49. How To Stop Your Company From Drowning In Information

Brandon 0:05

Music. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the operations room, a podcast for coos. I am Brandon minsinga, joined by my lovely co host, as always, Bethany Ayers, how are things going? Bethany,

Bethany 0:16

I'm doing really well, like I think for the first time in such a long time, I'm a bit cheery. I've had an up and down week, but I think it's all turned out mostly well in the end. So I have decided to release a course about presenting to boards. I have five sections, five videos, 75 minutes worth of content. Monday I spent thinking through the rest of the structure and then recording all five videos. I was so proud of myself productive day.

Brandon 0:49

Yeah, that's like churning me on content on mass. I love that,

Bethany 0:53

until Louise popped up at five o'clock Monday afternoon and said, there is no volume, there's no words on any of your content. Oh, my god, wow. And recorded it on Riverside. And so I was like, how can that be? And I could not replicate the error. I have no idea how it happened. And so then I had to re record everything on Tuesday and Wednesday. And there was like, oh, it'd be much better, because you've basically practised. And it is not. It is, I suspect, worse, because I, in effect, recorded 10 videos and I couldn't remember what I had said on the videos that don't exist and what I had said on the videos that do exist.

Brandon 1:35

Always the second pass generally, is better. You know where to hit the high notes and what to discard. But in your case, you're saying that it didn't actually work that way. No,

Bethany 1:43

because five videos, 75 minutes worth of content, and it's five different topics, it was just too much for my brain to remember what was good, what wasn't, and when it went so anyhow, that was my Monday. Tuesday. Went to MMCs event, their launch of their new fund. That was super fun. There were, I don't know, 100, 150 people there, so mostly LPs and founders, and maybe 10 women. How can this still be happening? How can it be 20 years on? And I spoke to a couple of the other women, and they were not as outraged as I was. So they're like, I'm so used to being the only woman in the room. I think this is great that there

Brandon 2:25

gone from 1% to 10% so you're a baller now. You're an LP investor now. So this is you're getting the big times here. So we've got a wonderful topic today, which is, how much effort should we invest in knowledge management systems? And we have an amazing guest for this, which is Jeremy Slater. He is the CEO of Bob W and before we get to Jeremy, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about this, because knowledge management within organisations, this always comes up as a bit of a bug bear for everyone, and the question of how much time and effort you put into it and spent on it, to make it useful for the organisation, or leave it as a bit of an afterthought, is always this balance of what is the right thing for this company at this particular point in time. So the first question I wanted to ask you was, every company I've ever worked in to date is always the same scenario you walk in, they've got the Google environment and they've got Google Docs, and there's a sort of documentation all over the place, and it's a mess, and you cannot find stuff. Where do you start with that? What is the initial set of things to think about, or steps you might want to take to start to go down a pathway of actual knowledge management within that company?

Bethany 3:38

So at peak, there was a big belief in taxonomy, and really needing to use the taxonomy and put things in the right places. I am not a believer in taxonomy, because either I think differently than everyone else, or I suspect more likely we all think differently than each other, and so the taxonomy does not work for anything beyond the most obvious flows. And so the amount of time I spent last year's sales team kickoff, where is that going to be? Is that going to be in the strategy documents? Is that going to be in the sales documents? Is that going to be in the team doc? So one of the things I do like about Google is that it has a pretty good search engine, and so I default more for the Google part of it, to just throw it in effect, into one big bucket and then rely on search to find what I need. It's not ideal, but for document repository, I have the most luck that way, and I have no patience going through a taxonomy. Personally, where I think it becomes a little bit trickier. Is not your random documents, but in effect, what are you going to do about a wiki? Because a lot of stuff is like live information, and that is where I am not on the cutting edge because notion, and we've all heard my problems with the notion. Notion. I'm using it again with Louise, and I still don't know how to create a heading. So you can use notion, but the notion, for me is the same problem, in effect, with that taxonomy issue. And I don't really know what notions search is like at new voice media, we used Confluence. It was so complicated. Jeremy talks about Confluence and seems to make it out that it's much easier and better than it used to be. So anyhow, that's my answer. Is, I don't know, but you get to a point where it matters. When everybody's in the office together and can talk to each other, it doesn't matter where we realised that we had nothing critically documented at new voice media was when we opened up offices in New York, San Francisco and Sydney in one quarter, and those teams do nothing and did not know how to serve themselves and did not know who to ask. And then we very quickly had to work on documenting it all.

