Redefining Workplace Communication: The Shift from Person-Based to Topic-Based

Mitch (00:06):

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make Others Successful, the podcast where we share insights, stories and strategies about building a better workplace. I want to start by apologizing for my raspy voice. I lost it and trying to get it back. So I'm going to let Matt and Emma here, our communication collaboration team talk for the majority of this podcast. But I do want to set the stage about what we're talking about today and why this came up and just kick us off. So two podcasts to go to. Bob Gals talked about a lot of how we communicate internally and how it changes how they work and show up to work and how it's different from some of their old workplaces. And we realized we should probably zoom out from that a tiny bit because there is quite a bit of workplace strategy around this culture of communication that we're building.

(00:57):

And some of it goes down to the tools we use and some goes to how we approach these things. And so we wanted to zoom out and talk about a better way to communicate internally. And before we go too deep, we are developing a course on this topic, which I'm super excited about. The working title for it is a 20 day total communication reset where we go through 20 days in a row, just short video clips where we help you hit reset on your internal communication and work through some of these concepts on a day-to-day basis and hopefully come out the other side with a better collaborating team. So we'll give you a link to that in the show notes if you're interested. So the premise for a lot of this comes from this world of email where people talk in back channels and people are out of the loop.

(01:45):

And you probably know all the different nuances of how email works at your company and some of your things that you do not like about email. Maybe they're not things that you don't realize you don't like about email, but more about how you're communicating. And so today we want to talk about how you might be able to use some tools to shift how you're communicating, free up that inbox, stop using email, and kind of why some of these tools work better than others. So a lot of this is just helping you learn about something that maybe you didn't know about and how to use it better. So topic-based communication versus person-based communication is sort of our internal working phrase for this, and it's not the most marketing friendly phrase, which is why we're not calling this podcast that, but when it comes down to it, it's these two things that are at odds with each other. So let's talk about what does this even mean? What is person-based communication? Shouldn't all communication be person-based versus topic-based communication? To

Emma (02:57):

Me, person-based communication. When you start your message or whenever you're thinking about starting a communication, you're thinking about the people you need to send it to. So your first, when you think about an email, the first thing at the top is the two. When you think about a direct message, you're deciding or even a chat message, you're deciding who are you going to put in that receiving line? So person-based communication, when we're talking about it, it means it's based on the people that you're sending the information to at its most basic form. Anything else to add, Matt?

Matt D. (03:29):

The only thing I would add is the technology is also a component of it. If I am sending an email to someone and I'm choosing the people to send it to, when I send that, that information is going into their personal mailbox,

Emma (03:45):

Each individuals

Matt D. (03:48):

Inbox. There are other technologies which we're going to talk about a minute, which is the topic based thing where you don't have to do that. You could still let someone or think about a person, but the actual place that it goes isn't in a location. So there's two pieces. One is a mindset thing, which is the biggest thing that people have to change in order to adopt topic-based communication, which is change your mind from always thinking about I need to tell John and Angela about this thing to something else, which we're going to talk about in a second. The second piece though is the tools. You need to be using a tool that doesn't only or exclusively work in a person-centric way or a person-based way. Yeah, so let me talk about topics. So a topic based communication is starting with the topic first

Emma (04:34):

Instead of the person Instead of the person. So there's the

Matt D. (04:37):

Difference. Yeah, so instead of saying, I need to send this thing to so-and-so I need to update this project status. And so you're starting from the point of, okay, where do I go to update the project status? Once you're there, then you might go, oh, I need to tag so-and-so because this is really important that they see that this got updated, right? It's an approach to communication that allows you to talk about topics. Now, I also talked about technology. Email has a way to support topic-based communication, and that would be shared mailboxes and using a shared mailbox for all of your things, but it has lots of problems. When I send something to a shared mailbox, I can't tag a person to say, maybe there's 20 people on a team and they're all monitor the shared mailbox, but I really need to talk to one person, but I also want everybody else in that group to know.

(05:34):

And then you might have people go, well, then you email the shared mailbox and CC the person you want. It just gets really complicated and what you're doing there is really taking something that was email is based on snail mail and there's an address and I'm sending it to an address and to a person at that address, and there isn't a CC option or you have these other tools and it's built around this model that is very physical and very classic in how you're approaching that communication. There are new tools, specifically Slack teams, SharePoint, like all of these tools that support topic centric. So topic is the focus, and that's what we're going to talk about a little bit today, is how you can really transform how you communicate by leveraging those tools to support this mindset shift from thinking about communicating with people exclusively with people and starting to think about topic is the most important and people as the second.

