Redefining Workplace Communication: The Shift from Person-Based to Topic-Based
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, the I lost it and trying to get it back. So I'm gonna let Matt and Emma I lost it and trying to get it back. So I'm gonna let Matt and Emma here, our communication collaboration team, talk for the majority of this podcast, but I do want to kinda set the stage about what we're talking about today and why this came up and just kick us off. So 2 podcasts to go to ball gals talked about a lot of how we communicate internally and how it kinda changes how they work and show up to work and how it's different from some of their old workplaces.
Mitch:And we realized we should probably zoom out from that a tiny bit because there is quite a bit of workplace strategy around this culture of of communication that we're building. And some of it goes down to the tools we use and some goes to, yeah, kinda how we approach these things. And so we wanted to zoom out and talk about a better way to to communicate internally. And before we go too deep, we are developing a course on this topic, which I'm super excited about. The working title for it is a 20 day total communication reset where we go through 20 days in a row, just short video clips where we help you hit reset on your internal communication and work through some of these concepts on a day to day basis and and hopefully come out the other side with a better collaborating team.
Mitch:Mhmm. So we'll give you a link to that in the show notes if you're interested. So the premise for a lot of this comes from this world of email where people talk in back channels and people are out of the loop in it. You probably know all the different nuances of how email works at your company and some of your things that you do not like about email.
Emma:Mhmm.
Mitch:Maybe they're they're not things that you don't realize you don't like about email, but more about how you're communicating. And so today, we wanna talk about how you might be able to use some tools to shift how you're communicating, free up that inbox, stop using email, and kinda why some of these tools work better than others. So a lot of this is just helping you learn about something that maybe you didn't know about and how to use it better. So topic based communication versus person based communication is sort of the our internal working phrase for this, and it's not the most marketing friendly, phrase, which is why we're we're not calling this podcast that. But when it comes down to it, it's these two things that are at odds with each other.
Mitch:So let's talk about what does this even mean? What is person based communication? Shouldn't all communication be person based versus topic based communication?
Emma:To me, person based communication is when you start your message or whenever you're thinking about starting a communication, you're thinking about the people you need to send it to. So your first when you think about an email, the first thing at the top is the 2. When you think about a direct message, you're deciding or even a chat message, you're deciding who are you going to put in that receiving line. So person based communication, when we're talking about it, it means it's based on the people that you're sending the information to at its most basic form. Anything else to add, Matt?
Matt:The only thing I would add is the technology is also a component of it. Sure. If I am sending an email to someone and I'm choosing just the people to send it to, when I send that, that information is going into their personal mailbox.
Emma:Right. Each individual them.
Matt:Yep. Inbox. There are other technologies, which we're gonna talk about in a minute, which is the topic based thing, where you don't have to do that. You could still let someone or think about a person, but the actual place that it goes isn't in a location. So there's 2 pieces.
Matt:1 is a mindset thing, which is the biggest thing that people have to change in order to adopt topic based communication, which is change your mind from always thinking about, I need to tell John and and Angela about this thing to something else, which we're gonna talk about in a second. The second piece, though, is the tools.
Emma:You need
Matt:to be using a tool that comp that doesn't only or exclusively work in a person centric way or a person based way.
Emma:Right.
Matt:Yeah. So let me talk about topics. So a topic based communication is starting with the topic first. Right?
Emma:Instead of the
Matt:person saying the person saying.
Emma:The difference.
Matt:Yeah. So instead of saying, I need to send this thing to so and so, I need to update this project status. Right? And so you're starting from the point of, okay. Where do I go to update the project status?
Matt:Right? Once you're there, then you might go, oh, I need to tag so and so because this is really important that they see that this got updated. Right? It's an approach to communication that allows you to talk about topics. Now I also talked about technology.
Matt:Email has a way to support topic based communication, and that would be shared mailboxes and using a shared mailbox for all of your things. But it has lots of problems. Right? When I send something to a shared mailbox, I can't tag a person to say, you know, maybe there's 20 people on a team and they're all monitored the shared mailbox, but I really need to talk to one person, but I also want everybody else in that group to know. And then you might have people go, well, then you you email the shared mailbox and cc the person you want.
