or exclusive (restricted access, pilot) tools in the workplace, this is a dismaying realization. So what I’m now focusing on, to bring about information behaviour change, is this approach:

Make complicated tools easier to use: Strip out unneeded and confusing functionality. Use templates. Set people up with one-click, one-step mechanisms to use the tool the way they most often use it. You want to get the geezers in your company to blog instead of sending bulk e-mails to everyone? Make the blog site an e-mail address, so that all s/he has to do is e-mail to that address and voilý, s/he’s a blogger. Want people to share their stuff on the Intranet? Make saving documents on, and sending documents to, the organization’s websites the default, automatic, so that you have to do something extra in order not to share.
Make limited-access tools ubiquitous: Give everyone default access to all the tools in your company’s communication toolkit: Skype, IM, desktop videoconferencing (with a personal meeting-space URL for every employee), personal web pages, RSS aggregator pages, etc. If they’re simple enough to use and available to everyone, a certain number of people will start using them, provided they meet a need that other tools cannot. Usage will likely steamroller from there, as the pioneers keep exposing others to these tools until they become second nature to everyone.
Only once you have done the above, help people differentiate when to use the various tools that are simple, ubiquitous, and somewhat interchangeable (i.e. which are in the same quadrant of the charts above). Each tool has its unique advantages, and each is inappropriate in some situations. Once everyone has IM, for example, people will be open to understand when it is preferable to use that tool instead of the phone or e-mail, and when IM should not be used.

I’d always expected that the younger and more tech-savvy people in any organization would be able to show (not tell) the older and more tech-wary people how to use new tools easily and effectively. But in thirty years in business, I’ve almost never seen this happen. Generation Millennium will use IM, blogs, and personal web pages (internal or on public sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and FaceBook) whether they’re officially sanctioned or not, but they won’t be evangelists for these tools.We therefore need to look at each group in the organization as a separate cohort with different levels of comfort with (and possibly different degrees of access to) various tools. That means the larger and more risk-averse the organization, the slower the likely adoption curve of new communication tools will be, because (a) giving everyone access to a new tool is a more expensive proposition in larger organizations, and (b) there are more likely to be laggards, especially in the senior ranks, who will refuse to use a tool because they still perceive it as too complicated, and they will hold everyone else back.

There’s a lesson here for those designing and experimenting with new social networking tools, too:

If a tool is complicated or if it’s not freely available to everyone, or if it doesn’t fill some important need that current popular tools don’t fulfil, it won’t be extensively used.

It doesn’t matter if it’s better designed or has more functionality, or even if it’s clearly ‘best of breed’ — it won’t be used. Each new tool, to be introduced successfully, must meet all three of these stringent tests.

Come to think of it, this lesson probably applies to all new innovations, not just communication tools. I’m going to call it Pollard’s Law of Innovation.

In my current assignment, this means I have my work cut out for me. I have to:

simplify the functionality of our commercial groupware tool, and provide simple, automatic access to it to everyone in the organization
simplify the process by which employees can post information to our (bewilderingly many) web sites
create simple templated weblogs that will allow our subject matter experts, newsletter publishers and community of practice leaders to publish their stuff easily and automatically
provide simple, automatic access to IM, and to our licenced desktop videoconferencing tool, to everyone in the organization
and then create simple ‘cheat sheets’ explaining when to use IM (or face-to-face conversations) instead of e-mails, when to use blogs, groupware or a post to our websites instead of the endless bulk e-mails, and when to use desktop videoconferencing instead of teleconferencing.

This goes part-way, perhaps, to explaining why it’s so hard finding success stories of social networking tools in organizations — it’s just too hard for them to meet the stringent criteria. It took the ‘simple’ fax fifty years from its invention to achieve ubiquity, only to be obsolesced by e-mail a decade later.

And dare I suggest that, in so many of today’s hollowed-out organizations, for all the lip service paid to them, networking and communication just aren’t apriority?

Category: Communications Technologies