The most engaging method of communication you're not using

Let me clarify the post title a little - maybe it should be 'The most engaging method of communication you're organization is not using', but I read somewhere the best titles connect with people personally, so I left the 'organization' part out.

Two charts below will lay it all out for you. The first, courtesy of Business Insider's Chart of the Day:

Most people read this chart with the 'big' takeaway being something like 'Wow, young adults send a ridiculous amount of text messages each month'.  But that's not the only, or I'd submit the most important bit of insight from a chart like that.

What am I getting at? 

Take a look at the second image - a snippet from my personal Google account activity report from last month, the section that reports back my email aggregate usage for the month. Think about what this data says (admittedly just for my, but I am betting your experience is similar), compared to the text message data above.

The Google data shows that in the month I received almost 10x more email messages than I sent - and that is not accounting for spam and other stuff that I have filters set up for to skip my Inbox entirely - add that stuff in and I bet the ratio of emails received to sent would balloon to 20x. Email is essentially a massive ocean of noise with a tiny bit of signal mixed in, and that requires really close and dedicated attention in order to monitor.  I am in email multiple times a day, have been using it as a communications tool forever, and STILL miss or lose track of important messages more often than I care to admit.

Mine (and yours too I bet) experience with text messaging however much more closely resembles that even received/sent ratio we see in the first chart. Look at that chart again - while absolute volumes of text messaging decline as age groups advance, there are still more texts sent than received across the spectrum. Think about that again - every age group sends more texts than they receive.

Email is a mess - we are constantly looking for the important stuff, hoping we don't miss anything, and engaging with, at best, 10% of it in total.

Text on the other hand is almost all signal - we read all of them, we respond to just about all of them (and usually within minutes), and we send more than we receive. It has to be the most engaging popular method of communication - and yet I bet most of us have not tried to incorporate it into organizational communications in a meaningful way.

I'm not saying it's easy - but if you can figure out a way to get permission (bought or earned) to the SMS Inbox, the one really important Inbox people monitor - then you are playing a different game than your competition.

They're spending time, money, and talent trying to avoid the dreaded 'Mark as spam' designation.

Have a great week all - and please don't send me any more email.

Just kidding. Sort of.

WEBINAR: Seven strategies to save your employee referral program

Batman is without a doubt the greatest of all superheroes. A tragic origin story. A relentless and lifelong pursuit of elusive justice. And just the right amount of darkness, doubt, pain, and mystery to sustain the narrative for decades. You, me, all of us - we need a Batman. 

And you know what else you need - Mr. or Ms. Talent Pro? You need to fill that Sr. Software Developer role like yesterday - or the next version of Super-fantastic-amazing product might night make it out the door as promised. You could use someone like Batman helping you out, that is for sure.

The really cool thing about superheroes is that they are superheroes for a reason – they have someone who is their equal to compete against them. These competitors are the super-villains, and in the movies they’re doing bad things – but in real life these “villains” are only the bad guys and girls because they work for the competition.

So, how do you get your competitors talent to come over to your side and put on your company’s cape? A great employee referral program is the key.

Your pals over at Fistful of Talent are back at it with the March installment of their monthly webinar series. This month, with the help from the heroes at Zao, HR SuperFriends Kris Dunn and Tim Sackett will be laying down seven strategies that are guaranteed to put your employee referral program on another planet.  

Join us Wednesday March 27 at 1pm ET and we’ll hit you with the following:

• Seven surefire ways to engage your best employees and increase referrals (while ensuring your employees don’t refer SuperDuds!)
• How to develop an internal communication strategy for your employee referral program
• The keys to sustaining your program long-term
•  How and why trends like gamification can lead to better employee referral results
• he top three reasons 99% of employee referral programs fail and how you can make sure your employee referral program is delivering the goods all year long

Don’t let your employee referral program fall to the Legion of Doom. Register now for The SuperFriends: 7 Strategies to Get Your Superhero Employees to refer Their Arch Nemesis! 

As always, the FOT webinar comes with a guarantee - 60% of the time it works all of the time!

On teamwork and a busted out tooth

With the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament underway I wanted to share a little story from the world of college basketball before I come back to my senses and realize once again that the college game is inferior in every way to 'real' basketball, i.e. the NBA.

A week or so ago, during the West Coast Conference's post-season tournament, the team from Saint Mary's University found itself in a tough game versus conference rival San Diego. Late in the game during a scrum for possession of the ball, San Diego big man Jito Kok managed to separate Saint Mary's forward Brad Waldow from one of his front teeth.

Undeterred, and as you can see in the GIF below, Waldow reacted like most tough competitors would, with the knocked-out tooth in hand he proceeded to head over to the bench to find someone to relieve him of said chiclet so he could continue playing in the still undecided game. But take a look at what happened as Waldow looks to the sideline for some help with the tooth:

Thanks - Business Insider

Did you catch what happened as Waldow approached the bench and looked for someone to take the tooth from him?

