People are now totally overloaded by information!
At our conferences, we love a good poll. It's an ideal opportunity to canvas opinion on subjects that matter to us and the wider community and also to find out how people are doing business using SharePoint.
At our last event, one of the questions we included in our poll asked how people are getting important information to employees for them to read, and also how they are getting them to acknowledge the content. It's something we are passionate about in our own business and we were genuinely startled by the results.
The reason we are interested is that we live a 'connected age'. Information can be shared in an incredible variety of ways (Intranets, E-mails, Posts, Blogs, Notices...it's a never ending list). It's a cliche to say when it comes to the IMPORTANT STUFF, it is often hard to see the wood for the trees. My own personal e-mail inbox for example boasts over 250 e-mails per day.
If I spent just one minute reading each one individually that would be over 4 hours just reading e-mails.
So how do businesses share IMPORTANT information and how successful are the outcomes? Take my example. I'm an average member of the human race, I can't keep track of all those e-mails. So I scan the titles and delete what I don't think is important. Then the ones that look worthy of a read, I scan the body and delete some more. Very rarely does an e-mail get time to be fully read and properly consumed! There simply isn't time. What if one of those mails was sent by someone who really needed me to read what's inside?
In our poll, we knew that it wasn't just us worrying about information being overlooked. As the volume of information sharing increases, so does the risk that something crucial to a business gets missed. So we set a question asking people what they did to mitigate the problem. Here is the question we set and the answers we gathered.
The Question
As part of a wider ranging poll we ran at the Summit, we wanted to know:
How do you get staff to read and acknowledge a document stored in SharePoint?
Surprising Response #1 | People still use Read Receipts!
I was amazed to find out that the highest ranking response and preferred method among all respondents was to send an e-mail and ask for a read receipt. Its a method that emerged way back when e-mail first became popular and hasn't changed much since. It does have its benefits but in combating the sheer volume of information being shared...I think it has more negatives that positives!
PROS:
If your e-mail client supports it, it is really simple to request a receipt and it costs nothing!
CONS:
Recipients can choose NOT to send a receipt back leaving you none the wiser.
If you have a good volume of people you are sending a message to (lets say over 20) you need some pretty nifty extra rules and tracking processes to figure out who has and hasn't read the information on your e-mail.
For people who don't read the information you have shared..there is no easy followup. You have to figure out who they are and then do 'something else'.
Not all e-mail clients support read receipts
Your Important information can easily end up in the dreaded Junk folder so the reader is never aware that it was sent!
If the group you want to send information to changes, how do you know who has and hasn't got your Important information and for those new to the party, you are going to have to send that e-mail again!
Surprising Response #2 | Face to face is great...but only in a small team surely?
If you have a document that has a small distribution of say 4 or 5 people then hands down, this is by far one of the most effective ways to ask the question. A lot of the respondents agreed. In fact it was one of the top replies in the poll.
Here at Collaboris we are always on Skype video calls asking if other team members have read something (contracts, e-mails, marketing literature, even people who reviewed this blog post!). We also use Slack but when it comes to important messages and finding out if people have read things...if you scale up the team to a couple of dozen, it becomes impractical and cumbersome to be sure your message has been heard loud and clear.
PROS:
There's nothing easier and quite as responsive as face-to-face!
CONS:
If you need to prove that someone read a document where's the proof? You'd normally need a certificate or signature to help here.
If you have a document that needs to go to 10+ staff - perhaps in remote locations - then this becomes unmanageable.
Surprising Response #3 also got us thinking | People do print it and ask for a signature.
For years and years this has probably been the number 1 solution and will still be in many organizations. It didn't rank above some of the other responses in the poll but it still out there and still being used.
In my contractor days, I have walked into many a company and been asked to wade through a stack of paper-based induction material, ranging from the 'First Aid Policy' to the 'Internet Usage Policy'. The problem is, paper is wasteful, easy to lose, hard to store securely and above all, I can never find a pen when I need one!!
PROS:
This method is pretty good as people can't avoid paperwork on their desk.
CONS:
Collating, tracking, storing and logging responses and signatures can be a full time job.
If you have a document that needs to go to 10+ staff in remote locations then just like face to face, this much less manageable.
Paperwork is expensive to print, store and expensive to report on. It requires a lot of manpower to maintain, track and (in times of need) locate the specific record of the information being read.
Security of data and information can be a challenge (again an expensive one)
Response #4...now we are getting somewhere | Using SharePoint for what it's good at - Content management and collaboration... but this one still falls short in our view.