Mitch (06:35):

Yeah. Yeah. So people-based, first thing you think about is people topic-based. I am actually going to pull out a list of our channels just to give some examples of what we talk about. I actually misspoke there. I said channels. They're our channels. But what I want people to think about right now, these are the topics that we talk about. So we talk about operations, we talk about leadership, we talk about marketing, we talk about specific clients, sometimes specific client projects. These are all delineations between our communication. They do require using these, well, you mentioned it, a change in strategy, a change in mindset in order to use it well, you cannot just throw this new tool at somebody and say, talk there, because people often fall in common traps, which is what I want to talk about next, which is our primary audience is probably people who are using teams. We use Slack a lot, but we use teams a lot too. What are the things that people usually see something like teams and say, okay, this is the next way to communicate, but they kind of fall in the person-based approach still, and we'll talk about why that's a problem, but let's relate it to the people of how might they be using the tool today that is not the best.

Matt D. (08:00):

So almost every tool that can support topic-based communication can also support person-based communication. And that applies to email, it applies to teams, it applies to Slack, and in the world of email, it's the default. You get a two in the front and you say, this is what it is, and then you do the CC and then you do a subject. You don't do the subject first because it doesn't help in regards to where it's going. These tools like Teams for example, and Slack, it still supports direct messaging and direct messaging and files and calendar. These things are highly promoted within the package. When you open, if you're a brand new tenant, don't have anything, you open it up, you click on the top, things you see are chat activities and stuff, but then chat is really high on the list channels or a calendar is really high on the list and files is really high on the list or OneDrive, OneDrive. Those are all personal individual things. If I use chats, it's no better than me sending an email to someone directly. If I put something in my OneDrive, it's no different than putting something on my local file system on my computer.

Mitch (09:11):

And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck where they say, why is this tool so much better? I'm using chats, the direct messages, I'm using the files, but I'm not feeling this warm fuzzy. This is changing the way that we're communicating. And so I feel like teams probably gets a bit of a bad rap because people don't make that shift towards the next level.

Emma (09:38):

I think Matt's hitting on it really well when he talks about a chat is really no better than an email because that kind of brings us to the first problem I would call out is all of its own by the individual. The individual is responsible for all that information, whether it's in a chat or whether it's in an email. So it's on that individual person to make sure are they the only one that needs to know? Did other people need to know they're responsible for either looking at it, sorting it, putting it in the right spot, which kind of leads to just a whole nother issue if you have a lot of these conversations going on. So a lot of emails or a lot of chats, why do we create email folders? Because we're trying to sort things by where these go, whether it's projects, whether it's topics.

Mitch (10:24):

You have video about how to organize your inbox, right?

Emma (10:28):

Inbox, and we all do it right? It's natural because you're trying to bring some type of organization or structure to complete chaos. So I would say those are two big problems I would bring up of it's all owned and responsible for by the individual. And number two, you have to do the work to organize it after you've received it, which is just extra

Mitch (10:46):

Work. A lot of the same symptoms are mirrored on teams or email.

Emma (10:51):

If you're using direct chats

Mitch (10:53):

In teams, you're still or group

Emma (10:54):

Chats,

Mitch (10:54):

Yeah, you're still going to need to, I think about BCCing a boss so that someone can be in the loop when there's conflict or something where in an email it's just direct between those people and then you want to loop more people in. It creates this constant game of who needs to pay attention to what, and everyone needs to filter through that in their inbox in one feed and it's not

Matt D. (11:16):

Great and it's up to every individual to do it. So now rather than having, this is how we manage our stuff for this project or for this topic, you have, Emma has her way and I have my way, and you have your way and somebody else has their way and we just hired somebody new. They get to figure out their own way. And then the last thing I'll say, the last problem that I would highlight is there's no way to opt into these things. So many times in email and in chat messages, people get overwhelmed. People are either overwhelmed or they're not informed, one or the other. You either have a situation where someone includes everyone on every chat because they want them to see it, but in the chat message, every chat message teams expects you and Slack and all of these tools expects you to want to read every message.

