Best Practices for Internal Communication & Digital Organization
by Nicole Adams and Mel Baiser
Do you and your team struggle to come up with a unified system for sharing information? Do you sometimes find it difficult to remember where you saved a particular document or sift through your overloaded inbox to find a specific email? Are you unsure if you are referencing the most up-to-date project information because different team members save files in different ways and places? Below are some suggestions for setting up a consistent system for managing and sharing documents with everyone on your team.
Assessment
Before we dive right into solutions, a great first step in getting organized is assessing where you are starting from. What does the process around communication and information storage currently look like in your company? Where is it working for you and your team and where is it falling short? At HELM, we’ve found that the best way to ensure a successful implementation of a new system is to have everyone's buy-in for the change. Understanding what isn't working, and the costs associated is critical in gaining this buy-in. If those involved are motivated to address the reoccurring problems that arise from communication and information challenges, the adoption of new systems and processes will be more likely.
If your company is like most in the construction industry right now, there is a flurry of information swirling around a chaotic process of trying to extract information and details while meeting client demands. You may be managing unpredictable lead times and coordinating impossible trade partner schedules, all while trying to set your own team up for success so you can execute your projects and retain your employees. It’s a combo of hurry up and wait meets organized chaos with a sprinkle of stress and anxiety on top.
Process Mapping
In our consulting work with builders and architects, we’ve used a mapping process for taking stock of the current picture and identifying the areas where things seem to fall apart. Why are we talking about process in an article on digital organization? Because they are interconnected, and clear predictable communication and organized access to information are essential to good process. If you are going bother to think about where and how information is stored and shared, you might as well do it in the context of assessing and improving your overall process.
We’ve developed a tool for documenting this process, but it can be as simple as creating a table or spreadsheet using the following seven key questions.
List the first step in a process, such as lead intake during a sales process for example.
Next to every step there should be a column for the person who is accountable for that step. Maybe you have a salesperson or is it the office manager who fields initial sales leads?
Perhaps there are others who are involved but not ultimately accountable. Does the owner or GM get notified? List them in the next column.
Now, what are the inputs? What information is required to accomplish that step in the process? Did someone gather the appropriate information about that lead?
What resources are available to support this step? Do you have a new client intake form or a list of good client criteria?
Now, what is the output? What action, document, deliverable comes from this step? Is it an email, phone call, or an in-person site visit?
Lastly, to bring it back to our topic at hand, where does this information or document live? What program, software, or folder is it saved in?
Is there a team consensus on each of the seven answers? How many steps are in each part of the process? Is there agreement on what those are, the order they go in, and who is accountable or involved? Highlight every item or cell where there isn’t consensus or where things break down. These are your opportunities for improvement. By using this mapping process, you can begin to get everyone on the same page about what your current process is, where it is and isn’t working, what impact that has, and ultimately where you’d like to make improvements.
Digital Organization / File Sharing
There are a lot of options out there for cloud storage, with three of the most popular being Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. They all provide the same basic service: the ability to save files to a remote storage location, share them with others as needed, and access them from multiple computers or mobile devices.
All three options offer a decent amount of free storage, with monthly or annual paid plans for those who want more storage space or advanced sharing and security options. There are some important differences between the three when it comes to connecting with other programs that you regularly use. Google Drive has a wide range of integration options, with Dropbox not far behind. OneDrive does not offer as many integrations, but for teams that use Microsoft Office programs it can still be a great solution (and is included in most Office 365 subscriptions).
Ultimately, whichever option you decide to use will likely depend on your priorities regarding budget, storage and sharing needs, and the other programs that you and your team use frequently. Regardless of which one you choose, it’s generally best to agree on one option for your whole team and stick with it so you don’t have to keep track of files spread across multiple platforms.
File Naming and Organization
How you name and organize your files will determine how easy it is for you and others to find them in the future. To create a structure that is consistent and makes sense for your team and your business, start by coming up with a list of key categories that are relevant for most of the files that you typically work with. That might include client, project, document type (estimate, contract, etc.), date, or other general categories.
Once you’ve come up with a short list of categories, think about which ones makes the most sense to use as the top level of your folder structure. For example, you may decide to organize your work by project, in which case your top-level folder would be named “Projects”, and within that you would create a sub-folder with the name of each specific project. In turn, each of those project folders might contain sub-folders to organize different types of documents such as contracts, estimates, etc. You may end up with multiple top-level folders, each with their own sub-folders. That’s fine as long as the folders don’t overlap in a way that makes it confusing or hard to remember what belongs where.
Once you have set your folder structure, think about how you want to be able to organize and sort the individual documents within each folder. For example, if you’ve decided to group all project contracts into one folder, would you prefer to be able to sort them alphabetically by client name, or chronologically by date? You can use both categories in your file names if you want to, but you’ll want to use them in the same order every time (either “date-client”, or “client-date”) so you can find things quickly. Where dates are included, be sure to always use the same format (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD) so you can properly sort.
There’s no “right” way to organize your files, so you’ll need to think about what makes the most sense for the way that you and your team work. It may be useful to develop your file system as a team so you can share ideas and reach an agreement from the start. Above all, it’s important to remember that:
Your folder structure and file naming convention should be something that’s easy for everyone on the team to use – if it’s so complex that people aren’t sure what goes where, make mistakes when naming files, or forget what an abbreviation or acronym means, then it’s not a useful system.
Consistency is key! For your files to stay organized over time, everyone involved must be on the same page about using the same method every time. If someone thinks of a new category a few months from now it can certainly be worked into the system, you just need to agree to it and inform everyone of the change.
Archiving
As time goes by your folders may get very full, making it more time-consuming to search or scroll through everything even if the documents are consistently named and well organized. To avoid this, you should periodically go through and archive anything that you aren’t actively using and don’t expect to need anytime soon.
Archive folders should be created within your existing file structure. If you have a top-level “Projects” folder, you might consider creating a “Completed Projects” sub-folder within it so that individual project sub-folders can be moved there after the project wraps up. If you make a habit of doing this cleanup at least yearly if not quarterly, you’ll have an easier time finding the files that you’re actively using at any given time.
Email Management
The tips above apply to your email inbox as well. Any email application will allow you to create custom folders to organize your mail. You can also create rules so that messages meeting specific criteria are automatically moved to a particular folder – for example, if you want mail from “Client X” to always go into a certain folder, you can set up a rule so it will happen automatically. Or if you get regular newsletters and you’d like to set them aside until you have time to read them, you can put them all in a particular folder or tab so they’re not cluttering your inbox and distracting you from more time-sensitive messages.
You should get in the habit of archiving your email in the same way you would your other digital files. In many cases it’s more effective to read, respond to, and then delete an email rather than archiving it, but there are some emails you’ll want to keep and refer to. Depending on the volume of email you receive, it probably makes sense to get in the habit of doing a weekly or monthly cleanup: go through your email and read and respond to anything you haven’t gotten to yet; delete what you don’t need; archive what you want to save; and set up new rules as needed. This keeps your inbox from getting cluttered so you can find what you need quickly and easily.
Implementation
One of the primary barriers to getting your internal communications and digital organization in order is time and resources. Be sure you identify someone to carry forward the work of creating the organization and allow them the time necessary to manage the clean-up process. Whether you go back and organize all your current files or just start fresh with the new system moving forward, there is time associated with the effort. It’s worthwhile to hold a company meeting to outline the new system and clarify the agreements your team is willing to make with one another to hold you to the process. During these hectic times with everyone juggling more than they can often manage, it’s imperative that your communications and digital files are organized, and that information is easy to access. Take the plunge and invest some time in this critical task.