Brandon 5:56

if you think about HubSpot in: 2024

Bethany 9:23

and it's changed a lot since you last used it 15 years ago.

Brandon 9:26

Oh my God, it is like night and day, right? And I think realistically, in this transition from the Google environment to the MS environment, I've lost, maybe I want to say 20% of productivity over the past six weeks, seven weeks, because I just don't know what I'm doing to map what I would normally do on Google in two seconds. Is taking me, like an hour to figure out. How do I do it in the Windows environment? And I'll just give you one quick example that drove me insane for the last three weeks, which is when you're in Google, by default, you can see other people's calendars and when. You're booking meetings, which you want to do, obviously you want to book meetings, get to know people. Start ramping in, etc. No calendars were available, like, at all. How do I get access to people's calendars so I can see what they're doing periodically? I was poking around on the customer support just to see, like, how do you do this? And eventually I found the right article. Okay, so I need to go into add calendar, and then add directory, and then select my email address, and therefore I can see other people's email addresses, select those email addresses, add their calendars. Just ridiculous.

Bethany: 10:31

And conversely, the other way, we did that at peak, because there were still people coming from Microsoft world, and so slack is not teams. I don't know what teams is. Teams is. Shit is. What teams is.

Brandon: 10:42

The other thing Jeremy spoke about was for notion, or for any knowledge management system, which in his case was confluence, making sure that there was actual ownership or space owners for the different areas. And what he described as Confluence cleanup days, which I found quite interesting as well. And then he also talked about a third little piece which was fascinating, which is for areas of particular interest, where the data has to be correct and up to date, for example, customer facing materials for people understanding how to use your piece of software, making sure that's accurate, up to date and so on, that within the job description of particular individuals, you actually put that directly into the job description that they're responsible flat out to make sure that that's 100% accurate. But those little three tidbits, what do you make of that?

Bethany: 11:26

I thought it was awesome, and definitely make sense when you reach a certain scale, or when accurate information is really important. And I know it sounds like accurate information should be important all the time, but at new voice media, we were, I don't know, 150 people, something like that, all in Basingstoke, we thought we had things documented and we thought it mattered, but it was really It worked fine. And it was only once we started having people asynchronously work with us that we realised that accuracy of data actually mattered. And so it would be one of those things that depending on how important it is for your business. And now Jeremy will explain why it's really, really important for his business and why they invested early. It would be one of those things that I would just invest in, pre international expansion, but I wouldn't necessarily worry about when smaller, because there's just so many other things to worry about. But then also, what makes sense, I think would be something like the NHS website. I don't know if you've been on it. So again, for our international listeners, NHS is National Health Service. So for me, I think it's a great resource for finding out about various ailments. And as you know, I have lots of medical anxiety, so there's lots of ailments I'm researching all the time, and it will say when the article was written and when the review date is, and so I know how recent it is, and that's a way for everything to be updated. So I think that would be quite an easy solution for many things, and don't have the review date all be the first of January. You know, just kind of like by a de facto. Have a review date be every six months, every 12 months, every 18 months, like whatever, however, often that changes, and then somebody can be constantly reviewing as it comes up in the review dates. The

Brandon: 13:20

other thing that he spoke about is this massive information overload, in particular when you're dealing with Slack amongst a bunch of other tools that you may be using as well. And I just want to quote this journalist. Guy sent out a tweet, and he was saying that Salesforce is paying $28 billion for an app that people shut down when they need to get things done. That quote was perfectly encapsulated. Kind of what happens with Slack, I think, or at least for me, I basically turn it off, and that's my down time to focus on whatever I'm focusing on. The question to you is, what do we do? Slack is there? It's pervasive. It is instantaneous. There's a tonne of information that's flowing out of it, and plus all the other stuff that you're dealing with. What do you do as an operator? And then