(12:07):

Well, they're really only doing it so that I can keep updated. So we have our next meeting. If they wanted to review it ahead of time, they could review it. I don't need a response right? Then they don't need to respond to it immediately. But there is no other tool, there's no other way. When you BCC or CC someone, it's going to go in their mailbox and if they don't have it categorized and automatically going into a folder, it's going to be there with a bunch of other messages. The other end of it is somebody never includes anybody. I talk to this person and then I talk to that person and then I talk to this person, and then you're hearing five different versions of the message. There's no way for the person who is maybe interested in that topic but doesn't want to get all that flood of information to go on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning, say, I'm going to catch up on these things and kind of catch up on something that they're only interested in a little bit, not something that they need every day. There's just no option for that in email and in direct message and all of that stuff. There's just not a way to do that,

Emma (13:08):

And we're hitting on a lot of human behavior aspects in this conversation of each of us has our own way of working, so each of us wants to organize things in our own way or have an understanding of what we want to listen to or what we need to look at, what we feel we don't need to be involved in. So what we're talking about with topic-based communication, and I think we'll get there, is allowing people to make that decision autonomously, but having the option to opt in or opt out of things, which is kind of what you want to be able to do with email, but you can't.

Mitch (13:41):

Exactly. Yeah. Let's go there. Let's talk about topic-based communication to the rescue all. Why is this such a game changer, not just from a technology perspective, but from an experience perspective for someone? Let's kind of recap what the chat channels means and maybe what it means in Microsoft teams and let's go there for a minute. Well,

Emma (14:06):

Let's start with a really quick example. So I'm going to steal this from one of Matt Russell's blogs. I think it was a good example. So let's say I'm working on a project and I need to tell some of the folks I'm working with that I've updated all of the side deck that we're going to present and I need them to review. I really just need Sally and Dave to review. So in person base, I would just have emailed Sally and Dave and say, can you review this slide deck and get me back your response in topic based? I would put that in a channel that is labeled Project Blue Sky and I would say tag Sally and Dave and say, Hey, can you review these slides? Now, let's say Sally's out on vacation and Morgan is stepping up in her place and she's going to review the slides. I didn't know Sally was out. Well, Morgan's in that channel. She's already aware of that project. So now she sees the slides, she's able to respond. The information is in the channel, we're good.

Mitch (15:04):

The people who need to know about it exactly knew about it.

Emma (15:06):

Whereas in the first example, in the first part of that example, I would've gotten an out office message. Maybe Sally forgot to put her out of office message on and it just sits for two weeks. There's so many pitfalls of obviously person based and email. We've all been there, but having a channel for that specific project for that specific topic and posting there actually takes care of a lot of those issues. So there's an example to kind of think through. But Matt, why don't you talk more about just the structure of

Matt D. (15:35):

Channels. The concept of topics within teams in particular is very robust. So you have it at multiple layers. You have at the top layer, it's a team, so you can have multiple teams and each team in itself by its very nature, is a topic. Some organizations will have an all company team. Well, the topic there is stuff that you'd want everybody in the company to be able to see. They might have another project that is maybe a team focused. That might be the marketing team. Again, that's a topic. It's topics related to the people within the marketing team. And then you might have teams that are project focused that would be topics related to a particular project that a smaller group of people are working on. Within that, you have channels, and a channel is also a subtopic, if you will. So in the marketing team, you might have a channel for general, which might be just general conversations, but you also might have one that's on a specific topic or activity that's going on. We're doing

Mitch (16:38):

A campaign

Matt D. (16:39):

On a campaign that marketing is going through or

Mitch (16:41):

Building a video course about,

Emma (16:44):

Or maybe your social media is separated out there, your Instagram, your

Matt D. (16:48):

Facebook, and so really there is a lot of robust functionality around topics within the teams application, and it really, as you were saying, it provides a lot of benefit to be able to go into a channel that is on a particular project and be able to have that discussion there and not be afraid that someone might not be informed or that when next week when maybe you're jumping off the project this week and you you're putting your final notes together, being afraid that next week it'll get lost and somebody you're just going to get asked for it again. No, it is right there. It's in the team. Somebody has access to it. They'll be able to figure that out.

Emma (17:28):

And there's that history aspect, which is exactly what you're hitting on a

Matt D. (17:32):

History that's topic specific, not just the history of emails that I happen to have gotten on a particular topic, but a comprehensive topic history.

Emma (17:45):

Yeah, I mean talk about context, especially if you're onboarding someone or someone's newer to a project or you're trying to be agile and have people jump around from thing to thing. It really helps with that type of movement within a company because if someone's added to a team and you can scroll back up and kind of see what's happened recently, it really gives you context and you feel like you can hit the ground running versus, Hey, can you forward me every email that you've received? I mean, who wants to do that? No one, right?

