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unDavos Core Team
Internal Communication: How, why, and where do we communicate in UnDavos?
We use a lot of software tools, (see ). And sometimes it might not be clear which tool you should use, to communicate with your team.
This document outlines a vision and practice of how and where we communicate and collaborate in UnDavos. If you have questions, please ask them right here on the page in the form of a comment. And this is your document so see this as a live conversation for us to negotiate together on this page how we prefer to work together.
Embracing the balance between Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication
In a world dictated by calendars and schedules, people are conditioned to operate in synchronicity — meaning that they inhabit the same physical or virtual space at the same time. is the art of communicating and moving projects forward without the need for collaborators or stakeholders to always be available at the same time your message is sent.
Although we are not a fully all-remote company we are working in hybrid ways so practicing the balance between asynchronous and synchronous workflows are vital to avoiding dysfunction and increasing efficiency.
The benefits include enabling our team to work effectively across UnDavos project contexts, reducing meetings, and enabling team members to work on a flexible schedule according to our different UnDavos work percentages — all of which raises morale and productivity. However, shifting to this way of working requires a few of large and small adjustments.
The vision of this philosophy is to: A streamlined organisational, communication and collaboration system for both internal and external networks. To collaborate together like they do on the Star Trek Enterprise to have the impact we desire for our festival attendees and to achieve impact as efficiently as possible.
Studies have shown that the average knowledge worker devotes 61% of their time to “work about work”
As a result, we spend less than 40% of time on our actual current and future work:
Actual Work - Next question is quality of work?
We think it’s important to try to shift these percentages to eliminate a lot of the “work about work” that’s so common -- and the mindset, processes and tools we aim for implementing is designed to help accomplish that.
1. Asynchronous work provides autonomy, empowerment, and agency
2. Asynchronous work increases efficiency and boosts productivity
3. Asynchronous work is more inclusive
4. Asynchronous work alleviates stress and supports mental health
5. Asynchronous work encourages thoughtfulness and intentionality
6. Asynchronous work bridges the knowledge gap
What is Cross-Functional Collaboration?
Cross-functional collaboration is the process where individuals from different departments in an organization with different areas of expertise come together to achieve a common goal. This collaboration could be organic or project-based.
An example of organic cross-functional collaboration could be when the sales manager approaches the marketing manager about expected future buying trends of the customers to plan campaign ideas around it.
An example of project-based cross-functional collaboration could be when an organization decides to create a new product line and requires the collaboration of individuals from different expertise.
How to effectively implement Cross-functional Collaboration
An organization comprises individuals with various expertise who may be able to effectively achieve their departmental objectives. But without the interaction and involvement of individuals from different departments, it becomes difficult to achieve the overall organizational goal. Thus, the collaboration of individuals from different departments is critical to the survival of an organization. Here are some ways to effectively implement cross-functional collaboration:
1. Implement collaborative systems.
To collaborate you need the tools to aid collaboration. There are many software platforms in the market that help set up a . Depending on the industry and the organizational culture, you must choose a software platform that best suits your business. Most popular platforms today are cloud-based, ensuring they can be accessed across devices, locations, and time zones. Nonetheless, it is vital to adopt a collaborative system that works with minimal error and difficulty. Otherwise, for example, individuals will simply resort to saving files on local devices, which means other individuals are unable to collaborate on the same files.
2. Automate your workflows.
increases the efficiency of collaboration among different individuals. By automating straightforward tasks, you free up time and give each individual clear responsibilities so that they can focus on their tasks without worrying about other things. You have the ability to configure custom workflows, share them with all the individuals involved, which helps them focus on their specific functions. This leads to shorter execution times, as there is less unnecessary back and forth between individuals.
3. Hire and promote collaborative staff and leaders.
Culture manifests itself as a series of collective human behavioral norms. So to create a collaborative organizational culture requires staff and leaders with a collaborative mindset. Not all people are good at collaborating. Knowing this, recruiters must test and identify candidates strong in this area. Whereas, promoting existing staff with a strong collaborative mindset to leadership positions helps in getting the rest of the staff to collaborate effectively.
4. Build trust and transparency.
If there is no trust between employees working together in an organization, the collaboration will fail. Lack of trust disables individuals from different departments to communicate openly and, therefore, to work successfully towards the same objectives. requires honest and transparent communication. If lack of trust is an obstacle to collaboration in your organization, try starting with a few small opportunities for individuals to work together to get quick wins. In addition, consider rewarding individuals involved in cross-functional collaboration. Seeing short-term results and receiving rewards for achievement can help build trust among them.
