(Low-tech) ways to keep your team in sync

​We’ll come right out and say it: We’re unimpressed with Slack. And Wrike. And Microsoft Planner. And virtually every other whiz-bang online collaboration tool that’s supposed to magically replace email threads and get everyone in sync. 
 
Which gets to the generally-acknowledged problem in the first place: Keeping teams in sync. Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been doing the virtual-workforce thing for decades before the pandemic, and even before a lot of these highly-hyped “solutions” came along. 
 
We’ll circle back to our reasons for being underwhelmed by them—along with some cool, counterintuitive, and stupidly simple hacks which surpass them all (the reason you’re reading this article in the first place)—in just a minute. But for now, let’s talk about the team-syncing problem, and dive into its particulars. 
 
Throwing a lasso around dispersed teams (and emails)
 
You don’t need a pandemic to have a dispersed workforce. You can simply have different offices, traveling sales reps, far-flung vendors, whatever. And now, of course, there’s the work-from-home contingent. 
 
So gone are the days of “meeting in the conference room” and sitting there for hours with your “meeting face” pasted on. 
 
That’s an important point. So many people seem to pine for the good old days of sit-down meetings, but more often than not, they were total time-sucks. The more attendees, and the more items on the agenda, the worse they were. To be clear: These are not some halcyon days which you should hope will return. They should go the way of the fax machine. 
 
But before we get away from meetings, let’s review why they were needed in the first place. It was to get everyone on the same page. There should be an agenda for what needs to be discussed, and what questions should be answered, within the context of the meeting. From there, it’s “roles and responsibilities” along with deadlines, and everyone dashes out of the meeting to
 
—ready for it?
 
to get to work.
 
Aha. 
 
The meeting is not work. The meeting precludes work. It delays it. 
 
There has got to be a better way. 
 
Enter Email
 
You can divide the entire historic continuum of business collaboration into two halves: Before, and after, email. 
 
On the surface, email is a godsend. It’s not as disruptive as a phone call. It captures all thoughts verbatim. It includes an audit trail. It’s easy to share and forward. It’s accessible from any device, anywhere. Oh, and it’s free. 
 
Pretty neat. 
 
But, like the telephone that came before it, email quickly got abused. Which is why we suffer from email overload. Which is why you hear of people striving to attain the Zen-like enlightenment of “In-Box Zero,” and all that. 
 
Plus, pragmatically speaking, email gets messy. Which thread was that important tidbit buried in? Why did that one person start an entirely new, and important, conversation by replying to some ancient, random thread with a wholly irrelevant and confusing subject line? (Oh, here’s why: It was the boss. And all the underlings were scared to speak up.) 
 
So email only goes so far, as an asynchronous tool. 
 
It would certainly seem, then, that you need a relatively high-tech bridge between the old sit-down meetings, and the mess of In-Box Overload. 
 
Dot-glom
 
The promise of an online collaboration tool is certainly enticing. It would (or at least, should) combine the best of both worlds: Synchronous (live/real-time) and asynchronous (mildly delayed, like email). It should be clear and intuitive. You should be able to use it with no training whatsoever. It should be easily adaptable for dispersed teams. And it should be cheap or, better yet, free. 
 
Except for the “free” part, everything just described above reads like the promotional materials for any of these online tools that we find so underwhelming. And that’s because, our experience (working with lots of dispersed teams over many years) has shown that they don’t live up to the promise. They don’t perform as advertised. They’re not clear. They’re not intuitive. They’re not easy to customize. And they’re certainly not free. 
 
Here’s what we’ll typically see: One person on the team will be a big fan of one of these platforms. They’ll insist that everyone use it. And everyone, to their credit, tries. But, soon, they all get lost in the miasma of folders and sub-folders and strangely-truncated conversation threads, and the inability to figure out how to filter broad conversations from urgent, focused ones, and nagging reminders to “Install the desktop and mobile versions so you can get annoying reminders all the time” and, before long, guess what happens? 
 
Someone sends--heaven forbid!—an email. And then the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. Because everyone else replies to the email, and you’re back to where you started. 
 
There is a better (and simpler) way
 
Make no mistake: We are not luddites here at Copel Comms. We love shiny tech that works and makes our lives easier. But that’s a high bar. You don’t see better mousetraps coming down the pike every day. 
 
