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3 Ways to Create a Culture of Documentation

October 25, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

At many companies, documentation isn’t a core part of their internal operations, but a laborious chore to be managed; a way to prove that a meeting or conversation took place, never to be looked at again. However, the most productive, successful teams recognize obsessive documentation for what it truly is—an opportunity to work smarter and help your team focus on solving new problems, not mitigating the impact of old ones.

As valuable and impactful as documentation can be for teams of all sizes, it doesn’t happen by accident. Like any other aspect of managing your team, documentation should be a core facet of your corporate culture and an extension of your brand values. Yes, it takes time and effort to cultivate a culture of documentation, but doing so can have an incredible impact on your productivity and the dynamics of your team itself.

Let’s take a look at how you can start actually building a culture of documentation within your team.

Start with Standardization

One of the main reasons why documentation is so often overlooked is because most teams don’t have a standardized approach to getting it done. Who’s responsible for documenting what, exactly? What should that person do with that documentation, anyway?

When you get down to it, most of the resistance to documenting internal processes is rooted in a fundamental resistance to change. As the old adage says, everybody loves progress but nobody likes change. That’s why standardizing your documentation processes is so critical — by implementing predictable systems for documenting your work, you’re eliminating most of the ambiguity and uncertainty that makes people so resistant to change in the first place.


One of the best ways to start standardizing your documentation workflow is by using templates. Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for streamlining how and when you document the work your team does, but you can simplify the process by using templates as a starting point.

Standardized document templates reduce the cognitive overhead of actually documenting internal processes, because whoever is responsible for doing the documentation doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel after every meeting; they can adjust an existing template, document the work being done, and get on with their day. This approach is also much less disruptive because it doesn’t require a radical overhaul of how your team thinks. Rather than creating brand-new documents every time a process needs to be documented, your team can amend a simple template.

Another benefit of standardizing your documentation process is that it makes sharing important information much easier. When people in different teams or departments know what to expect from internal documentation, they’re more likely to share and actually use that information.

Build Living Documents That Grow with Your Company

Standardization is important, but so is recognizing that very few documents will stand the test of time as your company scales. Processes that may have worked well during your company’s scrappy startup phase may be entirely inappropriate for larger, more established teams. That’s why it’s crucial to create living documents that can grow alongside your company.


Living documents—documents that are updated over time—are crucial to any long-term documentation project. This is because not only do living documents make it easier to take note of changes as they happen, but they also eliminate the need to create multiple documents. They can also be linked together to create cohesive, relevant, up-to-date document hierarchies for complex projects, rather than forcing teams to rebuild entire libraries of documentation every time from scratch.

However, just because a document can—and should—evolve and grow with your team, it’s still important to approach living documents with standardized processes in mind. This helps minimize repeated work, eliminates potential redundancies across multiple documents, and ensures everybody knows what to expect.

Use Asynchronous Communication to Empower EVERY Member of Your Team

One of the major reasons why documentation falls by the wayside is because it is perceived as a top-down process; managers document internal processes, which the rest of the team is then expected to follow. This approach can work, but it’s much more effective to secure buy-in from everyone on the team by utilizing asynchronous communication and allowing every team member to contribute.


Fortunately, there are dozens of tools that make asynchronous communication effortless. Whichever tool you choose to use, it’s important that every member of your team is able and encouraged to actively contribute to your living documentation. If your team members can offer their own insights, thoughts, and suggestions to a document, they’re much more likely to do so—and this is crucial to building a culture of documentation, rather than merely implementing yet another task for your already busy team.

Asynchronous communication is practically mandatory for distributed and virtual teams. Communicating effectively across even smaller teams can be a major challenge when you introduce factors such as time zones, which increases the risk of losing valuable internal knowledge and expertise. The easier you make it for your team to share their insights, the greater the cumulative benefit to your team as a whole.

Incorporating this approach to documentation can also make your team members feel more valued. If managers or executives are the only ones who can create or amend your living documents, it can feel exclusionary to members of your team who may have genuinely great ideas or suggestions on how to improve internal processes. Allowing and encouraging every member of your team helps your company grow, but it also helps those team members feel appreciated and that their ideas have value.

Better Documentation Makes for Better Teams

Documentation might not be the most exciting aspect of your work, but it can have an immense impact on your team’s productivity, cohesion, and overall happiness. It becomes especially important if your team or company is still in an active growth stage, particularly when branching out into new products, service areas, or industries.

