Knowing means, knowing where to look
[This post was first published in German in the reinorange.com blog.]
Same old story: We all want to find whatever piece of information we’re currently missing, but few people are willing to put the work in to create documentation.
Let’s assume, you’re working in an organization that has virtually no documentation of company specific facts, resources and processes.
Every colleague has to retrieve each piece of information – even trivial ones – for themselves. Usually that means, that you have to first find out, who knows that particular piece of information, then hunt them down and ask them. People who harbor a lot of knowledge and are often at the receiving end of the questions eventually become mildly to majorly peeved about the frequent questions.
By the way, I’m talking about super general stuff like:
- How do I request leave?
- How do we hire new people?
And not yet about complex technical documentation like “How does our Continuous Integration works?”
The lack of information is hardest for new hires. Best case scenario: They are worried about annoying everyone with their questions but they still ask. Worst case: They wing it as best they can and when they can’t, they twiddle their thumbs or they’re heading in the wrong direction.
It’s not ideal. But the costs – lost time, mistakes, frustration – are spread out and largely invisible. The group most affected – new hires – are also the most unlikely to air their grievances. They don’t want draw attention if they don’t know what to do – fearing that it will be attributed to them as individuals, not to a failing of the company.
That’s why explicit investments into better internal documentation are few and far between.
Now lets further assume that you are pissed off at the situation enough that you want to tackle the issue. But how? You don’t have the time to write documentation for weeks on end! And even if you did – where would you put all of it? You first need a wiki or Notion and you don’t have any budget and … Aaaaah!!!
Okay, breathe. In and out. Let’s wave that elaborate, perfect solution goodbye, right here and now. Maybe it’s not crucial that you end up with a single unified system, containing everything described in great detail. Maybe it’s enough to create a Table of Contents containing all the information that already exists 💡
As a first step, all you need is something that better than “nothing” and that’s nowhere near as hard as the perfect solution.
The very first baby steps are:
- Collect what’s there (yay, nobody needs to create anything new)
- Distribute that collection somehow[™]
Step 1 – Collect what already exists
What pages have you already bookmarked in your browser (or you type them into the address bar every day until the matching suggestion appears)? Those are the start of your collection.
Next, ask others: Which pages do your colleagues keep opening time and again? Who has been with the company forever and is usually structured and organized. Ask these co-workers to give you their work-related links – via bookmark export, a copy of their notes or however they keep track of them.
Throw all these links into a pile, remove the duplicates and voila, that’s version 0.1 of your Linklist 🥳
Step 2 – Distribute the list
While it’s super duper that the list exists, it only reaches it full, helpful potential if others use it too.
In my first real job (it’s been a while 🙈), whenever someone new started, there came a point when someone said “Hang on, I’ll get you Richy’s bookmarks.” You’d be send a bookmark export to import into your own browser. That gave you all the most important links in one go.
Was that a perfect solution? OMG, no, faaar from it.
The export was a snapshot in time. From then on, all the collections of the various colleagues were independent of each other. When a url changed, each individual person had to notice, ferret out the new link and update it in their bookmarks.
We can probably all agree that a central solution would have been smarter. But was this less than perfect solution very helpful? OMG, yes!
You see, Richy had been with the organization for forever. His list included all relevant links to products, FAQs and admin interfaces. The leap from “no links and no clue” to “solid foundation with the most important links to start exploring” was ginormous.
So, if there is no obvious central place for your shiny, new linklist to live in, “bookmark export for importing” is an okay starting point.
Then all that’s left to do is spreading the word, however that works in your company – email, Slack, Teams, … – and broadcast that the latest version is available from you.
Done! (For now.)
One better: Central Linklist
Maybe there is a central place you can put the list so that it can be accessed by everyone and updated by at least you. Notion, Wiki, Google Doc/Suite, Office Online,…
A couple of questions to decide where to put the Linklist:
- What are you already using in the organization to spread news? Which of these channels work well?
- Which of these channels needs a login that only employees have? You do want it protected from outside eyes.
- What site can everyone in the company access? Do they know about this site and their logins?
- If you’d like co-workers to help maintain the list: where can they easily get writing permissions?
- Is there a place that people already go to when they are looking for information?
If so, put the Linklist in this central spot and distribute its url instead of a file, e. g.
- ask the sys admins to make it the browser’s starting page on newly installed work laptops,
- broadcast it again, pin it in Slack, …
There are lots of possibilities. Use as many of them as you can to drive the message home.
So far, so good. Give yourself a pat on the back!
But we can still improve the list itself and make it easier to find:
Bonus point: Shortlink
Do you use shortlinks within your organization? Then give a short descriptive URL your linklist, something that’s easy to remember. Benefits:
- People are more likely to successfully open the Linklist on a new device or browser and
- If the Linklist changes it’s home, you just have to change the url the shortlink points to. No need for anyone to remember a new url.
Bonus point: Sort
Your linklist will become more valuable if you put the lists into broad categories. Some examples:
- “Crucial Tools”, “Administrative”, “Student Helpers”, “Others”, …
- “For product A”, “For product B”, …
- “Project Managers”, “Devs”, “Customer Support”, …
- “Internal Project X”, “Joint Venture Y”, “Initiative Z”, …
- “Team T”, “Team M”, “Team N”, …
With scanable headlines your readers can scan the list and quickly gauge which kind of information is in the list. If a link fits into several categories, I always put it into all the sections it fit.
Within the sections, I also pay attention to order. Usually, I sorted by “what most people need”, but sometimes to “what people will need first (chronologically)”, depending on the topic.
Bonus point: Keywords/Tagging
The last bonus point is for tagging and adding keywords. Instead of just listing the naked url:
At least write:
And much better:
Product B Login (formerly oldProductName)
Our B2B product, providing X, Y und Z
more, keywords, to describe, productB
If this blog post was in my Linklist, I wouldn’t just write “Linklist” but also terms like “knowledge base” and “internal documentation”. Everything I can think of that someone might enter into a search bar to find this. Because that way, the browser search ctrl+f quickly helps you find what you’re looking for. And maybe the place you’re storing the linklist in has a search function too.
How much a build in search function helps, depends on the technology you chose. The search in Google Docs is absolute crap, Notion’s is okay.
You don’t have to do everything at once! You can also take the central Linklist “live” and then you add keywords for one section after another.
Disclaimer: Congrats on your new job
A Linklist works best if there is a clear contact person who takes care of it. And since you created the list in the first place… Chances are, that this is your baby now. It does come with benefits: You are making your co-workers lives much easier and they will remember that. It gives you rapport with many people. It’s worth it!
Obviously, you also save the company as an entity a lot of time, frustration and improve alignment if your Linklist also contains links to strategy.
Opening Doors
The best thing about the Linklist is that once there is a way to reliably find information, it suddenly becomes much more attractive to create new, additional documentation. But that’s for another blog post…