Here, then, are some real-life hacks that we and many of our clients use, which, while certainly not perfect, chug along pretty darn well for all of us: 

• The big Word doc. For any given client, we’ll simply maintain a big Word doc, called, say, “Client notes.” Simple as that. We’ll take notes in meetings; that’s where they reside. When emails come and go, we paste them into the Word doc. We’ve created a macro to type in the current date, in boldface, on any given day, and that’s about it. 
  
  It’s easily searchable. Once it tops about 1,000 pages (we’re not kidding, these things can last for years), it gets unstable, and we’ll create a new one. We won’t paste any graphics into the doc; it’s just verbiage. (Word, Microsoft claims notwithstanding, can’t handle graphics very well. You don’t want to corrupt a 500-page doc because you dropped in a photo.) 
  
  You’d think that this would be unwieldy. It’s not. Whenever it’s time to work with that client, then that Word doc is up on your screen. We’re always adding to the very end of it, so it’s easy to find where you left off. 
  
  This requires some diligence. In case you hadn’t noticed, it takes a couple extra steps to paste in the text of each email and your reply, which feels redundant, because your email app should handle that. Only it doesn’t. Even if you create “smart mailboxes” for a given client or project, you’re still at the mercy of others’ naming conventions and so on. 

 

• The shared to-do list. This one’s even simpler. For us, it started as a weekly update for a client, created in Word, as a one- or two-page update of “what’s on the agenda” for that week, created in bulleted/outline format. 
  
  The client would mark this up and send it back to us. Then we’d email it to the team... and it got messy, fast. 
  
  The solution was simple: Post the doc online. Our client used Microsoft SharePoint, with selective access for those who needed to see it. From there, they could download it or mark it up as needed. This is good for a “scratch-pad-style” doc like that, where the bullet lists are important—and yet the prose, style, and spelling aren’t. (Because not everyone is Shakespeare.) 
  
  Google Docs lets you do this, too, but we don’t like it as much. Word does a better job of tracking changes and allowing you to see what something looked like in an earlier version, so that good stuff is less likely to be accidentally overwritten. 
  
  Another hack: Version control. Name it “Update1.docx.” When someone works on it, they should save it as “Update2.docx.” 
  
  Of course they should. But of course they won’t. So save a version locally if you want to cover your butt. 

 

• The ultimate hack. One of our clients came up with this one, and, as clunky as it might sound, it’s far and away the best online collaboration tool we’ve found. 
  
  Again, it uses SharePoint. On one side, it’s a big Excel sheet living online, with sort-able columns for “Client” or “Project” or “Priority Level” or “Deadline” or whatever. It’s the master list of all the to-do’s. The sort-able function makes it easy to filter, keeping it manageable despite its size. 
  
  And in each cell, there’s a hyperlink to the actual deliverable, whether it’s a PDF, a video, a slide deck, whatever. 
  
  And these hyperlinked deliverables live in ingeniously-named folders, which the team can access (and upload to, adding links to the Excel sheet when they do). It’s basically an analog of a PC desktop with folders, but it’s far more logical. It was the setup—the taxonomy—of these folders that makes the system work so well. They all correspond to the exact columns in the Excel sheet, such as “Client” or “Project.” So if you need to find, say, the Client B Video, you go to the “Clients” folder online; in there, you see all the clients. Click on the folder for Client B. In there, you’ll see sub-folders for “Presentations,” “Reports,” etc. Click on the “Videos” sub-folder, and there you are.
  
  Note that 1) every client folder has the exact same set of sub-folders in it, all teed to the categories in the Excel sheet, and 2) only the owner of the Excel sheet has “decision rights” as far as creating and naming folders and subfolders is concerned. This imposes order, and rigor, on the whole setup. 
  
  So what about the meetings? They’re simple. The whole team joins via Zoom, audio-only (to reduce hair- and wardrobe-induced stress), and simply hands off screen sharing to each participant, in which they update the others on what they’ve just completed and what they need to do next, showing the Excel sheet and whatever linked files they may be discussing. A team of ten can fly through a couple dozen assignments in about 15 minutes. It’s very impressive. 

 
Need help organizing that next project? We can apply what we’ve learned. Contact us today to get started. 

---