First Saint Mary's head coach Randy Bennett leans back in a 'no 'effin way I am taking the tooth' manner, and delegates down the bench to his assistant. The first assistant coach then coolly points to the next assistant down the line. And once that assistant refused to help a brother out, Waldow just tossed the tooth on the floor in order to head back into the contest.

Waldow, the player, the guy out there on the front lines taking shots to the mouth, loosing teeth, bleeding all over the place couldn't get any of the suits on the bench, the organization's 'leaders' to give him an (admittedly gross) hand when he needed it. And all Waldow wanted to do was to continue playing, to keep putting it on the line for the team.

Sure, the natural reaction just about anyone would have in that kind of a circumstance would be similar to the Saint Mary's coaches - I mean, who the heck wants a handful of someone's bloody, busted-out tooth?

But their reaction is also instructive I think, because when their player was in need, no one stepped up to help, they let their first reaction overcome their roles as leaders. They ask players like Waldow to make all kinds of sacrifices in the name of the team. It would not have killed one of them to make a little bit of a sacrifice themselves and help him out when he needed it.

This may be a goofy, insignificant example but I think it serves as a good reminder for any of us that have a leadership position. We ask the people we are leading to give up things all the time. 

What are we prepared to give up for them?

Have a great weekend!

What matters more than money and other sick day questions

A really quick shot from me today - as I am neck deep in some kind of horrible flu/cold/whatever diseases are floating around the redeye home from Las Vegas on Saturday nights. It is gross. And no fun.

When you are feeling sick and kind of not very productive it is a natural to let the mind wander a little bit - to start questioning what you're doing and second-guess the decisions you've made. For me today the main question I'm asking is 'Who can I convince to come over and make me some chicken soup?'

Organizations too should ask themselves questions, at least that is the premise in an interesting piece on the Fast Company Co.Design site titled 'Forget the Mission Statement. What's Your Mission Question?'. The piece advocates that organizations shouldn't try to craft lofty mission statements that are often vague, shallow, and instantly forgettable, but rather should think more deeply about their cause, purpose, and reason for their existence by answering or at least contemplating several key questions.

Here are the key questions that FastCo recommends organizations should examine when seeking to better understand their mission:

1. Why are we here in the first place?

2. What does the world need that we are uniquely able to provide?

3. What are we willing to sacrifice?

4. What matters more than money?

5. Are we all on this mission together? 

I think you'll agree they are probably valid not just for organizations or corporations to evaluate - even individuals could benefit from a little self-examination as well. What do you think - should organizations take a 'sick day' from time to time and think about these big questions?

Hopefully you won't wait until you are as sick as I am to take the time to think about them as well.

(and please send me some soup)

(and if you do ask yourself these questions and decide you need to find more 'meaning' in your work, check out a site called ReWork, they have a new and interesting approach that might help.

Work, productivity, and driverless cars

The last 30 years or so have seen the dramatic impact of technology upon the workplace - from the PC revolution, to email, to sophisticated ERP systems to better manage the flow of material and information, all the way to the present day, where social, mobile, and video technologies continue to disrupt how, where, and with whom work gets done. Certainly the workplaces and the methods of getting work done, almost to a job, look nothing today like they did just 15 or 20 years ago. And no doubt technology will continue to advance and impact work - what the future of wearable computing like Google Glass holds is of particular interest to me.

But our friends at Google are at the forefront of another new technology development that also has the potential to dramatically alter work and productivity - perhaps just not in the ways we are accustomed to seeing how workplace technology changes our jobs, patterns, and behaviors. While Google Glass has enormous disruptive potential, in some ways the autonomous car, being developed at Google (and several other places as well), perhaps has the potential to have a more direct and sudden effect on work and how work gets done, (and how much more of it potentially gets done).

According to recent statistics, workers in large US cities spend as much as 40 minutes each-way commuting to work, and just about 75% of them make the journey by themselves in their car.  In the worst cities for commuting, perhaps a city where your organization has facilities, as many as 3/4 of your workers are, on average, spending more than an hour each day in their cars, stressed, getting frustrated, and with the exception of the occasional business call, (taken 'hands-free' of course), getting almost nothing productive accomplished. 

The driverless car - and don't think it is THAT far away from becoming a reality, Google's testing has logged well over 300K miles so far - would instantly transform that hour or hour and a half from empty time to potentially productive time. From the Google piece linked above:

This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars.

Imagine cleaning our your entire email Inbox before arriving at work, or having that conference call with clients while actually paying attention, or even doing a video chat with colleagues that are kicking back in their driverless cars on the way to the office.

If the recent hubbub from Yahoo! and Best Buy around the need for employees 'physically being together' catches on more widely - then it will just put more workers back on the road. Driverless cars are the one technology solution that has the potential to almost instantly turn down time into productive time, and enable your commuting workers to take back just a little bit of their lives. Which is kind of ironically what teleworking policies were meant to do.

The next great workplace tech breakthrough just might be the one that takes you to the workplace.