Benefits of effective cross-functional collaboration
There are major benefits to implementing a robust collaborative system. Besides the obvious that the output of a multifaceted team is greater than the sum of its individual parts, here are some overlooked benefits of that will help your organization grow holistically.
1. Knowledge sharing.
Individuals get to learn more about other expertise. This creates employees with multifaceted skills and perspectives.
2. High-level insight.
Provides insight into how different departments function. This helps employees understand the overall functioning of the organization which helps them gain clarity, and with clarity comes better decision-making.
3. Innovation.
Innovation comes out of new combinations and this is true for cross-functional teams. When employees with different areas of expertise brainstorm together, there are bound to be new and innovative ideas.
4. Team spirit and employee engagement.
Collaboration provides the opportunity for individuals from different departments to interact with each other, that they otherwise may not have. This builds an overall team spirit and creates a positive environment within the organization.
Conclusion
An organization comprises various departments with individuals from different areas of expertise. Managing, organizing, and aligning organizational goals can get difficult if each department functions autonomously. Every organization will have some degree of collaboration. But to truly get the maximum out of your workforce it is vital to set up a robust collaborative system.
The human body is made up of eleven major systems:
Each system plays a crucial role in keeping the body functioning properly.
In the same way we have systems and tools for different purposes, that are interacting to sustain the Organisation / Organism.
Best practices for smooth asynchronous UnDavos communication.
When having a base collaboration culture working asynchronously, we must default to over-communication. We lose the richness of body language voice cues and energy levels that enrich what we actually say when we are face to face, so we must counter that with crystal clear written communication across all channels.
This means something for where we communicate, what we communicate, how often we communicate, and how intrusively we communicate. In other words, it means something for how we interact across the range of digital tools in our toolkits.
Principle 1: Overarching principle communicates where the actual work will get done.
This one rule will probably give you the answer to where should I communicate about X 80% of the time.
This is why
This rule is best illustrated with examples.
Pro Tip: In every project/meeting etc define where you can continue the conversation digitally so everyone knows where to speak in between physical touchpoints. Write this down in for example the Monday Project overview or in another point of truth, so its easy to understand where the “official” communication channels are for that specific context your collaborating in.
Principle 2: If it's actionable, it probably belongs in in Monday.
Monday is our social platform and point of truth for everything we intend to do in UnDavos. To this extent, we can say that if it's not in Monday, it's not happening. The vision and power of Monday are to map everything so that Monday represents the actual situation. This way we can use Monday as a map to navigate our future and chip away at the complex challenges we are facing.
So If you are going to do something or need someone else to do something, you should probably create a Monday task, and assign the task to the person, in the
We default to Monday (not Telegram) for everything that is not world-ending urgent.
Communication on Monday is asynchronous and nonintrusive. Direct messages (and @tagging) in Telegram are intrusive and focus-killing. We don't want to encourage reactivity and an “always-on” mentality in the team, so whenever possible, use Monday so your recipient can reply whenever it is convenient for them, NOT right now when, they are in the middle of something important.
Also, using Monday makes sure the communication stays CONTEXTUAL and linked directly to a task or a project, which makes it easier to collaborate with others and find the information again later. Default to Monday.
Our goal with Monday is also to open it up to the larger community to get insight into our way of working.
There isn't one "right" way to use Monday, but we should agree on and set conventions around the right way to use Monday with UnDavos. Every team will have unique preferences, but here’s some guidance to help get us started on defining our UnDavos shared conventions.
”Defaults to Monday” only work if Monday stays in a dynamic place where things actually happen. That means you must open Monday Updates every day and at some point during the day, reply to whatever needs a response. Clean up your Monday My tasks and update your projects. This is not just for your own sanity sake, but for everyone else's too: the team can only trust that Monday gives a realistic, up-to-date picture of the current status quo if we trust that it is kept up to date daily,
✅ Do's
⛔ Dont's
Tasks are the basic unit of action in Monday. You can create new tasks, duplicate an existing task, merge two tasks together, print a task, or delete a task. Create a task if you have a smaller effort that logically fits into an existing Project.
Think of the task as an email:
Assigning work to other people can feel awkward. This is a common hurdle when adopting Monday as a team - but is transformative once overcome! We recommend encouraging everyone to create tasks and assign them to anyone on the team (even direct reports should be able to assign tasks to managers). Monday is most useful when anyone can contribute their ideas and move action items forward. Assigning tasks forces a degree of clarity around who is responsible for what. Some ways to help:
✅ Do's
Check Monday daily, as you would with email or Telegram, and respond to tasks assigned to you! Ideally, track your personal to-do's in Monday so it becomes a necessary tool to keep open.
