If you are the tech team in a smaller business – I have a question for you; How well do you communicate to your organization when something on the technical side goes wrong?
We know that things will go wrong, it is just about unavoidable, perhaps your Internet connection goes down, a particular server has trouble. the bottom line is that events happen, and things do break. And when they do break, what happens? Are company employees kept in the dark wondering what is going on? Do they know the issue? Are they being told what is being done to fix the problem?
Communication, and lots of it, is critical with IT Service issues. Communicate the issue, the status, even your hopes! Simply ignoring the effect of the disruption on all employees or a curt comment that it is broken is not acceptable.
Managing Perception
Accurate and honest communication affects how people will perceive your effectiveness during the stressful periods of IT service disruption. Absolutely nobody wants a service failure, but their perception will be one of two things;
One perception can be that the error is being handled as quickly and effectively as possible, or worse, the perception could be that the technology leadership does not give a damn that something is broken and no one has a clue what is really happening. Communication: honest, rapid communication helps keep the positive perception in place.
Lets look at an example written by Tom Catalini in this post titled: The value of information, and the cost of misinformation.
Mr. Catalini is a resident of Boston MA, and recently Boston, as well as many other parts of North America have been battered by heavy snowstorms. With massive amounts of snow piling up, the Boston public transit systems real time communications systems were constantly and consistently being updated, and being constantly and consistently and completely wrong.
If you were outside standing in that snow, having been told that the next bus is in 7 minutes, when the previous 3 did not show up at all, how would you begin to feel? A little frustrated perhaps? The communication keeps saying; Give it a few minutes!” but reality cannot meet that communication.
Now how about if the situation was the same, but the real time communications system was a little more honest with a message; “ … due to inclement weather, we are working our hardest to…”
I guarantee that we can still be frustrated while we freeze outside waiting, but we also understand the details of a very important why. And that someone is ‘working their hardest..’
The SMB IT Takeaway
As an IT leader in the small to medium business, I consider it critical that communication to the organization is complete, honest and as accurate as possible when there is any type of IT service disruption.
To give an example, what if our critical Internet connection has stopped working? My first communication will be about the issue, the support steps and the testing that will take place, and I will add a comment that I will keep everyone up to date as I get new information.
Lets imagine that my internal technology pieces are all working OK, and that my next step is contacting our service provider. Again, I communicate the status and that I have created a support incident with our provider, and again that I will let everyone know when new information is obtained.
This continues until the issue is resolved, and after it has been resolved? I then communicate the full details, the why it failed (root cause) if we were able to determine that.
Nobody wants our Internet connection dead, (that includes me) but when everybody knows up front what is happening, it stops long line ups around my office asking what the hell is going on.
Photo Credit Doc Searles via Flickr
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