Communication at Work - I Done This Blog

The Science of Trust in the Workplace

November 27, 2020 by Willa Rubin Leave a Comment

Trust in the workplace doesn’t come from authority or job titles: there’s evidence that trust is a simple product of gratitude, validation, and understanding. And that this trust leads to greater efficiency, bonding, and the desire to please—all of which can improve and transform any workplace.

A comprehensive 2017 study noted that verbal, expressed gratitude in 129 pairs of adults led to significant increases in oxytocin.

(Source: Brain Facts) Oxytocin is released from the pituitary gland (in orange).

Oxytocin is a hormone responsible for social and romantic bonding and creates a pleasurable sensation that comes to be associated with the person who triggers it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give some to your manager?Continue Reading

Writing is Power: Supercharge Your Writing Process

August 31, 2020 by I Done This Support 3 Comments

We’re writing more than ever these days. Every day, you’re texting, emailing, and chatting. As many of us sit at our computers at work all day and our phones everywhere else in between, we’re writing.

Successful leaders believe writing is a crucial ingredient of great work. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, insists that writing replace other forms of communication to make the most of meetings. Instead of jumping straight into a conversation, or snoozing through bullet-pointed sentence fragments in a slideshow presentation, he requires his senior executives to write six-page narrative memos.

He explains in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.” In this age of knowledge work, we’re hiring people to think and communicate those thoughts — which means people who can write have a leg up.

Like most things worth doing, writing can be a chore. But the more fluent and practiced you become at the writing process, the more you’ll be able to own your success.

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

June 30, 2020 by Blake Thorne 5 Comments

Whether you fear its impersonal nature or thinks its the best thing since streaming television, asynchronous communication is here to stay

Remote work is rising and online education is becoming more accepted and commonplace, both due to changing attitudes and the pandemic. These factors are only going to increase the use of asynchronous communication to keep business, schools, and other organizations running smoothly when they no longer share the same space 100% of the time

But what is asynchronous communication, and is it really better than synchronous communication?

How to Keep Calm and Carry On When You Feel Ignored

January 6, 2020 by Elizabeth Grace Saunders Leave a Comment

(This is the last part of the 3-part “Manager’s Series” by our friend, productivity expert and CEO of Real Life E time-coaching company Elizabeth Grace Saunders.)

Feeling ignored is one of the most infuriating situations you can be in — but it’s your job to control how you react to it.

When you’ve tried so hard to address team members’ emotional hurdles to accepting change and walked them through how to apply the change to their work situation, your blood can start boiling when you still don’t see the desired results. You feel ignored. Have you ever caught yourself thinking “How could they be disrespectful?” or “Do they notice? Do they even care?”

Before you stomp over to people to tell them exactly how you feel about their impertinence (or, send them that fiery Slack or email), step back and take a deep breath . . . and one more, just in case. Count to four, inhale. Count to four, exhale.Continue Reading

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

December 20, 2019 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.
It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem.

That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations, structural problems, and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

At best, it’s a symptom of a greater failure.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

Written Communication Channels at Work – Where Your Intranet Fits

December 19, 2019 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Good communication is vital to a productive, healthy workplace. But where that communication takes place — the channel or medium used to convey the message — can make a big difference in how successful it is.

Written communication channels have risen to the forefront in recent years. Many people now prefer written communication over phone calls and would rather read an email than have a meeting. And thanks to technology, there are more tools available now than ever before that let you tap out a message to your co-worker without having to get together in person or on the phone.

But the plethora of tools have also complicated the choices we must make when choosing the right communication channel. With teams moving to instant messaging, social intranets, and even texting as a way to communicate, the written communication channel alone brings a multitude of decisions: Should I text Sharon about this? Should I try her on Slack first? Do I need to also follow up with email? What happened to that document where we discussed this same topic last week…?

It’s as important as ever to match the message to the medium. So, how does your team know which written channel to use when they have something to say? And how does your intranet fit into the mix?

When Employees Feel Ignored at Work, Everyone Suffers

March 25, 2019 by Jimmy Daly 2 Comments

This piece was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include new advice for teams in 2019. What exactly does ostracism at work look like? On the exclusion spectrum, you’ll find everything from accidentally leaving someone off a calendar invite to purposefully avoiding an individual in the lunchroom. Feeling ignored at work is a silent but hurtful experience.