Bethany: 14:04

also, I think the added annoyance with Slack isn't just the amount of information, but actually all the emojis and reactions. And it's quite nice as a user to be able to do a thumbs up and be done with it. But I think people become addicted to the reactions in a similar way as in social media. And so it's not just an avalanche of information, but then you're like, Ooh, how many thumbs up did I get? Did anybody care? What are my comments like, you know, and you have all of this weird extra level of internal validation that we never used to have with an email. It was an email you didn't care how many responses you got, and you weren't going to add it

Brandon: 14:45

up. Yeah, you wanted less responses. You're just like, consume this and go away exactly

Bethany: 14:50

whereas, like, we actually had meetings that would be like, Oh, that one had a lot of responses, or our general response rate is going down. Or you talk to somebody like, Oh, that was. Really cool announcement, they'd be like, Yeah, I got 100 response. I'm like, Oh my god. So there's two elements to slack. One is, in some ways, if we remove the ability to do all those responses, or just become aware of the fact that the responses are some sort of dopamine system in us and not real, and don't worry about it. And then the other one is just the overwhelming information. I treat email and slack like an RSS feed, and so I consume information, but I respond to as little as possible, which then, hypocritically, is why I quite like the ability to do a thumbs up, because I can clear a lot of stuff without actually having to say anything. And just like, thumbs up acknowledged when you start replying to things, people reply back to you. And you don't want that, because you just unless it matters, it's just some sort of nice, polite commonality, and it's just not necessary in 95% of the communications. And with DMS, so many things people think are urgent, but it's really like, well, what would you do? What do you think your advice is? And the people will just answer their own questions really quickly. And then, if it's something complicated, why don't we talk about it? Or why don't we save it for a one to one? And you can actually just like, purge a huge amount of slacks without taking it seriously. I think our first response is, Oh, I better answer this. But if you just take a pause and look at what people are asking, not answering the question is often the right thing to do, because people know the answer. So in effect, like micro coaching opportunities,

Brandon: 16:37

I have exactly the same approach. Recently I saw a customer success person that I was dealing with, where I sent them a very kind of, like, straightforward request, and what I got back was a novel this person had written, like, this huge response, and I was looking at, I'm like, That is a colossal waste of time. I don't know why that person would possibly think that's a good idea to write me a novel in this case, and maybe it's because I'm senior. I spoke to this person just saying, Hey, you don't need to provide that level of richness in your responses. This gets to this notion of, how do you make yourself, personally, as productive as possible? And to your point, I do as little as I can through actual writing of things, because it is very slow. It requires me to think a lot, which I don't want to do. And I use thumbs up all the time for all sorts of things. And if I actually want to dig into something in some form, I will always do an immediate call. If I actually want to have a more of a substantial understanding of what's going on, I will not do an interaction through slack. I will actually call the person have a bit of a discussion, I think just to respect to the more the systemic thing with the company, I think my feeling right now is that we all use Slack. We all use it in different ways. I think what's very helpful at the outset and the onboarding for the company is number one, every Slack channel that you have, in my view, you should be turning all of them off and meeting all of them. And the only ones that should be on are the ones that you actually you actually use or want to use. Essentially, even if they're vaguely interesting to you turn them off. You can obviously go into them asynchronously when you choose to, but just the ones that actually matter, that's where you should be getting your notifications. The other one is to make sure that every channel that you have in the organisation has a wiki, notion page for it, where there's an actual description for what the hell that channel is about. Because, you know, you look at these channels, they have like weird, vague descriptors,

Bethany: 18:30

and it's morphed over time. So even the descriptor might not be anything about what the channel has become, and nobody's really updated it exactly

Brandon: 18:39

notion description, and somebody needs to be culling the ones that are dead. And I think the other bit was that by making the Slack channels super specific to the topic at hand, it's much, much better. Instead of these broad based channels where everyone's notified around everything you know, of consequence, you know, make it super micro. It's like this is about this particular topic with whatever stakeholders need to be there, and that is it.