Mitch (18:13):

Yeah. I feel like one of the other things you talk about too is we've been talking about maybe more day-to-day collaboration and communication, but the intranet kind of concept plays a role in topic-based communication too. Yeah,

Matt D. (18:28):

A hundred percent. It's just another tool that doesn't work in a person specific way. So if you take it all the way down to the file level, sharing a employee manual from your OneDrive is not super great because that's me, that's my personal library of files and I have the employee handbook and now I leave or I transfer or I don't have owner. What do you do using an intranet or a more centralized solution that is not person specific? It is topic specific. So in the case of an intranet, you might create multiple sites and multiple libraries that have topic specific focus. And actually a lot of the work that we do around an intranet solution is architecting the site structure, which is effectively the topic structure do you create about US site and an HR site and a news site. So it's all about corporate news. How do you approach that structure, which is 100% all about topics and what topics your organization talks about frequently enough to rise to the level that it needs its own site or its own tag or its own library or its own whatever. One

Mitch (19:44):

Of the things you just reminded me of is when we work on intranets, we recognize that there's departments in any company. We do not necessarily reflect that one-to-one at an intranet because a person does not necessarily work according to departments or they shouldn't. I hate it when people try to do that. They're like think a lot of the government sites that you go on, they're very based on department, you need to know where to go as opposed to what service, what am I trying to do? What am I trying to do? And so that is sort of, I guess we're saying cascade that down into your teams where teams might have be from different departments, but overlap and responsibility and you can have them on the same channel or same topic and be in one place as opposed to drawing clear lines between those departments, which yeah, it's hard to do without a tool that can be topic-based.

Matt D. (20:43):

Well, switching the concept and the paradigm of what you're thinking to topics rather than your structure allows you to think about things very differently and maybe you have certain topics that there is a lot of synergy between different groups and what they would want to talk about, and it allows you to break out of that if you need to. There are places and times when you need to explain what a division does within an organization. There's times when you need to manage things about a particular division. Intranets is definitely another area where topic-based communication is critical and most organizations get it wrong because they do exactly what you were talking about and they start from the perspective of, I have to have a page for this group and a page for this group and a site for this group and a site for that group. Maybe you do, but you also probably need some targeted topic specific thing.

Mitch (21:38):

Yeah. Can we wrap up this section with if someone is using teams, what would we tell them? If you wanted to do topic-based communication, instead of going to chat, what should they do?

Matt D. (21:50):

So instead of chat, it's all about teams. It's about making sure that you have a team created and a channel created that makes sense for that particular topic and using that almost exclusively. There's only a handful of times where I go, yes, this should be something that's direct messaged everything else. There's pretty much no reason it shouldn't be in a channel.

Emma (22:18):

So what I would encourage too is to not think about channels as being the super formal mode of communication. So a channel could just have two people in it or three people in it. Maybe you have a leadership, well, when I say channel, I mean teams. Teams. We use Slack. So a lot of times channel comes to mind, but a team could be just two people or just three people. You could still have a two person team and have conversation there, and that is still better than a direct message, if that makes sense.

Matt D. (22:46):

We had for a long time a two person channel. It was Mike and me and then Mitch got involved, and guess what we were able to add, Mitch, it. I

Mitch (22:58):

Could see all the times you talked about before it blackjack.

Matt D. (23:00):

Just kidding. You're a hundred percent right that the topic is the most important thing and if the topic is important enough, make it something specific

Emma (23:11):

And got to love Microsoft naming conventions. But I think sometimes that leads us astray because we think, well, I got to create a team. Well, in my mind, a team is five or more people or you got to have at least three three's company. A team is really no more in our minds than a place to talk about a topic, and so if you don't think about it as this huge, you got to get past this barrier. It's really formal to create a team. I mean, don't go create a team for

Matt D. (23:37):

Everything. Well, I mean that's the problem that Microsoft created. Microsoft created a tool that has a lot of stuff behind it. We're talking about the chat piece of it, but you get a SharePoint site, you get a planner, you get all of these things,

Emma (23:48):

So it creates this like, oh my gosh, this is this whole thing, but it's such a classic. Let's say you're thinking of let's do this new campaign for marketing or something. We don't think it's going to be that big of a deal, so we'll just direct message about it. Well, let's say it becomes really successful and it really takes off now it's going to be a bummer that all of that information was just back and forth in an email or just back and forth in a chat. So when in doubt, just create a channel. You can always archive it. You can always