[Source] The topic may seem trivial — “Are adults really so sensitive?” you might ask — but it’s one that can have a serious impact on your employees’ job satisfaction, performance, and happiness. A 2014 study questioned if a lack of attention could be more painful for victims than bullying. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is often yes. Continue Reading

Why Jeff Bezos’ Two-Pizza Team Rule Still Holds True in 2018

December 4, 2018 by Janet Choi 21 Comments

[Source: Amazon]

Jeff Bezos is prolific. In 21 letters to his investors over the years, he has delivered dozens of nuggets of wisdom ranging from prioritizing long-term outcomes over short-term results to embedding R&D in every single department.

He also has a unique take on company communication.

Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, individual teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed.

Think of it this way: at a large party, it’s hard to connect with people. You’re overwhelmed by the number of guests you could possibly meet and converse with. You end up with more — yet more shallow — interactions. If the host is trying to project a message to the crowd, he or she might have trouble shouting over the din. In contrast, at a small party, you might talk to the people sitting next to you for hours. You can develop more meaningful relationships and maybe come away with new ideas and inspiration.

Although Bezos first declared the “two-pizza” rule in Amazon’s early days, it continues to resonate in 2018. As the pace of venture capital accelerates, and more and more companies enter hypergrowth, figuring out how and when to design teams for effective communication becomes critical.

Not convinced? Here’s the hard evidence behind why the two-pizza team rule holds true.

Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Culture

November 2, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Aside from “innovation,” few buzzwords carry as little real meaning in Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector than “culture.”

While countless startups and established companies alike have seized upon the idea of corporate culture as a vehicle of employee attraction and a way to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, culture remains one of the most crucial aspects of your organization.

So how do you cultivate and maintain a strong, ethical corporate culture when you’re trying to scale?

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at what companies actually mean when they talk about culture, as well as ways to foster your corporate culture as a direct reflection of your company’s brand values.

First, let’s talk about what culture really means.

Healthy, Productive Cultures Don’t Just Happen

Perhaps the most important thing to realize about culture—at least as it pertains to companies and brands—is that, even if you do nothing, a culture will emerge across your organization. Once we understand this, it becomes easier to see that culture is a result of actions, decisions, and direct actions.

Put another way, strong corporate cultures don’t just “happen.” We have to make them happen.

This is surprisingly difficult even in the early stages of small companies. Think about it for a second. If workplace culture is an extension of a company’s brand values, who decides what those values are? Once that’s been figured out, how do you actually disseminate these ideas and values across your organization?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the CEO or founders are responsible for identifying and shaping a company’s values as well as ensuring that every employee understands these principles. The problem with this approach is that it’s up to a single individual to arbitrarily decide what the entire company’s values are and adopt a top-down approach to implementing those values. This is fine if your company aspires to be the personal fiefdom of a control-freak CEO, but for companies that want to cultivate and nurture genuinely meaningful corporate cultures, it’s completely, wildly unrealistic.

What We Really Mean When We Talk About ‘Culture’

One way to think about culture is to see it as “our way of life.” As you can probably imagine, this covers virtually every single aspect of a company and its operations, from large, intangible brand values to how your customer support teams answer the phone or respond to email.

Culture encompasses big and small things, such as:

The products we build and how we ship them
The way we communicate internally and externally
The messages we choose not to send—and why
The incentives we use to motivate our staff
The behaviors we exhibit every day
The boundaries that, if crossed, have meaningful consequences
The speed at which serious problems are escalated to someone who can solve them
The speed at which those problems are acted upon
The way we dress and the symbols we display
The ways in which we celebrate victories
The things that make us proud, and the things that bring us shame
The things that upset us, and the things that bring us joy
The things we do to grow as individuals and as teams
The way we perceive ourselves and our role in a company

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the things that fall under the umbrella of corporate culture. It is, however, a way to start thinking beyond Casual Fridays and ping-pong tables as being representative of the cultures we create.

Our companies—and our people—deserve better.

Action + Communication = Values

One of the major challenges to establishing and maintaining a strong, cohesive corporate culture is the fact that many companies rely on at least partially distributed teams. It’s hard enough to foster and cultivate an inclusive culture at a growing company without tossing remote workers and asynchronous communication into the mix.

That’s what makes understanding that corporate values are the direct result of what we do every day and how we communicate with each other so important.

However, even this is easier said than done. For small teams, it may well be possible to intentionally create a positive culture via Slack. For larger teams or fast-growing companies, it’s completely impossible.

As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” For our purposes, this means that all those negative interactions we try to avoid—angry posts on social, customer support tickets, bad reviews—are actually the most valuable opportunities to identify and cultivate the brand values we want to foster across our companies. A negative tweet, for example, may be a great opportunity to identify a potential feature gap in a product or fix an overlooked bug. A customer support ticket might be a great way to update your internal documentation or develop a new troubleshooting tool.

Put another way, failure is a much better teacher than success.