Bethany: 19:04

So another one on the back of your small channels is to default to channels than DMS when it's more than a couple people and you're gonna have a constant conversation, because I would end up with seven different DMS with three out of the four same people, and when you're looking at your list, can't find the right one. And then, if with the DM it's hard to add people in and do they have secrets? So this is almost always default to a channel, and then the second one is, I argue to turn off all notifications, because basically, Slack should be or is often a replacement for email, and so you should not expect instantaneous answers. I don't think in work you should expect instantaneous answers 97% of the time, anyhow, because very little that we do is urgent, and when it is urgent. Truly urgent, and we're all working together. So turn off notifications and look at look at things when you need to and share your phone number. So if it's truly urgent, somebody can call you. And because nobody likes calling anymore, when I would get a phone call, I would know it actually was urgent, and that helps with timing a huge amount, because otherwise, I think back to that social media dopamine thing. We have our alerts on alerts feel good. We get a moment of, ooh, maybe this alert is going to solve my life, or this alert is the thing that's super exciting, and then it's just something boring and distracting that you can answer because it's something to do, but it's not valuable.

Brandon: 20:42

If it's truly an urgent issue, then you should legitimately be calling the person. There's

Bethany: 20:48

nothing that we are doing that can't wait an hour. The

Brandon: 20:52

only legit emergency that you're ever going to have, I think, is when the system crashes and customers are losing their minds that then you have an actual urgent issue.

Bethany: 21:03

Yeah, and then if you're communicating on Slack, like other than instantaneously, you're probably a bit screwed, because you need to be on calls working it through last

Brandon: 21:12

question. As an operator, you always have this scenario where employees are complaining that they don't know where to find something, or information is not being made available to them, or what have you. And the fact of the matter is, you've had a team meeting about it. You've slack notified everyone about it. It's sitting directly on google drive somewhere. It's in the knowledge management system as item number one, and people are just blind to it somehow, which is incomprehensible. So what do you do in that scenario? Like, what is happening? I guess it

Bethany: 21:43

almost goes back to our conversation with Steve's fall around strategy, where people just think that they don't have a strategy, and sometimes it's because the company doesn't, but quite often it's because they either don't agree with what the strategy is or don't know what a strategy is, and are trying to solve another problem, like, what am I supposed to do today? Which is different to the strategies like the operational plan, I suspect a lot often, is that they have access to that piece of paper, but that's not actually what they care about. So sometimes it's that sometimes people feel they should be and I'm actually really guilty of this spoon fed the information. So product me and product have this all the time where I'm like, I want to have the roadmap and I just need to understand what's happening. They go, here's the roadmap, and then they show me something that is just like incomprehensible to anybody who's not on the product team. Ta, da, here's the roadmap, and you can click in, and it's just like, I don't want to have to click into every single one of your boxes to find the hidden named one that is each feature I'm actually looking for and the piece of information I want. And so I think it's just like levels of information and how spoon fed people want to be. And sometimes people want to be more inappropriately spoon fed. And sometimes the information is not comprehensible in the form that it is. And so it's like working down to, why is this information not working? And then sometimes it's also just, I don't really know how to use the wiki. It's hard. It's annoying every time I go on and look at something. It's old, so I'm not even going to think about going and finding out that there's this brand new, wonderful piece of information that's actually valuable sitting there. So basically, lots of different possible reasons why it can go wrong.

Brandon: 23:35

I think the most powerful tool that I've added to my arsenal as an operations person over the past year and a half, by far, has been loom. I'm a huge fan now of loom. Looms a tool, obviously, but just this idea of being able to put up a dock or some kind of material, and I do a talk track, overlay on top of it, package it up and ship it out as a pre read. I think it's much more powerful to capture my voice on top of it, whereby they don't actually have to read it, per se, if they don't want to, if they want more detail, of course, they can read it. But my talk track over top of it is like the key stuff that I want to punch out, and it's been very effective. And I believe it's done the job that I wanted to do, which is to get people more engaged, in a better position to have a better conversation, because they've actually listened to me talk about it prior to the meeting.

