Any wiki software suffers from the problem that only a small percentage of the company uses it. It's essentially a tax on the most productive people. If someone asks you for the same thing 8x, you will write it down and share it via a wiki.
I've spend years trying to solve the problem - how do you get the average person writing more at work? What I've come up with resembles a company "journal", but helps you automate any routine communication or update (daily standup, weekly update, retros, etc).
Would love any/all feedback on the idea, here's the website (https://www.friday.app/). You can use it as an individual, team, or with the entire org.
> how do you get the average person writing more at work?
Some people have many answers, but other people have many questions. So I think encouraging people to ask more (even stupid) questions might be a way to get the discussion going.
This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly).
Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication.
My startup (https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly).
Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.
My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see entries over time.
I ended up building a product (https://www.friday.app/) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too.
I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.
>The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information.
Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.
Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic...
The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings.
Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.
Whether everybody in the press uses "zoom fatigue" the same way I can't say. In any case, it's the fatigue from suboptimal sound environments is how the author of this thread's article is using it.
Thank you! Props for polite correction on someone straw-manning the OP. Otherwise I likely wouldn't have looked into this one.
I've definitely noticed mental fatigue from the changed aural environment in my house. I normally work from home, but now that my wife is also WFH, I've realized that hearing her on zoom at the same time as I'm in a meeting (or trying to concentrate) just melts my brain. Can't actually comment on zoom sound quality as have a pair of headphones that doesn't drive me completely nuts, and didn't notice anything about it in the previous few years of WFH...
“bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.“
I hope that if video conferencing stays more popular we will see a lot of progress there. Cell phone cameras have shown what can be achieved with enough computation so I hope the same can be done for video conferencing. The current solutions are still very primitive as far as sound and image quality goes.
I wonder if premium virtual conferencing solutions will pop up. People might pay more to be guaranteed calls would go over dedicated networks and high performance servers; the service provider can send the participants custom hardware (perhaps even appliances) to improve quality at the ends. I'm unsure how much of the quality degradation is at the last mile, which this sort of service won't be able to help much.
This is a great point. The issue is that the current best practice advice is to use a wiki.
Wikis are riddled with problems. They become out of date quickly. They need a librarian over time to organize the content in a way that's meaningful. There's also no "habit loop" to encourage people to regularly contribute content.
Right now, wikis are a tax on the most productive people in a company. If someone asks you the same question over and over, you will eventually document it to share.
At my company (https://www.friday.app/) we've found a way to get people to regularly communicate asynchronously via regular updates like daily standups or weekly status reports. It's more like a work journal vs. a file cabinet.
When collaborating over ambiguous topics where the potential to be misunderstood is high, you need to use the "richest" communication channel possible. Body language, facial expression, and the fast feedback loop can help you quickly establish a sense of common ground.
On the other hand, status updates or sharing of metrics/information can easily be done asynchronously, because the potential to be misunderstood is low. It's also a more scalable approach and persists over time.
> When collaborating over ambiguous topics where the potential to be misunderstood is high, you need to use the "richest" communication channel possible. Body language, facial expression
I would dispute that body language and facial expression are somehow always correctly interpreted or unambiguous, like most forms of communication.
Written word, or a series of characters in a string, as I think we in a technical forum with many programmers in particular can appreciate, can in fact remove quite a bit of ambiguity if everyone is careful about what they type.
I'm the founder of a startup with 6 employees (FT/contractors) and have one 1-1 meeting every week (30 min) + a "coffee shop session" for an hour where we shoot the breeze and talk about non-work stuff.
1.) communicate asynchronously as much as possible. If you have a synchronous conversation like a meeting, make sure there is a written representation of what was discussed. If it doesn't persist, it doesn't exist
2.) Understand that implementing a wiki by itself will not work. There's a gravitational pull to throw a bunch of junk in it (like a file cabinet). Things become out of date and each person will structure things in a different way.
3. Create some loose structure around sharing regular, written updates about what each person/team is working on.
At my company (https://www.friday.app), we've created a tool that is somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki. It's kindof like a work journal. As a distributed team who only has 1 meeting every week, it's a place where all our updates are captured in a single place.
This is great advice. As an employee, I've found success with the following:
- Send an agenda beforehand. This gives your manager an idea about what you'd like to discuss, so then they can prepare themselves and/or not get caught off-guard.
- At the end, I try to ask, "do you have anything for me?", which typically opens the door for them giving you feedback/thoughts if they have it. It also is a nice way to prep myself for receiving feedback vs. it coming without me "opting in."
I've spend years trying to solve the problem - how do you get the average person writing more at work? What I've come up with resembles a company "journal", but helps you automate any routine communication or update (daily standup, weekly update, retros, etc).
Would love any/all feedback on the idea, here's the website (https://www.friday.app/). You can use it as an individual, team, or with the entire org.