By standardizing document creation and working asynchronously to keep living documents up-to-date, you’re making an invaluable investment in your team’s future success.

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.

Filed Under: Company Culture, People Management, The Science of Productivity Tagged With: Management, Productivity, Time Management, Work Transparency

How MindMate Stays Mindful of Remote Team Success

September 13, 2016 by David Zha Leave a Comment

It takes a truly noble cause to inspire three graduate students to put dissertations on hold so they can start a company. For the founders of MindMate, that cause was helping people who suffer from dementia.

The University of Glasgow’s Patrick Renner, Rogelio Arellano, and Susanne Mitschke created an app that empowers those with dementia to live as independently as possible. MindMate comes with cognitive stimulation games, reminder tools, and a “Getting to know me” section where people can save personal information.

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Filed Under: Remote Teams Tagged With: Communication at Work, Focus on Work, iDoneThis, Management Tools, remote team, Self-Improvement, Work Transparency

Trust, But Verify: The Key Management Tool To Build Team Satisfaction

May 3, 2016 by Jimmy Daly 1 Comment

Delegation is one of the hardest management tools for leaders to learn.

We all understand that micromanaging your employees isn’t good for anyone, but when you’re used to being involved in everything, it can be hard to let go. It gets easier as you hire great people and implement sound processes—watching your company grow without your fingerprint on everything is a beautiful thing.

Perspective helps too.

trust but verify micro management yoda

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Filed Under: People Management Tagged With: Communication at Work, Focus on Work, Leadership, Management, Management Tools, Meetings, Work Happiness, Work Transparency

The Definitive Guide to Daily Standups

November 17, 2015 by Charlotte Dillon 1 Comment

dailystandup

When the business world seeks new productivity tools, it often turns its gaze to Silicon Valley, an industry famous for its ability to eliminate the cruft of the workday. But there’s one productivity tool that has its roots not in open-plan offices, but in military strategy boardrooms: the daily standup meeting.

The daily standup has its instructions in the title. It’s a daily meeting where participants stand. That’s it.

Ideally, the lack of chairs promotes a quick and effective meeting. If the conversation prompts a deeper discussion about a specific topic, it’s tabled for after the daily standup.

It’s a technique that American General William Pagonis used during the First Gulf War, where he served as director of Logistics. Each morning, he had 40 officers meet together in a conference room without a table or chairs. It minimized the need for pleasantries and unnecessary comments. Even military officers, it turns out, have a tendency to digress. Pagonis found that the format maximized productivity crucial to military success. Norman Schwarzkopf, in fact, salutes Pagonis as the “logistical wizard” of the Gulf War.

After hanging up is uniform, Pagonis brought this military precision to his corporate job as a Sears executive. He brought workers into a conference room sans chairs and had a quick run-down of the day. Under his leadership, Sears streamlined its business model, cutting delivery times in half. The standup, Pagonis says, was crucial to Sears’ success. When asked why the daily standup was so effective, he said, “When you sit down, a meeting goes for over an hour or an hour and a half, and you lose everybody. When people are standing, they talk faster or they say I don’t have anything to add.” It’s that simple.

The daily stand-up takes a lot of forms. Some offices do it once a week—others, twice a day. Some use chairs, some do it electronically. Some, as it turns out, are more successful than others. This guide looks at how and why daily standups are so effective, and the best way to implement one into your workday.

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Filed Under: Daily Standup Tagged With: Case Study, Collaboration, Communication at Work, Work Transparency

What Sports Knows, and Business Gets Wrong, About Motivation

July 14, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

pablo

Big teams are bad for productivity. The bigger the team, the less people do.

Maximilien Ringelmann discovered this more than 100 years ago. The French engineering professor measured effort from students in a simple rope pulling exercise. Not only did people exhibit less individual effort while pulling as a group, individual effort quickly diminished as the size of the group increased.

Ringelmann found that eight people didn’t even pull as hard as four. It became known as the Ringelmann effect.

Unfortunately, many businesses are run like a giant game of tug of war. There can be a top notch team, a clear objective, everyone working toward the same goal. And maybe it’s successful. But who actually helped pull the rope? Did they do their best? We’ll never know. Stop running your business like tug of war. Want to be successful? Run it like an NBA team.