Matt:Like, it just gets really complicated, and and you're what you're doing there is really taking something that was you know, email is based on snail mail, and there's an address, and I'm sending it to an address and to a person at that address. And there isn't a cc option or a you know, you have these other tools and it's built around this this model that is very physical and very, classic in how you're approaching that communication. There are new tools, specifically Slack, Teams, SharePoint, like, all of these tools that support topic centric. So topic is the focus. Mhmm.
Matt:And that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit today is how you can really transform how you communicate by leveraging those tools to support this mindset shift from thinking about communicating with people, exclusively with people, and starting to think about topic is the most important and people as the second.
Mitch:Yeah. Yeah. So people based, first thing you think about is people, topic based. I I'm actually gonna pull out a list of our channels just to give some examples of, like, what what Yeah. What we talk about.
Mitch:I actually misspoke there. I said channels. They are our channels, but what I want people to think about right now are these are the topics Oh, yeah. That we talk about. So we talk about operations.
Mitch:We talk about leadership. We talk about marketing. We talk about specific clients, sometimes specific client projects. These are all delineations between our communication. So they do require using these well.
Mitch:You you kinda mentioned it as a change in strategy, a change strategy, a change in mindset in order to use it well. You cannot just throw this new tool at somebody and say, talk there, because people often fall in common traps, which is what I wanna talk about next, which is our primary audience is probably people who are using Teams. Yep. We use Slack a lot, but we use Teams a lot too. What are the things that people usually see something like Teams and say, okay.
Mitch:This is the next way to communicate, but they kind of fall into the person based approach still. And we'll talk about kinda why that's that's a problem, but let's relate it to the people of how might they be using the tool today that is, quote, unquote, not the best.
Matt:Yeah. So almost every tool that can support topic based communication can also support person based communication. And that applies to email. It applies to Teams. It applies to Slack.
Matt:And in the world of email, it's the default. Like, you get a 2 in the front, and you say this is what it is. And then you do the cc, and then you do a subject. Right? You don't do the subject first because it doesn't help in regards to where it's going.
Matt:These tools like Teams, for example, and Slack, it still supports direct messaging. Right? And direct messaging and files and calendar, these things are highly promoted within the package. Right? When you open the if you're a brand new tenant, don't have anything, you open it up, you click on the top things you see are, like, chat, you know, activities and stuff, but then chat is really high high on the list, channels or, calendar is really high on the list, and files is really high on the list or or OneDrive.
Matt:Those are all personal individual things.
Mitch:Mhmm.
Matt:If I use chats, it's no better than me sending an email to someone directly. Right? If I put something in my OneDrive, it's no different than putting something on my local local file system on my computer. Right?
Mitch:And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck where they say, why is this tool so much better? I'm using chats, the direct messages. I'm I'm using the files, but I'm not feeling this, like, warm fuzzy. Like, this is changing the way that we're communicating. And so I feel like Teams probably gets a bit of a bad rap because people don't make that shift towards the next level.
Emma:I think Matt's hitting on it really well when he talks about a chat is really no better than an email because that kinda brings us to the first problem I would call out is all of it's owned by the individual. The individual is responsible for all that information, whether it's in a chat or whether it's in an email.
Matt:Mhmm.
Emma:So it's on that individual person to make sure, are they the only one that needs to know? Did other people need to know? They're responsible for either looking at it, sorting it, putting it in the right spot
Mitch:Mhmm.
Emma:Which kinda leads to just a whole another issue. If you have a lot of these conversations going on, so a lot of emails or a lot of chats, Why do we create, you know, email folders? Because we're trying to sort things by where these go, whether it's projects, whether it's Yeah.
Mitch:You have whole video Right. About how to organize your inbox. Right?
Emma:And we all do it. Right? It's natural because you're trying to bring some type of organization or And And number 2, you have to do the work to organize it after you've received it. Yeah. So just extra work.
Mitch:A lot of the same symptoms are mirrored on Teams Yes. Or email.
Emma:If you're using direct chats. Yeah.
Matt:You're still gonna need group chats. Yeah.
