How do you keep someone informed about progress?

• Depends on situation, some people earnestly care about whats happening in your life, it helps people know how to plan their lives around yours, etc etc...

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  • Curation, Knowledge Management – Whatever you call it, you need to do it…
  • 1. Know why you’re doing it
  • 2. Agree on quality
  • 3. Add value, don’t just aggregate
  • 4. Choose a tool that will do the hard work
  • 5. Define “Team” clearly
  • 6. Let everyone own it
  • 7. Keep it all in one place
  • 8. Build team and personal habits around keeping smart
  • 9. Keep the sources fresh
  • 10. Measure the impact
  • What is the best way for manager to keep you informed?
  • Why is it important to keep colleagues informed about work activities?
  • Why is it important to keep employees informed?
  • How the employees are informed about important matters in a company?

• Open lines of communication between all levels in the workplace creates a teamwork environment -- which can increase productivity and lessons learned within all departments.

• Living in this world we need friends, especially, those who care about us. By letting our friends know the progress we're currently making, we feel lonely no more, at least we have a group of listeners.

• In terms of business administration I think it is important to keep people informed about progress so that other people can plan and prioritise their workloads around you. If someone is relying on a piece of work from you to complete their own tasks then it is important to keep people informed of where you are. By doing this you can also gain information on timescales, when this work needs to be completed. If you are unable to complete something by the time requested then other people will have to re-prioritise their own workloads to fit around you and by keeping people informed of your progress you can show that you are on track with you work.

Posted at 11th March 2016h in Continuous Learning

Nobody is as smart as everyone. And maybe nobody is as well informed as a team that’s working together to collect intelligence and keep each other smart. But it’s not easy. It needs the right approach, tools, and habits.

Curation, Knowledge Management – Whatever you call it, you need to do it…

When you share content with anyone, you’re in the business of content curation. Kevan Lee defines it: “Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.”

Sometimes it’s also called Knowledge Management, though that’s usually a broader category of all knowledge, inside and outside the organisation – curation is more about finding outside information and bringing it in. It’s the learning that you do outside of formal courses, informal learning – whatever you call it, the challenge is the same. There’s lot of content out there and nobody has the time to sift through it all.

So how do you find and filter the right information to help build your team’s connective knowledge? Here are 10 steps you can take to help your team stay smart.

1. Know why you’re doing it

You and your team are already overloaded with information. Why take the time to add to it? It’s good to be clear as a team on what you want (and what you don’t). Some reasons could include

To achieve a project or business goal: We learn things to help us achieve a goal. So align your curation and collective filtering to whatever project or goal that your team are focused on (e.g. new market for this quarter, ongoing scanning of retail sector).

To help each other: We are all drowning, getting dumber each day. So we need better human and machine filters to ensure only relevant content gets through. Learning is 90% outside courses so need to ensure the right relevant content is available when we need answers. You can leave this purely to algorithms and aggregators, which can help get you to a certain point, but really you need humans to make sense of the information.

Google’s recent quest to build the perfect team showed that collaboration and support matters far more than the level of talent. Being nice is the key skill. We should all be aiming to help colleagues who are seeking information similar to your interests, helping them to make sense of it. We like the Harold Jarche model seek / sense / share approach:

Source: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/

To help yourself learn and reflect: One of the best ways to retain knowledge is to teach it to someone else. Curation for a team is a form of that. That’s the sensing element of the model above. Curation is active reflection.

To help your status: Curation doesn’t make you an expert but you can build a profile as a connector and scanner and an authority, someone who adds value by being externally focused and attuned to risks and opportunities. If you’re a good filterer of information you add value and enhance your reputation.

2. Agree on quality

Quality matters in curation for your team. Topics, influencers and types all play a part in getting quality right.

What topics should we track? If you try and track “Marketing” as a topic, you’re going to get a lot of content, and most of it will be too broad. Filtering intelligently will block irrelevant content so you can focus on content that’s more specific to your needs, e.g. “B2B Inbound Marketing for Retail”. What you don’t share is as important as what you do . We all have limited time and attention spans so diminishing marginal returns if you share things that aren’t valuable.
This can be easier defined in the negative, e.g. we don’t want generic news from this site or promotional content from vendors. Good curation and filtering tools will block that for you. Your team can give you feedback on this. So use tools that have negative operators, e.g. don’t show me articles about Marketing that are job listings, for example.

Who should we follow? If you’re filtering information from external sources, you’re going to be following influencers and experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and elsewhere. If you already have good network of influencers or trusted sites, then that can work as a baseline. But often, setting up a new filtered set of content, we don’t know who to follow or where to start.
Choose influencers with higher domain authority and level of social ranking. Tools like our new Anders Pink App will automatically generate a list of high ranking experts as a baseline which you can adjust.

What type of content do we want? Is long form more valuable than short form content for your team? Do you prefer how to content over trends pieces, infographics over video? You need to be responsive to demand in terms of the type of content you filter for your team.

