Question of the Week: Communication

Many participants in the strategic planning listening sessions this Fall have talked about a lack of communication at the college, but also expressed concern about the volume of email we all receive.

What is the best way for the college to effectively communicate important information without it getting lost in a barrage of emails? [Use the speech bubble to the right or the reply link below to respond]

Please feel free to think of this question in terms of the college as a whole, as well as in relationship to your own discipline, expertise, or experience.

12 thoughts on “Question of the Week: Communication

  1. A college wide calendar on my desktop screen would be great! The event organizer could post the information on the calendar and I could check the calendar in the morning to see if there are events I’m interested in attending.

    The meeting/ event organizer could send out a campus wide Outlook meeting request and I could accept/tentative/decline the event. If I accepted, the event would be put directly onto my calendar eliminating the need for reminder emails. I believe that the organizer can choose not to receive confirmation emails, which would prevent him/her from receiving a million emails.

  2. I have worked at other institutions that ban many of the announcements we receive in our email. Instead, they had a website devoted to events and announcements. It was updated daily, every computer on campus had a link to the site on the desktop, and it was very easy to post announcements to the site and specify the length of time that the announcement should stay active.
    A setup like this would go a long way toward cleanup up our email inboxes. Instead of having emails sent out multiple times for events, the event information could be posted on the site for a week or more. This shift in how we obtain information would allow us to focus on important correspondence in email while consolidating announcements in one location. I’m sure there are people at the college who would not look at the announcement sites, but those same people probably reflexively delete announcement emails already.

    • I love this idea! I often feel overwhelmed by the amount of email I receive in my BC email account. I want to know about campus announcements, but if they could all be consolidated on a single page, I think it would greatly help in reducing Inbox fatigue.

  3. Perhaps if there was/is a way to designate a specific color font to the subject title of e-mails containing important information that would be the most efficient way to distinguish e-mails of importance from the rest. For example, most people would be apt to notice an e-mail if the subject title were in all red letters.

  4. If you want to effectively communicate IMPORTANT information, the news should come from leadership down to the individual divisions and departments directly. But, first, there should be a decision made early in the process to prioritize what information is important, otherwise, it would be too overwhelming for the leaders.

  5. At a bank I worked at in my former life we had an intranet site that came up first thing when you opened your computer. On it would be announcements and important stuff. You could just minimize the window and look at it when you wanted to. This kept stuff from getting lost in emails and forgotten about. We could redesign the MyBC site to better show events and other FYI. Maybe there could be a way that if you wanted to go to an event that’s posted, there would be an accept to your calendar button and it would go to your Outlook calendar.

  6. I echo a lot of the suggestions here. I know we have an events calendar on campus, but publicizing that, making it a go-to tool, rather than one very few people know about would be better. A reliable campus calendar would be nice, and part of that requires perhaps the Events Office to be expanded. Carla and Peggy are wonderful, but they are only two women, with one assistant, and one person for set up. Having another full time assistant to manage the calendar and work on pushing the events out on campus, rather than having each department send 30 e-mails would be nice.

  7. I love the idea of an event calendar with some other form of notification other than email. The volume of email is overwhelming….especially for new faculty.

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