Values Are Meaningless Until We Act Upon Them

As we mentioned earlier, “culture” has become one of the most overused buzzwords in tech. Many companies talk a good game about their culture and values, but talk is cheap.

Values mean nothing until we act on them. We’re inherently social creatures. We follow the examples set by others, particularly those we admire. It’s easy for a CEO to talk about open-door policies, but their actions are what matter; it doesn’t matter how easy it is for employees to air their grievances with the Executive team if nothing ever comes of it.

There are unique challenges to retaining a strong corporate culture as a company grows. However, managing organizational change always comes back to the same two things: how we communicate and how we choose to act upon that communication. This applies to the scrappiest underdog startups and to established tech behemoths.

Avoiding Culture Shock

Corporate culture is a lot like a garden. Left alone, it may be fine for a while, but before long, you’ll be confronted with a tangled, overgrown wilderness that bears no resemblance to the garden you originally planted. If, however, you tend that garden carefully and consistently, it will bloom and thrive.

Take a look at the culture of your company and think of it as that garden. How are you nurturing it? When was the last time you got on your hands and knees and weeded it? How often do you water it? Sure, Mother Nature will do most of the work, but we have to get our hands dirty, too.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

Great Customer Support Starts with Great Teamwork

October 18, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, customer support was seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Many companies mistakenly saw customer support as an expense to be managed rather than as an asset to be leveraged. As flawed as this position may be, it’s understandable. After all, it’s a lot easier to quantify the value of a lead or a sale than it is to somehow measure the impact of a successful support experience.

Unfortunately, one result of this mindset is that, historically, customer support teams have been overlooked or neglected in favor of more tangible investments.

For instance, customer support has very little influence on product development, yet it’s still expected to handle any and all problems created by the product. Conversely, product teams—which can shape the growth trajectory of entire companies—often leave it to customer support teams to clean up their mess on the back end.

Of course, that was then. Things are different now—much different.

In today’s completely oversaturated technology market, it’s getting harder and harder for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition solely in terms of their underlying tech. As a result, only companies that invest in their frontline staff and give them the tools and resources they need to deliver better, faster support will succeed.

One of the best ways to deliver superior customer support is to elevate your customer support teams from within. Let’s talk about how we can do this by working together—across Sales, Marketing, and Support—toward a common goal.

Help Your Teams Work Together

Picture the scene: A customer buys two brand-new smart-home speakers because of their advertised surround-sound capability. But there’s a problem: That feature isn’t due to be rolled out until much later in the year. Now somebody has to break it to the understandably upset customer that they bought a product on the basis of a feature that hasn’t yet been implemented.

These sorts of situations happen every single day, and often its Support that has to deal with the aftermath. It’s on Support to deliver the bad news, and they’re the ones who somehow have to smooth over an impossible situation as best they can.

These kinds of interactions are hugely damaging to your company’s brand, not to mention that time, energy, and resources are wasted in an effort to salvage the situation. So how can you avoid situations like this in your own company? By making sure that Sales, Marketing, and Support work in harmony to create a seamless, consistent customer experience that scales. If you get this right, you’ll join the ranks of Amazon, Zappos, and other customer-centric companies that are renowned for treating their customers well.

Ready to bring everything together and deliver a superior experience to your customers? Read on.

Nail Down Your Customer Profiles

You can’t effectively support your customers if you have no idea who they really are. That’s why developing detailed, three-dimensional personas or customer profiles is essential; it’s vital that, regardless of department or job role, everybody knows and understands your customers in the same way. If you don’t, you can’t expect to communicate effectively about your customers’ needs, desires, or motivations.

[Source]

Creating rich, detailed customer profiles helps every department better understand their role in the acquisition process.

Never created a customer profile or buyer persona? Here’s how:

Describe your company’s ideal customer: Who are they? What matters to them? Why would they choose your business over a competitor? Once you’ve started to ask these questions, give your customer persona a name and a face to make them easier to visualize and relate to.
Delve deeper and fill in the blanks: Once you’ve established the skeleton of your customer profile, it’s time to drill down so you can start fleshing out the persona further. Why wouldn’t your ideal customer do business with you? What factors are important to their decision-making process? The more detail you can capture, the better; understanding the psychological nuances of your customer will help you craft deeply relevant messaging that directly appeals to and engages your ideal customer.
Think about how your ideal customer will discover your business: For this step, it’s time to think about content. What newspapers, magazines, and blogs does your ideal customer read—and why? Which social media platforms do they use most? What does your ideal customer search for online? Where do they get their industry news? The more you know about where and how your customers are spending their time, the more effectively you can intercept their attention and position your company as a solution to their problems.

