Notes from Brie Wolfson

Company Wide Comms

I found this in the word doc, her favorite company-wide comms channels for building the system of shared knowledge:

  • org/team-updates: for people updates, updates about the shape of the organization and where people sit in it, promotions, new people starting
  • starting-line: workstreams that are getting started, chime in when relevant
  • shipped: something brand new that’s launching
  • state-of: how a particular workstream is going
  • retrospectives: lessons learned from evaluating work already done
  • board-meeting: what the company is presenting to the board (sensitive stuff redacted)
  • chit-chat: random chatter about anything
  • announcements: company-level news and updates everyone should know about (separate than chit-chat so that people can have notifications on)
  • inspiration: work outside the company to aspire to
  • ama: a safe place to ask questions that someone else might be able to answer quickly
  • win-wire: big company wins, particularly for user-facing teams (sales, renewals, deals signed)
  • leader-notes: what’s on the mind of company leaders
  • suggestion-box: a lightweight way to suggest improvements to the company
  • industry-news: relevant things going on in the industry
  • user-feedback: what user’s are saying
  • overheard: to laugh about silly things colleagues say
  • A note on templates: I’m obsessed with these because if you get them right it reduces the cognitive load of sharing information. I always put a note at the top of a template that says, “if this template doesn’t cover something that’s important to your work, edit the template.” Internal comms person can partner with the right people to produce the right templates for the right channels.
  • Slack Rangers. For every company-wide channel like this, I tell teams to appoint a “ranger” for ensuring that 1-expectations, norms, templates, etc. for that channel are documented and 2- good stewardship in that channel is upheld. So, this person is often pinging things like “this might be better suited for x other channel” or “reminder to use the template next time” or honestly just being the first person to react to something to show engagement.