Improve your Internal Communication with Office Hours

Internal communication and stakeholder engagement is key for any successful project, everyone can agree with that. Between the weekly, monthly meetings, the project updates, and steerco, the amount of time spent in various communication mechanisms can be huge -think 5 hours a week- with results often mitigated. When was the last time you ran a project and everyone felt consulted and considered enough? The last time someone shared a last minute feedback and you wished they expressed it earlier in the project?

One tool that I have found particularly interesting in the project communication toolbox is the office hours. The office hours are basically a time, usually an hour, set on a regular basis where you make yourself available on an open conference ID (or a actual room!) and let people come at their convenience during the hour to answer 1 to 1 questions.

I find office hours particularly interesting in business, for projects where reaching to everyone individually would be too difficult or time consuming because:

• It helps creating an atmosphere of transparency and openness: people know where to find you, and know that you will be open to discuss during this time.
• It saves time and removes friction as people can come, ask rapid questions, and get an answer without going through the trouble of sending emails, finding calendar slots etc.
• It helps you increase the number of 121 interactions, which may lead to hearing new perspectives on an issue you may be facing and increase stakeholder buy-in.

Best practices:

• Frame the office hours to get people to come and have specific topics to discuss with you. Make sure you have given them updates on where the project is, what are the lowlights, highlights etc. Office hours on their own aren’t enough.
• Make sure the time and location are known. It is nice to use the quiet time of an office hours to do some emails etc, but it shouldn’t be the point. Make sure you are advertising this time enough, send calendar invite and mention this designated time as often as possible.
• Educate your stakeholders. Instead of replying through emails to any question, tell them to come to your office hours to talk. This will improve your productivity and favorise face-to-face interactions.

Use this when training people to new tools or processes as well! In addition to the classic instructor-led training and user guides, setting up some office hours in the immediate weeks of such projects can help drive adoption as people may not be available for the planned training, and face-to-face interactions remain more effective than user guides.

Are you using office hours yourself ? Any other benefits or best practice to share ? Please do so in the comments below!