Mitch:Yeah. You're still gonna need to, like, I think about BCC ing a boss so that someone can be in the loop when there's conflict or something where in an email, it's just direct between those people and then you wanna loop more people in. It creates this constant game of who needs to pay attention to what, and everyone needs to filter through that in their inbox in one feed. And
Emma:it's Yeah.
Mitch:Not great.
Matt:And it's up to every individual to do it. Yep. So now rather than having, this is how we manage our stuff for this project or for this topic, you have Emma has her way, and I have my way, and you have your way, and somebody else has their way, and we just hired somebody new, they get to figure out their own way. Right? And then the last thing I'll say the last problem that I would highlight is there's no way to opt in to these things.
Matt:Right? So so many times, you know, in in email and in chat messages, people get overwhelmed. People are either overwhelmed or they're not informed. 1 or the other. Right?
Matt:You either have a situation where someone includes everyone on every chat because they want them to see it. But in the chat message, every chat message, Teams expects you and and Slack and all of these tools expects you to want to read every message. Well, they're really only doing it so that I can keep updated so we have our next meeting. If they wanted to review it ahead of time, they could review it. I don't need a response right then.
Matt:They don't need to respond to it immediately. But there is no other tool. There's no other way. When you BCC or CC someone, it's gonna go in their mailbox. And if they don't have it categorized and automatically going into a folder, it's gonna be there with a bunch of other messages.
Matt:Right? The other end of it is somebody never includes anybody. Everything's you know, I talk to this person and then I talk to that person and then I talk to this person, And then, you know, you're hearing 5 different versions of the message. There's no way for the person who is maybe interested in that topic but doesn't wanna, like, get all that flood of information to go on a, you know, Friday afternoon or a a Monday morning, say, I'm gonna catch up on these things and kinda catch up on something that they're only, you know, interested in a little bit, not something that they need every day. Right?
Matt:There's just no option for that in email and in direct messaging and, like, all of that stuff. There's just not a way to do that.
Emma:And we're hitting on a lot of human behavior with in this conversation of each of us has our own way of working. So each of us wants to organize things in our own way or have an understanding of what we wanna listen to or what we don't, what we need to look at, what we feel we don't need to be involved in. So what we're talking about topic based communication, and I think we'll get get there, is allowing people to make that decision autonomously, but having the option to opt in or opt out of things, which is kind of what you wanna be able to do with email, but you can't. Exactly.
Mitch:Yeah. Let's go there. Let's talk about topic based communication to the rescue. What yeah. What all is this why is this such a game changer?
Mitch:Like, not just from a technology perspective, but, like, from an experience perspective for someone. Let's let's kinda, like, recap what the chat channels means and Yeah. Maybe what it means in Microsoft Teams, and let let's go there for a minute.
Emma:Let's let's start with a really quick example. So I'm gonna steal this from one of Matt Dressler's blogs because I think it was a good example. So let's say I'm working on a project, and I need to tell some of the folks I'm working with that I've updated all of the side deck that we're gonna present and I need the them to review. I really just need Sally and Dave to review. So in person base, I would just have emailed Sally and Dave and say, can you review this slide deck and get me back your response.
Emma:In topic based, I would put that in a channel that is labeled project, you know, blue sky. Yep. And I would say tag Sally and Dave and say, hey. Can you review these slides? Now let's say Sally's out on vacation and Morgan is stepping up in her place, and she's gonna review the slides.
Emma:I didn't know Sally was out. Well, Morgan's in that channel. She's already aware of that project. So now she sees the slides. She's able to respond.
Emma:The information is in the channel. We're good.
Mitch:The people who need to know about it Exactly. Knew about it.
Emma:Whereas in the first exam in the first part of that example, I would have gotten an out of office message. Maybe Sally forgot to put her out of office message on, and it just sits for 2 weeks. There's so many pitfalls of, obviously, person based and email. We've all been there. But having a channel for that specific project, for that specific topic, and posting there actually takes care of a lot of those issues.
Emma:So there's an example to kind of think through, but, Matt, why don't you talk more about just the structure of channels?