The process of crafting detailed buyer personas takes some effort, but it pays off in the long run.

Onboard New Hires the Right Way

Many companies see onboarding as little more than a glorified orientation session. Typically, this involves a myopic focus on the company, its staff, and its internal processes. Although these are all elements of better onboarding programs, it’s vital that you also teach new hires about your ideal customers and how you interact with them as a business.

Here’s what this looks like in action:

Onboarding starts before a new hire’s first day: The best teams know that onboarding truly begins far in advance of a new employee’s first day on the job. In the weeks leading up to a new hire’s first day, send a series of “pre-start” onboarding emails to the new hire to prepare them for life at your company. Each email should have a different focus, but don’t feel limited to the specifics of their role—this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the corporate culture you’ve worked hard to cultivate, too.
Launch a “buddy” program: Pairing a new hire with a dedicated onboarding “buddy” is a great way to personalize the onboarding experience and minimize stress for the new employee. Ideally, onboarding buddies should be chosen cross-departmentally to give new hires a better sense of what people do in other departments and how they work. This context is critical in developing a consistent, organization-wide approach to supporting your customers.

It doesn’t matter whether your new hire is joining your sales team, your marketing department, or your customer success desk. The goal is to help new hires hit the ground running and gain vital insights into how you work as a company, not just as a department.

Implement Interdepartmental Training Programs

It’s hard to get everybody on the same page if people across multiple teams can’t communicate effectively with one another.

Conducting regular, interdepartmental training sessions involving Sales, Marketing, and Support is one of the best ways to develop a singular framework for thinking about your products and your customers. This is also an exercise in cultivating empathy; exposing Sales and Marketing personnel to typical support problems and feedback from net promoter scores helps them understand the challenges support reps face every day.

There are two things you need to do to develop an effective interdepartmental training program:

Be consistent: Whether it happens once a week, once a month, or once a year, it’s vital that everybody knows exactly when the next training session is so they can prepare appropriately. The more engaging your sessions are, the more value you’ll deliver to your employees.
Be specific: Don’t focus on vague, nebulous problems—address specific, actionable issues that your departments are trying to solve right now. Once you’ve identified tangible issues to tackle, walk through the solutions with everybody, not just key stakeholders. This is another exercise in empathy; it’s difficult to bring people together if you’re not committed to a culture of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.

Opening lines of communication between Sales, Marketing, and Support will help your sales reps and marketing personnel gain a better understanding of the problems your support team faces every single day, which in turn can help surface new ideas and innovative solutions.

Investing in Support Drives Revenue

There’s no other way to put it: The more effort and resources you devote to providing top-tier customer support, the happier your customers will be—and your revenues will likely increase alongside your customers’ happiness.

Happy Customers Are Loyal Customers

There are few customer retention strategies more potent than doing everything in your power to make your customers as happy as you can. Why? Because the decision to patronize one company over another isn’t a logical decision—it’s an emotional decision. And, whether positive or negative, your frontline support staff is often the source of that emotion.

Great customer support experiences create positive emotions that result in happier, more loyal customers. This isn’t just important in terms of customer retention; it can be a valuable asset in attracting new business:

According to American Express, happy, satisfied customers tell an average of nine people about their positive experiences with a company or brand.
Data from Right Now suggests that 73% of customers say friendly, helpful support staff can make them fall in love with a brand.

This is all well and good, but that door swings both ways:

According to Right Now, 82% of customers have abandoned a company or brand due to a negative support experience.
Approximately 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as the primary reason for churn.

Loyal Customers Spend More

It’s no secret that consumers who spend longer in a retail store are significantly more likely to spend more than in-and-out customers. This can be explained, in part, by inertia; it’s harder to stop doing something once we’ve gotten started. Fortunately, this principle also applies to users of SaaS products.

Once a customer has a positive association with a brand—whether physical or virtual—they’re much more likely to spend more:

According to Temkin Group, 86% of consumers who have a positive interaction with a brand are likely to repurchase from that business.
Data from Medallia, a provider of customer-experience software, suggests that customers who report the best experiences with brands spend approximately 2.4x more annually than customers who report negative experiences.

Investing in Support Is Investing In Your Business

For far too long, customer support has been seen as an add-on, rather than an essential component of a business’s retention strategies. It’s only in the past few years that companies have begun to rethink their relationship with support teams and recognize superior support as a key differentiator in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

That’s why it’s crucial to empower your support team internally. That means facilitating communication between departments, helping employees work together toward shared objectives, and solving problems creatively by inviting everyone to participate.

Support teams can’t do their job without support. That means not only investing in new technologies but also securing buy-in across the entire company and making superior support a core part of everything you do as a business.