Are You Allowing Microsoft, Cisco or Slack to Redefine Your Company Culture and the Value of Employee Communications?

19 Feb 2018
Microsoft, Cisco and Slack are redefining your company’s communication capabilities and culture and leaving corporate communication staffs alone and under-viewed within your employee’s inboxes and web browsers. 
 
Over the last two years, Cisco, Slack and Microsoft have been aggressively pushing their respective team communication and collaboration applications deeper into your workplace, often at the expense of your enterprise communication messages, efforts and delivery channels. These tools are great for a project and department team; all items and information an employee needs are in one place, outside all the clutter and distraction of using traditional email and web browsing.
 
 
Teams/Slack/Spark are an all-in-one platform for employees to interact with all the information and conversations required in the day to day needs for a project, team or department. This approach removes the need for employees to be in their email and web browser applications all day.
 
Your IT department often enables these new releases and features without consultation or even awareness from Corporate and Employee Communication teams. All of this is performed because they are seen as “team and project communication tools,” and not enterprise communication tools. However, in the process of releasing these new services and updates, they are devaluing and replacing email and web browser usage with a dedicated application that supports intra company and team communication and collaboration.
 
  • This implies less use of email and web browsers in the day-to-day work flow. In this new way, email is only used to communicate externally of the company when needed. 
  • Less eye time on email is great for company productivity, but bad for communication needs from departments that use email as the primary delivery and notification channel of company news and information.
  • Most companies do not use their Corporate Communication teams and staff and do not push corporate messages down at the project level. Corporate Communications staff members are often out of the day-to-day team activities and project communications. Corporate Communication interaction with a project team is often when the project needs to communicate cross company or to a defined audience, group or stakeholders.
  • Microsoft Teams, Slack and Spark all have mobile applications dedicated to them, therefore, access to information is easier and already available; companies are still struggling to allow employees access to their intranets outside of the company network.
 
Microsoft Teams includes Instant messaging, persistent conversations and decisions are stored in the message thread, project files, task tracking, 3rd party bots are used to provide external status (package delivered, testing plan completed, code migration successful, etc), voice and video calling is possible within the application (person-to-person and conferencing), team recognition and motivation tools to keep up engagement and encouragement are also included.
 
Based on the points above, you hopefully can see how Corporate Communications' ability to get their messages noticed will be more problematic as applications like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Cisco Spark become more common within the enterprise for team collaboration and communication activities within companies.
 
If you would like to learn more about these Communication and Collaboration solutions, contact Chuck Lear at [email protected] or by calling 805-283-7399.

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