Matt:The the concept of topics within Teams in particular is very robust. So you have it at multiple layers. You have the at the top layer, it's a team. So you can have multiple teams, and each team in itself, by its very nature, is a topic. Right?
Matt:You know, a lot some organizations will have an all company team. Right? Well, the topic there is stuff that you'd want everybody in the company to be able to see. They might have another project that is maybe a team focused that might be, you know, the marketing team.
Mitch:Mhmm.
Matt:Again, that's a topic. It's topics related to the people within the marketing team. Right? And then you might have teams that are project focused that would be topics related to a particular project that some that a smaller group of people are working on. Within that, you have channels, and a channel is also a subtopic, if you will.
Matt:Right? So in the marketing team, you might have a channel for general, which might be just general conversations, but you also might have one that's on a specific topic activity that's going on.
Mitch:We're doing a campaign.
Matt:Yeah. On a campaign that marketing is going through. Right?
Mitch:Or building a video course about
Emma:Right. Or maybe your your social media is separated out there, your Instagram, your Facebook.
Matt:And so, really, there is a lot of robust functionality around topics within the Teams application, And it really as you were saying, it provides a lot of benefit to be able to go into a channel that is on, you know, a particular project and be able to have that discussion there and not be afraid that someone might not be informed or Right. That when next week when, you know, maybe you're you're jumping off the project this week and you're you're putting your final notes together, being afraid that next week, it'll get lost and somebody you're just gonna get asked for it again. No. It's it's right there. It's in the team.
Matt:Somebody has access to it. They'll be able to figure that out.
Emma:And there's that history aspect, which, yeah, is exactly what you're hitting on.
Matt:A history that's topic specific.
Emma:Right.
Matt:Not just the history of emails that I happen to have gotten on a particular topic, but a topic's a comprehensive topic's history.
Emma:Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, talk about context, especially if you're onboarding someone or someone's newer to a project or, you know, you're trying to be agile and have people jump around from thing to thing. It really helps with that type of movement within a company.
Emma:Because if someone's added to a team and you can scroll back up and kinda see what's happened recently, it it really gives you context and you feel like you can hit the ground running versus, hey. Can you forward me every email that you've received? And, I mean, who wants to do that? Yeah. No one.
Mitch:Right. Yeah. I feel like one of the other things you talk about too is like, we've been talking about maybe more day to day collaboration communication, but the Internet kind of concept, plays a role in topic based communication too.
Matt:Yeah. 100%. It's it's just another tool that doesn't work in a person specific way. Right? So if you take it all the way down to, like, the file level, sharing a employee manual from your OneDrive is not super great.
Matt:Right? Because that's me. That's my my personal library of files, and I have the employee handbook, and now I leave or I transfer. I don't have like, what do you do? Right?
Matt:Using an intranet or a more centralized solution that is not person specific. It is topic specific. So in the case of an intranet, you might create multiple sites and multiple libraries that have topic specific focus. And, actually, a lot of the work that we do around an intranet solution is architecting the site structure, which is effectively the topic structure. Right?
Matt:Do you create a about us site and a, you know, a HR site and a news site. So it's all about corporate news. Right? How do you approach that structure, which is 100% all about topics and what topics your organization talks about frequently enough to rise to the level that it needs its own site or its own tag or its own library or its own, you know, whatever.
Mitch:One of the things you just reminded me of is when we work on intranets, we recognize that there's departments in any company. Yeah. We do not necessarily reflect that one to 1 on an intranet because a person does not necessarily work according to departments or they shouldn't. I hate it when when people try to do that. They're like, think any a lot of the government sites that you go on, they're very based on, like, department.
Mitch:You need to know where to go as opposed to what service well, yeah, what am I trying to do? And so that is sort of I guess, we're we're saying cascade that down into your teams where teams might have be from different departments, but overlap in responsibility, and you can have them on the same channel or same topic and be in one place as opposed to drawing clear lines between those departments, which, yeah, it's it's it's hard to do without a tool that can be topic based.