A significant number of people replied that they use this method (more so than paper copies in our poll)
If you are not familiar with an announcement list, it's a special type of list that allows you create a company announcement. It's really simple to use and ships with SharePoint. You can load a document into a SharePoint Library - many organizations ONLY use SharePoint as a file store (tut tut...you are missing out on so much!) - and then create an announcement telling people to go and read the document. This is great, it's nice and easy, and effective IF people read the announcement. You also have to do little to make sure your document is accessible to the masses.....but the problem comes again in enforcement. How can you be really sure that people have not only seen your announcement but also actioned it AND also be confident that everyone who needs to see it has done so.
PROS:
Announcements avoid e-mail which is a good thing...and the danger of the Junk folder!
The announcements can be embedded onto the Intranet home page using the List View Web part meaning people should notice it when they visit.
CONS:
You have no real way of enforcing that people read the information.
You cannot target to individuals or sub groups. It's a bit of a blunt instrument when it comes to specific messages as you may not wish to share some information with all users of the intranet for example.
There isn't an easy way to report on who has read the announcement and opened the document. So you haven't really solved your original problem.. even though you are trying to use SharePoint to help, there is more to be done.
Response #4...now we are getting somewhere | Using SharePoint for what it's good at - Content management and collaboration... but this one still falls short in our view.
A significant number of people replied that they use this method (more so than paper copies in our poll)
If you are not familiar with an announcement list, it's a special type of list that allows you create a company announcement. It's really simple to use and ships with SharePoint. You can load a document into a SharePoint Library - many organizations ONLY use SharePoint as a file store (tut tut...you are missing out on so much!) - and then create an announcement telling people to go and read the document. This is great, it's nice and easy, and effective IF people read the announcement. You also have to do little to make sure your document is accessible to the masses.....but the problem comes again in enforcement. How can you be really sure that people have not only seen your announcement but also actioned it AND also be confident that everyone who needs to see it has done so.
PROS:
Announcements avoid e-mail which is a good thing...and the danger of the Junk folder!
The announcements can be embedded onto the Intranet home page using the List View Web part meaning people should notice it when they visit.
CONS:
You have no real way of enforcing that people read the information.
You cannot target to individuals or sub groups. It's a bit of a blunt instrument when it comes to specific messages as you may not wish to share some information with all users of the intranet for example.
There isn't an easy way to report on who has read the announcement and opened the document. So you haven't really solved your original problem.. even though you are trying to use SharePoint to help, there is more to be done.
We like people who chose #5 !! | People are using OUR product and it's working great for them.
We're very proud of our own products DocRead and DocSurvey for SharePoint. We have designed them to kill off all the cons in all the other options above and it's reassuring to know that people are using them and loving them (based on some great numbers choosing this as their reply to the poll).
The key goal of DocRead and DocSurvey was to implement a simple-to-use process which allows people to distribute the information that really matters and get staff to acknowledge it. Where they truly want staff to prove they've read it - they assign a quiz in DocSurvey.
PROS:
Both tools function as natural extensions to SharePoint. They don't get in your way and feel like they're part of the product.
You can make sure that ONLY the important information gets the DocRead treatment. With tailored templates, you can make them stand out from the e-mail crowd and shout up on the intranet so you KNOW people are getting your message!
Documents can be targeted to individual users, SharePoint Groups, AD groups and Global Audiences (role, location, etc)
Tracking is a breeze with real-time reports. You can find out exactly who has not completed their tasks at the click of a button.
You can assign a quiz at the time of confirmation to ensure that staff understood the information.
Works with documents (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) as well as other types of content such as video, audio, SharePoint pages, external web pages and list items.
DocRead adapts as new people join groups or people leave groups meaning you don't have to worry about 'extra processes' to keep on top of who has and hasn't read your important information.
CONS:
It's not free - Although there is a free trial version which costs not a penny or dime. The full version is actually very affordable and we are confident you will save hours on each Important task. Customers save these hours many times over and time is money after all (not to mention saving huge amounts of frustration tracking reading receipts and the like!)
SO WHAT?? ... its wrap up time on this blog. But before I sign off, I wanted to share how interesting the responses were to me. The key take away for me is that you could probably have put a dozen more options on this question and still had people giving a wide variety of answers (all of which have pros and cons when you evaluate against their requirements).
However, if you have SharePoint and you have a need to track and report on the information you send out, there are definitely some methods that beat others hands down. We are biased of course but would love you to try our our product to see if it can fix the problem that might have brought you here in the first place.
If you aren't ready to try something new or just don't think you need it .. but still want to find ways to work smarter with Documents and activities for teams using SharePoint, we have compiled a nice set of 5 tips for you below to keep you going. Just click the link and download. We hope there are some good tips in there for you SharePointers!!
We've put together a guide listing 5 time-saving techniques that help us to manage our workload more efficiently when running our conferences.
Find out how we have got over 200+ Speakers to read documents and fill in forms by a deadline, in a 100% trackable process.
Learn how we store, organise and share our speaker slides and resources with the right attendees at exactly the right time.