Bethany: 24:22

Interesting. I have been the recipient of looms, and sometimes I listen, and sometimes I don't, but I always listen at 1.5 or two.

Brandon: 24:32

Put it on 1.5 that's what everyone does, 1.5

Bethany: 24:35

sometimes two.

Brandon: 24:39

How boring is this person.

Bethany: 24:43

I do a lot of scanning, and so I lose control of being able to scan quickly with it. So I will only do it really with topics where I suspect I'll get more information from listening than just reading it myself.

Brandon: 24:56

So let's go on a quick break, and when we come back. We will have our conversation with Jeremy Slater,

: 25:05

a company like ours. We are not a data business, we're not a tech business, but our success is based on the quality and accessibility of knowledge. And I'll give you an example. We have a centralised customer services team who need to serve guests in 40 hotels across Europe. Of course, they're not expected to know the boiler location of the hotel in Helsinki or in Amsterdam or in London, but they need to answer questions about it if there's troubleshooting to be done. And so they use Confluence. Could be any Wiki tool, but they use Confluence to find that information. So for us, Confluence is a given. The communication needs to happen asynchronously, but it's about how easy it is to access that information. I think just having that information in one place by default definitely helps as a starting point. We'd be in a whole world of pain if some information was on the drive, some was in a Google Sheet, some was in notion. You've just got to have one.

Brandon: 26:09

What do you consider to be the best toolkit out there right now for asynchronous communication?

: 26:16

Definitely a leadership led documentation hub, whatever that

Brandon: 26:22

is. What is it? Which one

: 26:25

I use notion personally, but I believe Confluence to be the best for companies, actually, of any size. Obviously, they're more of a sort of enterprise looking tool. Why is that? They have got a lot better over the last few years at making them accessible. I mean, I do onboarding with with all the new joiners on how to use confluence, and it's actually quite an easy job now, whereas maybe five years ago, you were about to take in a data science degree to do that, but it's pretty easy now, and we get people onboarded and editing and updating and creating documentation really, really quickly with using Confluence. So I think it's a world class tool. They don't possibly move as quickly as notion do when things like aI come along, but they move, and they have the might of Atlassian behind them. And obviously there's an integrations with Trello and loom if you use those as well, which we don't, but we probably should, because we use similar tools outside of that ecosystem. And there's a new Atlassian tool called Atlas, which I haven't tried yet, which is, I think, their attempt to do OKRs as well. So that's another rabbit hole to go down on a quiet Friday afternoon.

Brandon: 27:30

So confluence, you like that one. What else do we got in the toolkit? Asana,

: 27:35

we use? The possibilities are endless with task management tools and project management tools. I don't think it really matters which one, but you've got to pick one and just roll with it. We picked Asana, and the way that we embed that as our task management tool from day one is that we make a couple of mandatory meetings. We make it so that they have to happen inside Asana. So again, whether that's the best place for those meetings to happen is another question, but it does mean that people pick up the tool really easily. So we you know you have a weekly or biweekly running matters with your manager that happens in Asana, because Asana is an easy place to create action items and to organise tasks. Great. Now people are using Asana for task management. We then don't police how teams are using Asana. You know, religiously, it's just important that they are using a tool to organise their work, sort of long form meeting agendas, long term projects, epics, all these things are happening in JIRA and Confluence. And then Asana is a sort of bolt on for task management, then for day to day communication. You've got slack, which I have a big problem with, because I think it's indispensable, but also horrible and shit at the same time. And when I say slack, I guess I'm including all the tools under that umbrella, Microsoft Teams, whatever other ones there are, but they're a minefield, because the instantaneous nature of instant messaging, internal messaging systems like that imply that you need to respond immediately. Well, I think they do anyway, but most people don't take that implication. They take it as messages come through. I will get back to that later. And there's nothing as far as I know, built into Slack that, apart from your status, that can really attempt to solve that problem. So if I were slack, that's what I would be trying to figure out now, is, how can we make this tool work for remote first companies, but also businesses that aren't so much and they've tried it with huddles and things like that that I don't think that works particularly well.