Matt:Well, switching to switching the concept and the paradigm of what you're thinking to topics rather than your structure allows you to think about things very differently. And maybe you have certain topics that are there's a lot of synergy between different groups and what they would wanna talk about, and it allows you to break out of that if you need to. There are places and times when you need to explain what a division does within an organization. There's times when you need to, you know, manage things about a particular division. Intranets is definitely another area where topic based communication is critical, And most organizations get it wrong because they do exactly what you were talking about, and they start from the perspective of, I have to have a page for, you know, this group and a page for this group and a site for this group and a site for that group.
Matt:Maybe you do, but you also probably need some targeted topic specific thing.
Mitch:Yeah. Can we wrap up this section with, if someone is using Teams, what would we tell them, you know, if you wanted to do topic based communication? Instead of going to chat, what should they do?
Matt:Yeah. So instead of chat, it's all about Teams. It's about making sure that you have a team created and a channel created that makes sense for that particular topic, and using that almost exclusively. Right? Like, I there's only a handful of times where I go, yes.
Matt:This should be something that's direct messaged. Everything else, there's pretty much no reason it can't it shouldn't be in a channel.
Emma:So what I would encourage too is to not think about channels as being the super formal, mode of communication. So a channel could just have 2 people in it or 3 people in it. Maybe you have a leadership well, when I say channel, I mean team.
Matt:Teams.
Emma:We use Slack. So a lot of times, yeah, channel comes to mind, but a team could be just 2 people or just 3 people. You could still have a 2 person team and have conversation there, and that is still better than a direct message, if that makes sense.
Matt:We had Right. For a long time, a 2 person channel. It was Mike and me.
Emma:Yeah.
Matt:And then Mitch got involved. And guess what? We were able to add Mitch. Mhmm. Right?
Matt:Like, it is it is I can see all
Mitch:the time talking more. Before. Yeah.
Matt:Blackjack. Just kidding. It is it's you're a 100% right that the topic is the most important thing. And if the topic is important enough, make it something
Emma:specific. You know, gotta love Microsoft's naming conventions, but I think sometimes that leads us astray because we think, well, I gotta create a team. Well, in my mind, a team is 5 or more people or, you know, gotta have at least 3 threes company. It's a a team is really no more in our minds than a place to talk about a topic. And so if you don't think about it as this huge you gotta get past this barrier.
Emma:It's really formal to create a team. I mean, don't go creating that team for everything. Well,
Matt:I mean, that's the problem that Microsoft created. Yeah. Microsoft created a tool that has a lot of stuff behind it. Like, we're talking about the chat piece of it, but you get a SharePoint site, you get a planner, you get a Right.
Mitch:You
Matt:get all of these things.
Emma:So it creates this, like, oh my gosh. This is this whole thing, but it's such a classic exit. Let's say you're thinking of let's do this new campaign for marketing or something. We don't think it's gonna be that big of a deal. So we'll just direct message about it.
Emma:Well, let's say it becomes really successful and it becomes it really takes off. Now it's gonna be a bummer that all of that information was just back and forth in an email or just back and forth in a chat. So when in doubt, just create a channel. You can always archive it. You can always
Matt:Or use an existing one. Right? Like, we
Emma:Within a team Yep. Using it. Yeah.
Matt:We would use, like, if I've got, the marketing thing as a perfect example, until it gets noisy enough that they go, oh, I really don't want this in general, just have the conversation in general. Yes. Right? Like, you don't have to create a new channel or a new team for everything.
Emma:Mhmm.
Matt:Unless you know that you're gonna need it. Like you said, you know it's gonna be a long running thing and you want to have that pre that prep, start a conversation.
Mitch:Yeah.
Matt:When it gets to be the point where it's like, hey. This like, yeah. We need to move this out. Number 1, which we're gonna get to this a little bit, and so maybe I'm I'm I'm jumping ahead, but, like, don't crucify people who are talking that way because they're just trying to use the tool. Right?
Matt:And be okay to create something and move it and, like, move the conversation to somewhere else.
Emma:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would just encourage everyone to not have too formal or rigid of a mindset around it.
Matt:A 100%.
Emma:Because it can feel more casual to have chat conversations, but you can still have casual feelings around a more structured communication strategy.