Matt D. (24:15):

Or use an existing one

Emma (24:17):

Within a team using,

Matt D. (24:19):

We would use, if I've got the marketing thing is a perfect example, until it gets noisy enough that they go, oh, I really don't want this in general, just to have the conversation in general, you don't have to create a new channel or a new team for everything unless you know that you're going to need it. You said it's going to be a long running thing and you want to have that prep start a conversation when it gets to be the point where it's like, Hey, yeah, we need to move this out, number one, which we're going to get to this in a little bit, and so maybe I'm jumping ahead, but don't crucify people who are talking that way. Just trying to use the tool and be okay to create something and move it and move the conversation to somewhere else.

Emma (25:02):

Yeah, I would just encourage everyone to not have too formal or rigid of a mindset around it a hundred percent because it can feel more casual to have chat conversations, but you can still have casual feelings around a more structured communication strategy.

Mitch (25:19):

That's one of the things I'm hoping to reconcile with the course that we're working on where we actually take people through the day-to-day and say, okay, today you're going to create one of these things. Come back tomorrow. Here's what you need to work on next, and work on helping people through that process as opposed to it can be really intimidating.

Emma (25:40):

Just

Mitch (25:40):

See you go create stuff and hopefully it works. We've been talking about the good that comes with this. What is some of the bad that we've heard or seen and some of the reasons why someone might not jump two feet first into something like this.

Emma (25:56):

I'll start with my experience of joining the team. I sent you guys an email my first two weeks because I didn't know where to put. I was so enmeshed in that mindset of when I need to talk to people specifically like my three leaders at the company, I'm going to send them a specific email. I didn't know where else to put it. So it definitely requires extra training and a mindset shift, especially for people who have been working in the people based approach for a long time, for likely their entire career. So the extra training piece and then the change management around the mindset are to the most important to begin with.

Matt D. (26:33):

A hundred percent agree. Another one that once you get in there and you start using it, or maybe somebody is using chat heavily today and they're like, I love it. I don't email. I just chat all the time. They can complain a lot about the burden around putting stuff in a channel, for example, and the notifications around that, because when you put something in a channel, the notifications work very different than they do for a chat. Like I said before, a chat, there's an expectation that in a chat that you want to read everything that someone is sending to you in a channel. The expectation is you really only want to read the stuff where somebody's tagged you, and so what's going to happen is things are just going to behave differently than you're used to, and it's going to take some time to understand that and to get it set up because now rather than having maybe 5, 6, 7 chats that you're kind of monitoring off and on, and people kind of know, if I send 'em this, it's going to notify them immediately, et cetera.

(27:33):

Now I've got five channels in one team and two channels in another team, and four channels and another team, and each one of those channels can have different settings and different ways that you want to subscribe to that information. And so it can be a little bit overwhelming, number one. And number two, just like with chat, you're also heavily end email. You're heavily dependent on the other person understanding the etiquette, right? Yes. Do they understand that they're supposed to tag you when they want you to look at something, right? If they don't and you miss something, and now somebody's upset with you that you miss something, but it's not really your fault. They didn't tag you like they were supposed to, right? Yeah. But just like with email, just like with all these other tools, it's just a learning curve. People will get the etiquette, they'll understand it as you start to use it, but if you never use it and you avoid it because of it, it's never going to happen.

Mitch (28:28):

I categorize my channels according to importance. What do I need to know about every message that happens in there? What are the ones that I can just mute and check in on every once in a while just so I'm in the loop? And then there's some in the middle where it's more nuanced than that and I maybe just look out for tags or things like that. So there's a burden on me for

Emma (28:50):

Sure. The notification settings can be intimidating. I struggle with them sometimes as well of just, okay, wait, I didn't have my notifications on for this shoot. I missed things that I was supposed to see. So I would also suggest having a page about how to set notifications and that kind of thing on your internet or on where your knowledge base, wherever people find information on how to do things, having that set up before switching to this will be really helpful so that people feel like they're empowered to decide how much noise there's going to be and what they want to be subscribed to and getting notification for, because otherwise you're going to lose people real quick if everything's flooding in that once

Mitch (29:26):

Those go back to chat.

Emma (29:27):

Yeah, exactly.

