Rehumanizing Corporate Communication

     I’m an introverted computer nerd. I’ve been a nerd my whole life. Being a kid of the 80’s I’ve lived through the uprising of the computer age. Early in my career, telephones, fax machines, and paper copies of everything was the norm. Email and online collaboration tools were in their infancy. However, they would soon have a dramatic impact on the future of work.

    Email was the ultimate productivity unlock. Before email the typical way to correspond with some was to send letters back and forth or call them on the phone. Letters had a certain personal touch, but took some effort to craft and took a while to deliver. Email changed the time constraint around written correspondence by making it instantly deliverable while keeping the most critical element of letters, the asynchronous workflow.

   Email has been the reigning champion for corporate communication however, it’s riddled with problems like spam, AI generated content, and it strips out 90% of communication information, the non-verbals. Video conferencing has been a great supplement but it lacks the critical element of email, the asynchronous workflow. How can we keep an asynchronous workflow AND the human element?

    I believe that recorded video is the best of both worlds. Not exclusive to email and video conferencing, but it should be a tool in addition to the aforementioned. With recorded video you can send a colleague feedback while keeping all of the critical non-verbals in your message. How many emails have you sent have been misinterpreted? I bet a lot!

    Over the past few decades, and accelerated by COVID, we have systematically stripped humanity from companies. We are still treating people like replaceable cogs, just like during the industrial revolution. People are not cogs in a machine.

    People buy from people. People work with people. People follow people. The modern grind is not a mechanized process, it’s a human process. As we invent and leverage new technology tools it becomes critical to keep the human element present.

    My goal is to rehumanize corporate communication. This means we want to make tools that help teams become super efficient AND keep the human element with their messages.

Join me in the human revolution.
- jj