When someone assigns you a task, it means you are in charge of moving that work forward.
Here are some suggested ways to keep teammates informed of your progress:
✅ Do's
⛔ Dont's
Use Subtasks to break down a task into smaller steps.
When you assign a subtask, be sure the assignee has enough context from the parent task or within the subtask description. Avoid burying subtasks under too many layers. You can always drag subtasks into the main pane of your project to convert it from a subtask to a task.
Principle 3: If it is eternal knowledge, that we should remember for a long time, it belongs in Coda
Think of the Coda as our collective memory bank. If you want something to be stored for the future, something that's useful for yourself or a colleague, one week or several years from now on, put it into Coda. It could be a lesson learned, a documentation of the workflow process, or what the Wi-Fi code at the office is. For example, is the place for questions that get asked over and over again. If you're wondering about something, it might already have been answered somewhere in Coda. () As of now we have alot in Gdrive also. In general its usefull to lift up important resources from Gdrive and add it into the relevant places on Coda.
How to build a knowledge management system
A product team’s knowledge management system.
No matter what business you're in, knowledge is your most important asset and competitive advantage.
It's part of everything you do. It can be granular, like the step-by-step process engineers follow for a product launch. Or it can be strategic, like your marketing team's design language.
But what happens when that knowledge isn't documented? Countless questions arise. When it's inaccessible? Execution suffers. Time wasted, unfollowed processes, incorrect information sharing — these problems stem from not having a system with which to manage the constantly growing (and evolving) knowledge base at your company.
Building a knowledge management system — or KMS — is about more than just making employee benefits information clear and easily-found. It's like building a shared brain for your org, one that collects learnings and helps everyone operate more efficiently.
Here, we'll explain why a knowledge management system is important and how you can build one, so you can spend more time focusing on the task at hand instead of rooting around outdated files.
What is knowledge management? Why do you need it?
External knowledge is for people outside your company. Think about your help center or FAQs housed on your company website. You do this to help customers — providing a better customer experience by giving them the ability to access information whenever they need it.
We'll be focusing on internal knowledge — which are all your company resources for employees. How you create, distribute, use, and maintain all that information
The list of organizational knowledge is likely long. It can be the company mission, a team directory, or a process detailing how product managers should interview users. Your KMS makes this info easy to find for your team and remains updated with the latest information so nothing's our of date.
Without a KMS, you...
A well-tuned knowledge management system should fire like an engine, driving your team forward by getting everyone the most up-to-date information they need in as little time as possible.
All your team’s information is easily accessible in your knowledge management system.
Your KMS can...
Building a KMS is one of the highest-leverage projects you can tackle. Once built, it'll serve as the map for everything your team does.
What to consider when implementing a KMS
Everything about your company and its knowledge is unique. So before actually shopping for your knowledge management solution, it's important to think about the knowledge you're organizing and the technology you'll use to do it.
Explicit vs. tacit knowledge
You're probably familiar explicit knowledge — it's anything codified into a document and stored for later use. A company policy, a co-worker's cell phone number in a company directory, things like that.
The second is tacit knowledge. It's knowledge gained with experience. Often, it's hard to define and turn into explicit knowledge.
Knowledge management systems are usually good at organizing explicit knowledge, storing it, updating it and making it easy to find. Tacit knowledge is another story — not because it's less important but rather, because it's rooted in experience.
But these two types of knowledge need to work together in your KMS to level up your company and pull learnings from all angles.
Japanese organizational theorist , "The key for this synergetic expansion of knowledge is joint creation of knowledge by individuals and organizations." Your knowledge management strategy should bring together the knowledge from your organization (explicit knowledge) and your team (tacit knowledge).
The goal should be to cement a culture of documentation at your company, where employees are making strides to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
Knowledge management software
In order to choose the knowledge management tool, consider the pieces of knowledge you want to organize. Is it a collection of notes and documents? Is it resources and benefits for your employees? What about steps in a process a specific team should follow?
There needs to be a system for collecting, maintaining and serving that knowledge to the right person at the right time.
"The key to better productivity is applying technology more precisely," says Gartner analyst Thomas H. Davenport in .
After deciding what knowledge to organize, here are a few considerations for implementing technology to do it:
Each team can have their own space within your knowledge management system.
Remember technology is only part of the equation when creating a KMS. Writer that human interaction is part of a rich knowledge management system.