Mitch (29:28):

And I feel like we didn't really talk about it in the benefits as much, but there is beauty to those notification changes where instead of an email, you have one where everything is except for the jerks that send things as ultra important all the time. Everything is same priority in topic-based communication, you get to subscribe to the different feeds of information that are coming at you. So like I said, prioritizing things that are most important versus not. You don't have that opportunity outside of tools like that to automatically prioritize things that you need to know about versus things you don't. Someone I was talking to recently who was trying to use these tools, it adds one extra little hurdle when someone is looking for something or wants to send something, and so their team was trying to use this thing and he wanted to send a message, and he felt like, oh man, I have to go through this long file folder list of channels to figure out which one is the right channel for me to send this in. And it was extra mental load. They probably have too many channels, but the more and more you get used to it, the more it becomes more of an instinct reaction of where things should go

Matt D. (30:45):

And the more you're comfortable saying what you want to say immediately. The other thing that will happen as you use this more is it will be more like chat, but even more powerful because you'll be communicating with more people that may have more input that will provide value to the conversation.

Emma (31:02):

And let's be honest, no one enjoys searching their inbox, so

Matt D. (31:05):

Yeah, well, no, that's email or not searching for stuff is not, if searching

Emma (31:09):

For stuff's never great anyway, and so it's not like your email inbox is so much better. Yeah, that much better. Yeah.

Mitch (31:15):

Okay. Let's wrap us up enough negative. What is the bright, better green pastures that we're setting people off into if they adopt this

Matt D. (31:26):

Being released from your mailbox, your inbox? If you're a person that gets a hundred emails a day, half of 'em you don't care about, you just are kind of FYI on, and maybe 25% of 'em are ones that you need to respond to and maybe five or 6% of them are something else. You're going to see a transformation in how you work, and it should be a very positive one, especially if those emails include files or any other relevant content or long chains of information that are getting sent to you, and you'll be transformed because you'll be able to see those things as they're happening if you have the time or get brought into them as you're needed rather than just having to be on all of them all the time.

Emma (32:10):

And doesn't it sound great to have a future where everything's naturally organized so you're not spending your day trying to filter and organize and put things where they're supposed to go and remember to follow up on things. It just is naturally organized for me, the better future, and I think back to places I worked that didn't have topic-based is all about you're not leaving people out of conversations that should have been in conversations. There's so much mental load on the person originating the message to try to think through everyone. That should be every time you send a message who should be involved, and sometimes the person that should have been involved you didn't even think of because you didn't even know they knew an answer to the question that you're asking. And I think the fragmented conversations is something you can say goodbye to if you have topic-based communication.

Mitch (33:01):

Love

Matt D. (33:01):

It. Another thing is onboarding and being able to bring somebody into a conversation or add them to a team and they've got access to everything they need, right? There shouldn't be very much additional information. They really have to have. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't meet with them and introduce them and answer questions and whatever, but you're not searching through your email trying to find the last 50 emails or two months after they join the team. You're not having to go track down some email thread from five months ago that they're now is crept back up and they have an interest in. They can just look at the content within teams and find the content they need and oh, this was that thread that they were talking about

Emma (33:45):

And this is a huge part with training and learning the etiquette and the learning curve as well. I think it super helpful within any organization where you're trying to grow your marketing or your brand strategy where you hire someone and they're trying to learn your company and learn who you are all at the same time. Being able to add them and see the context super helpful in those roles, but honestly, any role when you're joining as an engineer or software developer or project manager to be able to look back and see, oh, this is how this person did it before me, or this is how, and I don't actually have to go ask everyone a million questions. It gives you some context. You feel like you're in control to look that up. You don't have to ask anything and it just allows you to hit the ground running. I know I've said that before, but it really is true.

Matt D. (34:27):

It empowers people to find the information rather than having to ask for people for the information.

Emma (34:32):

Yes, it just speeds that whole process up.

Matt D. (34:34):

Yep.

Mitch (34:34):

Awesome. Love it. Sounds good to me. You sold me.

Emma (34:37):

I want to call up all the places I worked before that didn't have topic based and tell them to start using this, so if you're listening to this, you should use topic based.

Mitch (34:46):

Yeah, so this episode will probably be released early June. We're looking at launching this course mid July, so be on the lookout if you want something a little more step by step. I'll have my voice back, I promise, and we'll be in better shape. But yeah, any closing thoughts? Otherwise we'll sign off and

Matt D. (35:05):

No, I think it's been a good conversation.

Mitch (35:07):

Thanks everyone for chatting.

(35:09):

Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already subscribed to our show on your favorite podcasting app, so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital and special thanks to Eric Veneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to make others successful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.