Bethany: 29:49

And I also just think slack is so much information. All of the channels just absolutely get overwhelmed by everything. I. I also find it really annoying that it's lots of different slacks for all these different groups, and so I keep getting these alerts, and I can't figure out where they are, why they keep showing them to me. And as soon as you have your work slack plus one or two other groups, it's not usable. As far as I'm concerned,

: 30:16

if you set ground rules for slack web, for example, really simple ones would be, all internal comms happen inside Slack, all external comms happen in email. Great. That kind of works. You literally know where you stand. You speak to your suppliers, your clients for email, which is probably better that you have that kind of waiting period and breathing room with emails. You flag it, you put it in your archive, whatever you do, however you do your emails. But now that line has been blurred, because you can get suppliers and external parties in Slack as well. So suddenly everything needs to be instant. In some ways, that's okay. And in certain channels, if you need instant feedback or communication, particularly for our operations teams, that's great. Slack works perfectly. But if you have another channel that sits right next to that, which is maybe the product team, who aren't going to reply immediately, they're going to process your request and triage it and see where it goes, maybe that person who's used to the ops channel the instant feedback is going to expect that same instant feedback in the other channel, and it just it's a minefield, and it generally leads to people hating, using that as a place to work, but kind of fearing the alternative, which is going back to emails only or the phone. Heaven forbid.

Bethany: 31:36

I read an article a couple weeks ago in the FT weekend magazine that was talking about they did a trial of moving communication with surgeons from beepers, which I didn't realise was still happening, but apparently it is to WhatsApp, and it was an unmitigated disaster, because it's a big deal to beep somebody, and so You would actually only do that when it mattered, whereas it's really easy to Slack people about all kinds of stuff. And so the surgeons stopped paying attention, or were overwhelmed with information. They couldn't actually get to their important information, as they had to go back to beepers. And I just love that

: 32:14

I read the same article and I listened to a podcast on it as well some time ago. It's a fascinating use case, and I think you mentioned it as well. In that test case, doctors in general were suddenly receiving additional context, photos, audio, a bit more colour, that actually led to them making worse decisions or delaying something that they knew to be critical, because they didn't want to open up their phone and see what the bombardment was. Whereas with a beeper, you get Beep, beep, beep code, or SOS, or whatever the nomenclature is, and you go, so it's yeah, it's fascinating. I wonder if any companies have or if you guys know of any companies that have done that have gone right, we're going to try fully going back to phone plus Email Plus calendar event only, and to see what would happen.

Bethany: 33:14

Quite an appealing one, I have to say, to just not be bombarded with information all the time. I think

: 33:18

the problem is, is that people would then defer to whatever personal communication they use, whether it's WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Viber, or any of the multitude tools out there. That's another thing. As a company, you have slack, and then you have the sort of the fringe cases where certain people are communicating using WhatsApp, which is difficult because it's not a business tool, so you can't really control it. So it's a bit of a minefield, but I suspect it's one that we can't come back from, and they just need to get better at building those guardrails within the tools. I suppose

Brandon: 33:53

you've talked about adoption for these products within companies, and your primary answer is select your tool to work with. Don't have multiple tools in place for roughly the same thing. Can you give us any other examples of rules of the road that you think are highly useful that you'd like to share with the audience?