Mitch:That's that's one of the things I'm hoping to reconcile with the the course that we're working on where we actually take people through the day to day and say, okay. Today, you're gonna create one of these things. Come back tomorrow. Here's what you need to work on next and, like, work on helping people through that process as opposed to it it can be really intimidating. Just Yeah.
Mitch:See you. Go go create stuff and Yeah. Hopefully it works. We've been talking about the good that comes with this. What is some of the bad that we've heard or seen and some of the reasons why someone might not jump 2 feet first into something like this?
Emma:I'll start with, my experience of joining the team. I sent you guys an email my first two weeks because I didn't know where to put. I was so enmeshed in that mindset of when I need to talk to people specifically, like, my 3 leaders at the company, I'm going to send them a specific email because I didn't know where else to put it. So it definitely requires extra training and a a mindset shift, especially for people who have been working in the people based approach for a long time for likely their entire career. So the the extra training piece and then the change management around the mindset, are 2 of the most important to begin with.
Mitch:I a
Matt:100% agree. Another one that, you know, once you get in there and you start using it or maybe maybe somebody is using chat heavily today and they they're like, I love it. I I don't email. I just chat all the time. They can complain a lot about the burden around putting stuff in a channel, for example, and the notifications around that.
Matt:Because when you put something in a channel, the notifications work very different than they do for a chat. Like I said before, a chat there's an expectation that in a chat that you want to read everything that someone is sending to you. In a channel, the expectation is you really only wanna read the stuff where somebody's tagged you. Right? And so what's gonna happen is things are just gonna behave differently than you're used to, and it's gonna take some time to understand that and to get it set up right.
Matt:Because now rather than having, you know, maybe 5, 6, 7 chats that you're kinda monitoring off and on, and people kinda know if I send them this, it's gonna notify them immediately, etcetera. Now I've got 5 channels in 1 team and 2 channels in another team and 4 channels in another team. And each one of those channels can have different settings and different ways that you want to, subscribe to that information. And so it just it can be a little bit overwhelming, number 1. And number 2, just like with chat, you're also heavily in email.
Matt:You're heavily dependent on the other person understanding the etiquette. Right? Do they understand that they are supposed to tag you when they want you to look at something? Right? Mhmm.
Matt:If they don't and you miss something and now somebody's, you know, upset with you that you missed something, but it's not really your fault. They didn't tag you like they were supposed to. Right?
Emma:Yeah.
Matt:But just like with email, just like with with all these other tools, it's just a learning curve. People will get the etiquette. They'll understand it as you start to use it. But if you never use it and you avoid it because of it, it's never gonna happen.
Mitch:I categorize my channels according to importance. What do I need to know about every message that happens in there? What are the ones that I can just mute and check-in on every once in a while just so I'm in the loop. And then there's some in the middle where it's more nuanced than that, and I maybe just look out for tags or things like that. So there's a burden on me for sure.
Emma:The notification settings can be intimidating. I struggle with them sometimes as well of just okay. Wait. I didn't have my notifications on for this shoot. I missed things that I was supposed to see.
Emma:Mhmm. So I would also suggest having a page about how to set notifications and that kind of thing on on your Internet or on where your knowledge base, wherever people find information on how to do things. Having that set up before switching to this will be really helpful so that people feel like they're empowered to decide how much noise there's gonna be and what they want to be subscribed to and getting notification for. Because otherwise, you're gonna lose people real quick if everything's flooding and
Mitch:otherwise. Go back to chat.
Emma:Yeah. Exactly.
Mitch:And I feel like we didn't really talk about it in the the benefits as much, but there is beauty to those notification changes where instead of, like, an email, you have one feed where everything is, except for the jerks that send things as, like, ultra important all the time, everything is same priority. In topic based communication, you get to subscribe to the different feeds of information that are coming at you. So like I said, prioritizing things that are most important versus not, you don't have that opportunity outside of tools like that to automatically prioritize things that you need to know about versus things you don't. Someone I was talking to recently who was trying to use these tools, it adds one extra little hurdle when someone is looking for something or wants to send something. And so their team was trying to use this thing, and he wanted to send a a message, And he felt like, oh, man.
