In the post, “Some Thoughts on ‘Home’ Pages for Individuals Within Communities and Social Networks” by Doug Belshaw, explains he’s “thinking out loud” in his post on a solution that allows him not to feel overwhelmed when returning to community or social network sites and having to face an onslaught of notifications that cause him to get tired because of the continual context switching.

He wonders if there was any way to be able to do this and I say, if it could be figured out quickly, it would be appreciated, K thnx.

One of the things that my friends and colleagues tell me is that they “mute messages, block people or turn off all notifications”.

I get that. I do that too in my personal life but I got to start thinking about my work life. In the past, when I’ve done that, I’ve missed important meetings and not been privy to conversations regarding project work so I come across as misinformed or at worse, ignorant and always apologetic.

I don’t think that turning everything off is a solution to the overwhelm frankly. I believe that there are behaviours that you can demonstrate that help support how much information you consume. (Says the person who deleted their social media permanently not because of the notifications but how it stopped providing me any value).

In my opinion, for our professional day-to-day work it’s a little bit different because it helps you to be “in the know”. The value is still there because it’s also a closed community with just your colleagues.

If you completely block yourself from all notifications then you’re effectively isolating yourself from your peers and your team and denying yourself the possibility of insights, ideas and perspectives that you can apply in your work.

You may miss the opportunity to identify new teams and projects to work on that will challenge and inspire you, or miss an opportunity to work on an exciting new or different project that needs your knowledge, skill and expertise in another part of the business which in turn will also motivate you with a new challenge.

So turning off and blocking all notifications holus bolus in an organisation may in effect hinder your work because effectively, you’re creating yourself into an island so people can’t get to you and you can focus on your work only.

Yes But…

I understand that many times, we need to focus on our work, to complete the tasks required of us and to meet our project or client outcomes. However, there are also times we need to reconnect with our team and wider organisation so we understand how we fit into the bigger picture. It’s rare to find individuals working alone in organisations, they always are part of a team so there needs to be some balance between individual focus work and teamwork.

However, I’d say that if people are outright disconnecting and disengaging from conversations and notifications, it’s not the technology at fault (after all, go into Settings of these and modify these), it’s the external factors such as environment and education of how to manage these notifications.

In his post, Doug says it’s not “information overwhelm” but “notification literacy”.

It’s the Same Information Everywhere

Thinking about this term, I seem to think it’s both sides of the same coin. Working for a Microsoft partner, I use the M365 suite at work and every program has its set of notifications.

One of the laments of any organisation is that people may joke at times of missing important company information or important team or project updates. Meanwhile teams such as Marketing may pull their hair out wondering why their intranet pages get low views which then means they have to send the same messages across different platforms to ensure that people get the announcements!

If anything, yes, it’s “information overwhelm” but many times it’s “repetitive information overwhelm”. It’s the SAME information repeated across multiple platforms to try and capture attention.

To me, that symptom is all related to education. Right off the bat, teams and organisations haven’t been adequately educated on the practices of information sharing on different platforms.

Their focus was on ‘getting information out’ as opposed to understanding, communicating and connecting with ‘where their people are‘. Organisations adopt the traditional business view of “top-down” – say it once – corporate communications and copy and pasting the messages across multiple platforms – no wonder people have turned off all notifications!

Just look at all our adoption, change management and communications practices which send out standardised messages across all platforms in the hope that people see the message. No wonder people turn off all notifications! No wonder people aren’t responding to emails, voice messages, disengaging by not responding to anything or anyone anymore.

The online work environment has been made difficult because from the beginning, we didn’t educate people on the practices of social collaboration and communication. So then this creates a vicious circle of more technology and add ons that measure our wellbeing, send alerts that tell us we haven’t connected with X for a while; to take a break; to do a meditation. At worse, it compels organisations to buy other technology to measure engagement to understand what their people are doing at work, people see this, so they disengage. It’s going around in circles.

In the article, Doug also mentions if there was some way to curate notifications into some board where you could refer to at a glance and get a dashboard of everything you need. I think this is an excellent idea and wonder if we ever needed to do such a thing IF people were educated right from the start.

(As an aside, I do wonder if this can be done using say, Power App Portal with M365. Loryan Strant has created a portal that we use in our company that curates RSS feeds across different blog sites related to M365 demos and announcements. This dashboard summarises every post and then the curator (Loryan and I) add our ‘value’ by adding commentary to every post. In effect, he’s created an internal content curation platform like a ScoopIt site using M365 PowerPlatform. We then publish this post out to various customer SharePoint sites as an added service to help their people keep informed and educated on how to use M365.

I wonder if Doug’s idea can actually be created using M365 tools where every employee personalises their feed to create this dashboard portal of all their notifications and messages as an interim measure to counter the “repetitive information overload” and instead receive a dashboard of information that only relates to the:

• Information you want to follow
• Sites you need to read
• Channels and communities you need/want to be a part of
• People you need to follow
• Tags and topics you’re interested in
• Conversations and replies you need to follow.

Of course, it would be possible but we need to do something else first.

So What Do We Do?

I believe we need a different approach.

It would have been best if we could have educated people to build social collaboration behaviours way earlier. After all, this is not new. This is not something that started with COVID. People have been writing about these for many years prior. Me included.

Part of me thinks we need a complete Communication Reset.

This reset is for everyone. At all levels, in all departments.

It requires rethinking of the principles of how we communicate with each other and deploy the civil and respectful behaviours that we use in real life when talking with others but in an online format.

It’s understanding also about the knowledge flows in an organisations, where they are, who they’re centred around and how to use the right people to get the message out into the right space customised in a way that is relevant, meaningful and pertinent for that group of people.

The difficulty? We’re trying to do something DIFFERENT to what everyone else is doing. Or saying that we should do or should be doing. It’s risky because we aren’t following the crowd. Or adopting so called ‘best practices’ or following templated approaches. It requires commitment of change from everyone – regardless of their role and position. It requires a different way of how communications is currently done within an organisation and calling out behaviours that don’t support the collective and impede on the individual’s time and attention. Respecting their time, respecting their work, respecting the places where they’re communing.

Who knows, maybe things would have been different in organisations if they spent less time training people in the specific technology on Platform XYZ* or rolling out expensive adoption and change management practices that are templates of a bygone work era and instead, spent more time in educating people to apply skills that would be useful and relevant on ANY social platform (work or personal).

Things such as:

• Encouraged people (at all levels) at work to feel safe that they could show and share their knowledge, skills, capabilities and experiences openly with their peers without fear of consequence or retribution
• Supported managers to enable the conditions that allow for their teams to share ideas and insights openly across the company (all the while managers doing the same with showing and sharing what they do)
• Encouraged and promoted people on the basis of the value that they provide to the organisation through their contribution and engagement in conversations and cross team collaborations
• Educated people in the functions of bookmarking, tagging and effective Boolean search operands
• Encouraged and actively promoted individual and collective sense making
• Educated people on how to curate information that makes sense for them
• Enabled online and physical spaces where people can learn from and with each other
• Educated people on how to write, respond, reply and engage in online posts and threaded conversations.

Maybe the horse has bolted before the gate has shut with this one especially as what I’m saying here affects every part of how a business is organised and structured but we can at least start with small steps from now to prepare the next generation of workers.

Enabling these behaviours and educating people is a start but I believe that to make this change ingrained and embedded, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on organisational systems first.

It’s not a quick fix scheme. If I was a betting person, I’d say this change will take a generation.

Photo Credit: Oladimeji Ajegbile on Pexels.com