: 34:09

Probably quite good to have the onboarding process in one of those tools that you really want people to use so it's their first touch point, and then you can have the best new joiner learning pathway in the world. But of course, people are going to forget that, so you need to implement those rhythms as quickly as possible. So week two after the learning pathway, they're getting on a call with Jeremy. I'm not only talking about our mission vision OKRs, but I'm also throwing in Confluence there, which seems like a bit of a strange segue from the grand vision of the business, but it puts our internal documentation system on the same level as our mission, which is slightly ludicrous, but for me, I think it's as important then when it comes to sort of making it an ongoing success, I think there's things you can do in meetings themselves that set the asynchronous work up for success. So. Probably one of the most difficult things to do, because generally, people are allergic to a, agendas B, preparing for agendas C, sticking to agendas and D, following up on those agenda items afterwards. It's one of the most difficult things to do, but I think there are some simple things you can do within the meeting. You have to, again, slightly remove the cringe barrier and just roll with it. But at the beginning of a meeting, define what the objective of that call is, even if it's a simple catch up, what are we all here for? What's the desired outcome? Where do we want to end up in 1520, 30 minutes? And then, what are the action items? And then make sure those are assigned. And if there's going to be another meeting, preferably there isn't those people know that they need to deliver on that work and that that work needs to be done asynchronously thereafter. So using the meeting to set up the asynchronous work for success, I think, is a good one. Then. I mean, this isn't a podcast about meetings, but I think being pretty brutal with cancelling recurring meetings that don't serve the work in between the calls is a pretty good one. And I think a good sign that a meeting should be cancelled is if action items aren't being followed, you're coming back to the same topics again and again. Attendance is inconsistent. This one is so common. I've seen it in every business I work for where there's this call that happens every week or every two weeks, and there's different people there every time. It's a sort of, let's say it's a an ops and product call. Great. That's really important. That sounds really important. But if you have different people there every time, how can you have any continuity and attempt to get anything done, and certainly action items, they may be being followed up, but you certainly don't know about it, because that person that was there last time isn't there next time. So cancelling those in an alpha in a brutal way that may upset a few people, I think, is better in the long run as well. So yeah, using meetings as a place to set up asynchronous cons for success. And then

Bethany: 37:04

is that where Asana comes into play? Because I know about Asana. I've never used it company wide. I tend to be somebody who doesn't want to roll tools out everywhere, because it comes super expensive, and half the company doesn't use them. And so it's interesting that you've opted for Asana everywhere, versus a Google spreadsheet, which is free because you're already paying for Google for other reasons. How do you use Asana asynchronously? Do you actually go in and see if action items are being addressed and comment

: 37:34

this is where it gets complicated, because we're doing our projects within Confluence. We're doing our meetings within confluence, and you probably won't be surprised to hear that there's no direct integration between Confluence and Asana. So you create an action item within Confluence. It's got a lovely little checkbox there. You can set a nice little deadline, but that doesn't then synchronise with Asana, so you've got to then transcribe your action items into Asana, if that's the place you want to manage your work. Which, yeah, I can hear the audible groans from the audience. Yeah.

Bethany: 38:13

It's like, why have you done this?

: 38:17

It's a good question. But as I said before, I think the fact that the most common recurring meeting, which is the manager team member catch up, is happening within Asana, it does mean that the bulk of the action items that are most likely to be followed up on and talked about again and result in, hopefully a conclusion, manager team member are in a place where that work can happen. We have a few special use cases where Asana does become a sort of super tool for us. We launch hotels with launching huge projects like that. You can either dive into the horrible world of Microsoft Project Management, or you can use the very simple Gantt charts within Asana. That's when it really comes into its own because you click Go on a new launch template in Asana. Suddenly it automatically creates 1000 tasks, automatically assigns them to those individuals that are responsible for that part of the hotel launch. It suddenly you've built a system whereby we can't grow unless you're using that tool. So yeah, I obviously highlighted it myself that we haven't got it right, connecting projects and meetings with the action, necessarily. But yeah, we do use Asana in a productive way, in more sort of structured parts of the company, which

Bethany: 39:35

is where I've used Asana, rather than company wide. It's like the project management sides of things, it's an interesting tension between using Confluence for meetings, so that everybody uses confluence, but then paying for Asana for everybody. I had a different question, which is quality of the kind. Confluence content, because this is another thing that you see internally and externally. I was just looking at Zapier user guidance for something, for troubleshooting something, and within two paragraphs, they referenced two different tools, and it was clear that those two paragraphs were written, not at the same time, and somebody did not update the first paragraph, and that's for customers and publicly facing internally, I have seen things much, much worse. How do you make sure that things are updated and also quality control, that what's created in the first place is right? Like that boiler is actually where the boiler is supposed to be, and that everybody can understand the location.