The people at your company are responsible for creating and organizing knowledge, while technology gives you the ability to share, collaborate and access it. For example, using Notion for your KMS gives the humans at your company the ability to create and customize your system. Instead of being static and rigid, its collaborative features enrich the relationship between explicit and tacit knowledge.
Examples of different knowledge management systems
Your team's knowledge isn't one dimensional — it'll likely range from company resources to meeting notes and everything in between. With Notion, you can create one single KMS for all types of knowledge.
Below is some inspiration, along with templates to get you started.
A home for all company material
Organize all your company's most vital information for employees. Here, each collection of knowledge has its own individual page — like "Office Manual" and "Employee Directory" — making it easy to find and access for your employees. Get the .
Your company’s knowledge management system becomes a tool for all your teams.
All meeting notes shared across teams for company-wide learnings
Think of this like a document management system. When meeting notes are shared in your KMS, so are the learnings for your team. These are tagged by the type of meeting, date, and its participants, making the notes easily-accessible by all team members, so no one misses a beat (even those who weren't in the meeting). Get the .
Your team’s meeting notes can be part of your knowledge management system too.
A content calendar to manage all your marketing team's work
You can even use a KMS to organize different types of media — whether it's a gif for a Tweet, a case study interview, or video inspiration. This system allows you to see where projects stand, who's responsible, and when they're set to launch. Get the .
Different kinds of media come together in your KMS, like a content calendar.
Teams within your company can create their own KMS setups
Each team at your company likely needs a specific set of tools, processes and guides to do their work. Inside of your knowledge management system, they can create their own space to access, share and update information. Learn how to make an .
Each team can build a wiki that holds their most important information.
A public job board
Using , you can make any of the pages in your company's KMS public. This can be used as an external knowledge management system, as opposed to the internal systems we've discussed. This way, people outside your company can get the necessary information they need — like job postings or FAQs. This saves your customer support team from getting inundated with requests about what roles you're hiring for. Get the .
You can create an external KMS for your job board.
How to Build Your Knowledge Management System
Ready to take the action and build your own internal knowledge management system? Using Notion, we'll show you how to make a KMS at the company level. You can apply these same principles to other systems too, like . And if you need a little help building the perfect setup for your team, we have certified who can help get you up and running.
Plus — this system totally customizable. You can make Notion fit to your workflow. And all that info is centralized in one place, which makes organization and knowledge sharing super simple.
1. Gather the information that'll live in your KMS
When thinking about building a company-level knowledge base, you'll first need to gather the resources employees need.
A repository of this information is a well your employees can continually go back to — so when policies change, or when new hires inevitably forget a few things in the , it's all available whenever they need it.
These might include:
It's beneficial to gather these documents by topic, making them easier to package when it comes time to build your KMS.
You can take this same approach when creating individual KMS systems for your teams. Assign a point person from each team to collect all that team's need-to-know information into one page, organizing it for easy use.
It can include:
Updating these pages on (at least!) a quarterly basis helps keep everything fresh.
2. Build & customize it
In Notion, you'll add a page to the WORKSPACE section in your sidebar that's called "Company Home."
This will be a one-stop-shop for anything you team needs. Ease of use is key, so employees can quickly parse through information instead of searching through a floor-length scroll of loose links.
In Notion, your KMS can hold different types of media.
Do this for each one of your information collections. So at a glance, employees can quickly see which page they'll need to find the information they're looking for.
In Notion, you can even customize how this looks.
Bring your KMS to life with custom emojis or cover images.
From an onboarding perspective, you can also create a custom set of materials for each new teammate. It'll have everything in your company wiki, along with relevant information about the team they're joining, their manager, and more.
Bottom line — you want this information to be useable by your team. Think about how they consume and share information, and customize your KMS to those needs.
3. Bring your team into the fold
The point of a KMS is getting your team to use it — both for finding information, but also for maintaining its accuracy. None of this is worthwhile unless it's a tool used by your team.
Here are a few steps to foster collaborative, effective knowledge management.
Tagging teammates in KMS pages ensures no one misses information.
Once employees start adding to the KMS, this fosters a collective brain. To further entrench this practice, create a page outlining how your company should be using Notion — setting guidelines to make these pages productive.
But if there's a page someone isn't supposed to see, in Notion, you can . For your primary wiki pages, you might want only a few people with editing access. But everyone should be able to read them. Learn more about permissions below.
4. Regular updates
Don't let you knowledge get stale. Set a cadence where you'll routinely check on your KMS to ensure everything's up to date.
Keeping your KMS fresh is another key to it being used by your team. It's like a chef's knife. The sharper it is, the better it is to use (and safer, too).