Mitch:I have to go through this, like, long file folder list of channels to figure out which one is the right channel for me to send this in. And it was extra mental load. They probably have too many channels. But the more and more you get used to it, the more it becomes more of, like, an instinct reaction of where things should go.
Matt:And the more you're comfortable saying what you wanna say immediately. Like, the other thing that will happen as you use this more is it will be more like chat, but even more powerful because you'll be communicating with more people that may have more input that will provide value to the conversation.
Emma:And let's be honest, no one enjoys searching their inbox.
Matt:So Yeah. Well, no. It's email or not. Yeah. Searching for stuff
Emma:is not Searching for stuff's never great anyway, and so it's not like your email inbox is
Matt:So much better.
Emma:That much better. Yeah.
Mitch:Yeah. Okay. Let's let's wrap this up. Enough negative. What is the bright, better green pastures that we're setting people off into if they adopt this?
Matt:Being released from your your your mailbox, your inbox. You know, if you're a person that gets a 100 emails a day, half of them you don't care about. They don't you you just are kind of FYI on, and maybe 25% of them are ones that you need to respond to, and maybe 5 or 6% of them are are something else. You're really you're gonna see a transformation in how you work. And it should be a very positive one, especially if those emails include files or any other relevant content or long chains of of information that are getting sent to you.
Matt:And you'll be transformed because you'll be able to see those things as they're happening if you have the time or get brought into them as you're needed rather than just having to be on all of them all the time.
Emma:And doesn't it sound great to have a future where everything's naturally organized so you're not spending your day trying to filter and organize and put things where they're supposed to go and remember to, you know, follow-up on things. Yeah. It just is is naturally organized. For me, the better future, and I think back to places I worked that didn't have topic based, is all about you're not leaving people out of conversations that should have been in conversations. There's so much mental load on the person originating the message to try to think through everyone that should be every time you send a message who should be involved.
Emma:And sometimes, the person that should have been involved, you didn't even think of because you didn't even know they knew an answer to the question that you're asking or and I think the fragmented conversations is something you can say goodbye to if you have topic based communication.
Matt:Love it. Another thing is, like, onboarding and being able to bring somebody into a conversation or add them to a team, and they've got access to everything they need. Right? Mhmm. You know, there's not there shouldn't be very much additional information they really have to have.
Matt:That doesn't mean that you shouldn't meet with them and introduce them and, like, answer questions or whatever. But, you know, you're not searching through your email trying to find the last, you know, 50 emails or 2 months after they join the team, you're not having to go track down some email thread from 5 months ago that their now has crept back up and they need they have an interest in, they can just look at the content within within Teams and find the content they need and, oh, this was that thread that they were talking about.
Emma:And and this is a huge part with training and learning the etiquette and the learning curve as well. I think it's super helpful within any organization where you're trying to grow your marketing or your brand strategy, where you hire someone, right, and they're trying to learn your company and learn who you are all at the same time, being able to add them and see the context, super helpful in those roles. But, honestly, any role when you're joining as an engineer or a software developer or a project manager to be able to look back and see, oh, this is how this person did it before me or this is how and I don't actually have to go ask everyone a million questions. It gives you some context. You feel like you're in control to look that up.
Emma:You don't have to ask anything, and it just allows you to hit the ground running. I know I've said that before, but it really is true.
Matt:It empowers people to find the information rather than having to ask for people for the information.
Emma:It just speeds that whole process up.
Mitch:Yep. Awesome. Love it. Sounds good to me. You sold me.
Emma:I wanna call up all the places I worked before that didn't have topic based and tell them to start using this. So if you're listening to this, you should use topic based.
Mitch:Yeah. So this episode will probably be released early June. We're looking at launching this course mid July. So be on the lookout if you want something a little more step by step. I'll have my voice back.
Mitch:I promise. Yeah. And we'll be in better shape. But yeah. Any closing thoughts?
Mitch:Otherwise, we'll, sign off and No.
Matt:I think it's been a good conversation.
Mitch:Thanks everyone for chatting. Hey. Thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulp Digital.
Mitch:And special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to make others successful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