: 40:41

I mean, these are the sort of fundamental principles of good documentation. Management is avoid duplication, put the quality of the information above all else. Make sure there's ownership over the information. All these things and really difficult to do without a COO that or whoever in the business who's really evangelising, we've adopted the approach that we have space owners within Confluence who literally own the space. We make it really simple. Each space within Confluence is a department, and so the department head is the owner of that space. So they're the person that someone goes to if they flag a duplication or something that's not quite right, then we also have within specific teams like operations, where the quality and accuracy of the knowledge is even more important than anywhere else. We have knowledge ambassadors within our customer service and ops teams who are responsible for checking for duplicates, archiving pages, updating pages as a part of their job description. It's literally a job responsibility, a desired outcome in their JD, in their contract. And then they meet on a monthly basis. And we even do these like Confluence cleanup days, where we won't spend the whole day doing it, but half a day where we get together and we go through the most critical parts of the relevant spaces and find information. It's not fun, but it's necessary, and we clean it up. I think we'll continue doing these things, and I think it's really important. And we look at it not just as we're cleaning up confluence, but we're looking at it as we're protecting our information and our data lake, or whatever you call these things these days. But I think companies like Confluence will produce, and they already are, tools that will help us do this ourselves. So we haven't paid for it yet, but the next tier of confluence, on the pricing structure has AI tools that remind you when a document has become sort of aged. It hasn't been updated or viewed for a while. That's great. You can get reminded and either archive it or update it. It reminds you when it even will scan for duplication. So if it sees the same information in two places, it will flag that to you, and you can do something about that. We're already using the AI tools within Confluence. It's it's actually pretty good. Rather than searching how many rooms are there in Bob W Madrid, you can now ask Atlassian AI How many rooms there are, and it'll reply in natural language and say, there's 31 rooms in Bob W Madrid, and yeah, you can copy and paste that and reply to whoever asked you it, but you obviously need to double, triple check the quality of that information at the moment. But I think that's where, again, accuracy of information and standardising how you record that information comes into its own. So if we have one way of classifying, this is taxonomy, I suppose, but classifying how a building is called or a hotel, how do we what do we name it? And then how do we structure the information, particularly the information that's going to be the most searched in a consistent way, so that that AI engine that's searching our knowledge base isn't going to hallucinate or deliver incorrect information, because that could then have quite significant consequences, and probably set ground rules that they only use those tools on questions that don't have a sort of life or death consequence if it's incorrect, it's

Bethany: 44:22

really interesting, because I was immediately thinking when you were talking about your tech stack and the ambassadors, this is a lot of investment, but you've just explained why the investment matters. Have you had a lot of pushback and needed to create the business case for why you want to invest as much as you do on what's fundamentally knowledge base, not

: 44:41

at all people can see the value in it. I just get made fun of a lot for being the confluence operating officer rather than the Chief Operating Officer. But I can deal with that. I like it

Bethany: 44:54

out of everything we spoke about today, if our listeners could only remember and take away one thing. What would it be? Don't

: 45:01

try and seek perfection, because it's not going to happen. But go all in on a knowledge management tool. Doesn't matter which one it is, but stick with it. Evangelise it. Push yourself to be the cringy person in the business. To do the loom video, to share the new Confluence update, because if you do it again and again, it works, and people will use it.

Bethany: 45:21

And then finally, just because you say, don't use loom, who do you use? I'm just curious, what's the loom alternative

Unknown Speaker: 45:28

I use Dropbox capture?

Brandon: 45:30

I have to ask then, why Dropbox capture versus loom? Good

: 45:34

question. I'm starting to run out of reason of my my own, my own personal tech stack. All

Brandon: 45:42

right, we'll leave it there. All right, perfect. So thank you, Jeremy Slater, for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment, and we will see you next week.