In Notion, maintaining and updating your knowledge management system for the entire company is easy because it's centralized. You can give yourself reminders about specific pages that might need frequent updating, like a team directory or work from home policy.
On the page, simply type @ and the date you want to be reminded. On that date, you'll get a notification in the All Updates section of your sidebar.
Keep pages fresh by assigning them to teammates.
5. Optimize for better use
As your company evolves, so too should your KMS.
Take stock of how your team is using the knowledge management system. Do you notice a lot of its links being shared in Telegram? Are less questions being asked because they're answered by the KMS? This isn't a science, but you can take a pulse check on the system's effectiveness.
Notion helps do this by showing how recently someone has viewed a page. Simply hover over the icons on top right to see the last time each page has been visited. This helps you audit your KMS, surfacing which pages might be irrelevant to keep.
Then, after you gather some learnings, optimize it.
At Notion, one thing we've done is create "Archive" pages inside certain area of our KMS. Here, we'll bury old meeting notes, decision-making frameworks, or outdated info. We find this better than deleting the page, because having it around might be valuable if you need to resurrect something later. If you're wondering how the vacation policy has changed since you started at the company, you can find out what it was before and why that decision was made.
Customize your KMS with drag-and-drop in Notion.
We also have team-specific wikis in our KMS. So, each team has their own knowledge base, from marketing to engineering to customer support. This way, all their information is neatly organized, making it easy to find and use.
Taking the overhead out of organization
A solid knowledge management system becomes an extension of your team.
Without a system, knowledge isn't tangible. It lives in employees' heads, slowing down new or existing teammates, plateauing learnings and potentially running incorrect processes — because nothing is written down and accessible.
With frequent use, it gets even more powerful. Information is gathered, stored, organized, shared and maintained. That foundation sets your team up to save time, work more efficiently, and collaborate seamlessly. Try today!
Principle 4: Telegram is only for things that don't fit anywhere else.
All information and messages that don't fit in other tools goes into the proper channels, on Telegram. Telegram is for immediate, quick updates, and all internal team communications. Use for urgent matters, internal info, questions, and tasks. Communication is expected between 09:00 - 17:30. Utilize threads for organized discussions and integrate tools for efficiency. Ensure messages are in the appropriate channel with relevant links.Here are a few Telegram conventions for how to use Telegram in UnDavos:
Discord is great! But it can quickly spiral into a stress-inducing monster that throws notifications at you and distract you from getting any real work done. We try our best to avoid that.
Before posting on Discord ask yourself:
The power of asynchronous collaboration is that we can communicate in a non-intrusive way where our collective deep work focus is respected. With good planning and an aligned use of our toolbox, we can trust that we all use the digital tools correctly daily we can also trust that our information comes through so we don't default to last-minute urgent messages that take others’ focus.
We have a few different Telegram channels. Each channel should contain a description of the purpose of that channel and in every project/meeting we should define where to continue the conversation.
Think about where to place the information/message with this metaphor.
You find a spoon on the floor. Its important that you put it in the right place so others can find it and use it. The question is then. Where does the spoon belong? Banal question right? Obviously in the kitchen, in the cutlery drawer. Now imagine you find a glass on the floor? That would go in the kitchen cabinet. The same goes for our messages. Discord is the kitchen in this metaphor and the spoon might be a specific project context.
Write out your entire message before hitting send, instead of sending five messages after each other. This forces you to think through what you're going to say and makes our channels less noisy.
Background
To make it efficient to manage 30+ sessions, it is best to put all involved in a session in a special TG group
Method
unD Summit Mental Health Panel > >> slot organizer = @juleschappell > I hour slot on mental health To do - catchy title, 50-100 word session blurb, collect speaker bios ( ), work out the best time slot - and ideally have an investor who is working in this area too … plus decide if you need a separate moderator, or you’ll have a content-moderator approach :) thanks!
Principle 5: Mail is for external communication
Mail is for external UnDavos communication.
Same point as above. Please do NOT become a reactive dopamine-driven monkey drooling over your inbox. 24/7 waiting for your next hits, but on the other hand, let's not keep important external parties (customers, partners etc) waiting too long. Responding to and archiving everything so you get to Inbox Zero daily seems like a good compromise (I highly recommend bashing your email in an intentional manner for example for 15 minutes after lunch and before going home instead of keeping email open all the time.)
Tips:
Principle 6: Urgent Communication via Phone/Text
Use phone calls or text messages for critical issues needing immediate action, ensuring quick resolution and minimal disruption.
Acknowledgement of this internal communication manual: The core structure of this page is created and inspired by Jacob Mørch from and then edited and built upon.
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