It’s a crisp fall morning, you can smell the coffee finishing its brew cycle, the computer chimes awake, and you click on your schedule to join the first meeting of the day. This meeting starts at 8:30 AM and as you sit at your desk the current time is 8:25 AM.
‘Great! I have time to grab my first cup of magic bean water!’
You return to your desk by 8:29, click on the meeting link, and join the meeting with a fresh cup of joe and a smile…
‘Hey, did you get my email? There is something critical and I wanted to make sure you read it…
Those are the first words you hear from your manager as the meeting starts. You are confused as you recall triaging all of the emails from the day before.
‘Umm, well, I don’t think so, let me check since I’m up to date on emails as of last night’
You open the email as everyone in the meeting is now waiting on your response to this 1:1 exchange. The email in question came through at 8:28 AM right before this meeting started…
(Start the dialogue around the email for 5-10 minutes in front of everyone)
If you are a person that manages your workflow and day via email please don’t be this person. Most people work on an hourly email cadence. One of the best things about the current state of professional IT tools to date is a ‘workspace’ functionality where not only can you check in with your people via email, but there is also chat, which is immediate and lends itself better to this sort of check-in vs stalling a meeting, calling out the person, and then making sure they have read an email that came through 2 minutes before their first activity of the day begins. In addition, there are so many options for IT collaboration within these ‘workspaces’.
I have used Google Workspaces and this solution is great for a team to email, but then collaborate via chat, and also all of the apps for process, policy, slide decks, and many other uses. Find the right sort of IT workspace for your group and lean in.
As managers, let’s work to meet people where they are as people, but also with the power of the best tooling for the task at hand.
Jason A. Belt 