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Filed Under: The Science of Productivity Tagged With: Leadership, Management, Work Transparency

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

January 19, 2015 by I Done This Support 5 Comments

Transparency for Startups

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

By law, a public company can’t be transparent about how it operates, but a startup can. The ability to be transparent is an advantage unique to startups and, done right, it can drive company culture, employee happiness & retention, marketing, community building, and all other aspects of your business.

Moreover, transparency is an essential movement that’s changing the way that companies are built because it has the potential to make work more human and fulfilling.

In this guide, we cover why transparency is so valuable and important, and we give you concrete advice on how to make transparency real in your company using examples from how the best startups are doing it today.  After you get a chance to read our guide, we’d love to hear what you think on Twitter at @idonethis.

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Filed Under: Company Culture Tagged With: Work Transparency

Are You an Unwitting Audience to Productivity Theater?

September 17, 2014 by Janet Choi 3 Comments

Before Curtain at the Theater

A productive office is supposed to be a buzzing hive of activity, right?

But as a manager, a workplace that’s always humming with constant activity is not what you want to see — because it’s a sign that something has gone awry. It means that people are putting on a show to look busy all the time.

You know the trick: when someone walks by, you quickly switch tabs to bring up the spreadsheet or report you’re supposed to be working on, or engage in theatrics like looking very annoyed or walking briskly like you’re a very important person who can’t be bothered.

Welcome to Productivity Theater. Even though it’s impossible for human beings to be working nonstop, that’s what’s expected at the workplace. Looking busy becomes how you get recognized for doing a good job. The result is a show put on for the managers — and proceeds largely according to their expectations, scripts, and direction.

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Filed Under: Company Culture Tagged With: Autonomy at Work, Psychology of Productivity, Work Transparency

The Transparency Paradox: How Transparency Can Force Your Best Employees to Hide

September 9, 2014 by Janet Choi 1 Comment

i love lucy chocolate assembly line to illustrate transparency paradox

The rule is one operator per station. But when nobody’s watching, there might 17 people for 13 stations on the assembly line at one mobile phone manufacturing plant in Southern China.

When managers comes around, though, they’ll see 13 operators, one for each station, exactly as prescribed by the leaders. Even with company values like learning and continuous improvement, this plant’s employees scrambles to hide exactly the kinds of refinements and creativity that management seeks.

Transparency is often touted as a vital ingredient for the best teams. And it’s true. For people to move fast and think for themselves, they need ready access to the information they need to do their job. Failing to provide a foundation of common knowledge and creating an uneven distribution of information opens the door for inefficiency and unhealthy power imbalances.

But the transparency paradox arises when there’s no trust and autonomy. Actually, it’s more like counterproductive monitoring — one-sided visibility to benefit the manager’s curiosity rather than equip the employees to do their best work.

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Filed Under: People Management Tagged With: Autonomy at Work, Leadership, Work Transparency

Why Getting Personal Matters for Getting Professional

August 29, 2014 by Janet Choi 1 Comment

karma team

Even if transparency is one of your official organizational values, how do you actually make that come true?

Karma has a company culture of openness and sharing, one that reflects its mission to make connecting to the internet easier for everyone. That philosophy of accessibility permeates the company — whether in sharing their journey with their customers, providing weekly — yes, weekly — updates to their investors, or how they get stuff done together.

Company culture isn’t what is written on a poster or slide deck but what happens day-by-day. And what the Karma team has figured out is that transparency doesn’t just happen by itself. The kind of information-sharing it requires depends on people’s willingness to be open with each other, day in and day out — and one of the best ways to do it is tell each other about their day.

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Filed Under: Company Culture Tagged With: Communication at Work, iDoneThis, Work Transparency

3 Radical Habits of Highly Successful Remote Teams

August 15, 2014 by I Done This Support 5 Comments

remote work

Working remotely requires a totally different approach from how we’ve come to define our workday. We’re so used to the commutes, having to deal with our cubicle neighbor, the water cooler chats, and shuffling in and out of meetings. That’s the way we know how to get stuff done. Removed from shared physical spaces, remote teams have none of that.

The physical workspace — from layout to furniture configurations to break-room — create a certain working environment that affects how you communicate and collaborate. Without those traditional areas in play, remote teams face a tougher challenge of figuring out how to work together, simply because there’s no conventional wisdom to lean on, no way to bump into someone on your way to the bathroom, no coffee break to take together.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s why the most successful remote teams are reinventing how to work together with methods you might consider extreme or crazy.

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Filed Under: Remote Teams Tagged With: Buffer, Management Tools, Work Transparency

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