To get more insight on content types you can look at Buzzsumo to see what’s most shared externally about a topic. This can act as a good indicator for the type of content what your colleagues are going to be more interested in.

3. Add value, don’t just aggregate

What you share should have a value add from you or from your colleagues. That can be a simple as putting it in the right context, so it doesn’t get lost in email or slack chats. Categorized streams and lists that have a clear focus are helpful, people know what to expect in them. In our new app, you can adjust by keyword and give a very specific name to your content, e.g. Product Sales Team – Asia Market Scanner.

Beyond categorization, you and your team can add more value to content by flagging as a risk, or opportunity, adding a comment, directing a question at someone, pinning and saving it to a specific list for future reference. All of this brings the content into your team’s context and makes it more relevant and personalised and increases its value.

4. Choose a tool that will do the hard work

There are many tools that will bring content to you, either as curation tools or newsreaders. Most of them are on two extremes:

• Empty shells – these tools will pull content from any source normally via an RSS feed but you have to find and list all the sources. They’re good if you already know exactly what you want and have an existing list of strong sources. Not so good if you don’t know what you don’t’ know (or don’t have time to research all of the key influencers).
• Fixed feeds – these tools can aggregate RSS feeds on a topic for you but you get what the feeds share and can’t edit the source. So if you choose “Artificial Intelligence” what you see is only as good as the editor of that feed or feeds, and it’s unlikely to be exactly relevant to your team’s goals.

At Anders Pink we think teams need more. In our app, we start by crawling new articles published across all websites and finding articles on specific topics. Your topic can be as specific as you want, so if you want articles on artificial intelligence but only how it is being applied to certain areas such as self-driving cars or machine learning, that’s no problem. Or if you want those articles but also any articles on AI published by say a particular site you can add that to your list, or maybe you also want to see all articles shared by a particular person, you can add that as well. You can then turn this list into a feed and share it with you team where they can comment and save articles.

You get tightly relevant content and you or your team can tweak at any time. So you have a baseline to work with, but it’s easy to add or remove any sources.

5. Define “Team” clearly

For collective intelligence to thrive, you need a team with shared interests. Too many people and too vague a topic won’t generate value. Better to have lots of curated sets of content with narrow focus than one generate one. Define your team by shared interest, which might be shared research topics e.g. everyone in UX design, sales team etc, or common projects.

6. Let everyone own it

Like the Google ideal team, collective intelligence works best when there’s no hierarchy. So while one person in your team might lead on setting up your content sources and kickstart the curation process, everyone should be scanning and making sense of content, and drawing collective attention to the most relevant content. The Anders Pink App will let you and team adjust sources, flag and work together. When this works, you get a double filter effect: Content is intelligently filtered from the outside world so only highly relevant information gets through. Then you and your team members filter it further to identify opportunities, trends, risks and insights relevant to you.

7. Keep it all in one place

We all probably have too many channels for information as it is across social, email, intranet, discussion forums, yammer etc. If you curate to these channels it can distract from focus and also get lost. lines between public and private get blurred, e.g. if you RT something will your team see it, should they comment there? The effort of pulling links into your internal channels is a disincentive to share. Mike Kaput put it well:

Consider a dedicated, secure channel for your team to share information. Your team needs to know it’s secure and private for workplace discussions. Assume most consumption of curated content will be on mobile so make sure where you share is mobile friendly.

8. Build team and personal habits around keeping smart

New information arrives hourly. You can’t take one hit to stay on top. Like keeping fit you have to do it little and often. Consider habits like setting aside 15 mins every morning to scan, seek for relevance, make sense and then judiciously comment, rate, and add value. Build a daily habit around curation and encourage others to do same and collaborate with you. With the Anders Pink App, we update content every few hours and summarise in a daily digest email, so you can stay on top of new information in your field.

9. Keep the sources fresh

The quality of the content needs to be consistent. So you also need to build a habit around checking your sources and making sure they’re still delivering good quality. Set a goal of reviewing the influencers and sites that your source content is coming from. Prune away people who are not adding value. If you or colleagues miss their insights, you can always add them back. Scan for emerging influencers who should be part of your filter too. Tools like BuzzSumo and FollowerWonk can show the influencers in any domain, and you can keep checking to see if there’s been a shift.

10. Measure the impact

Are you and your team getting smarter as a result? How do you measure? It’s not easy to do in the short term, but you can align to

• Project goals achieved with less research time
• Less time per person spent researching on multiple site and sources
• Risks identified earlier
• Opportunities taken

It’s worth planning in a regular review of how your collective knowledge sharing is helping you achieve your overall goals, and be prepared to adjust with new tools and approaches.

With the new Anders Pink App, we think we can help you and your team build knowledge sharing habits, filter and share efficiently, and make it just that bit easier to stay on top of the content that will help you achieve your professional goals.
Sign up to our beta to see how.

What is the best way for manager to keep you informed?

Why is it important to keep colleagues informed about work activities?

Why is it important to keep employees informed?

How the employees are informed about important matters in a company?