Every company that I worked in had their own specific language. Most of the concepts we use at work are used in different places, but can vary in names. Sometimes it depends on the country of origin, sometimes on the education of founders. Often the vocabulary is created as a result of different cultures cooperating and creating something new.
I was mostly OK with this part, languages came easily to me, and learning new slang at the beginning of a job seemed justified, and, I won’t lie, fun.
All of that changed when I started working more with processes and task management. It turns out that the language we are using can hurt us in many different ways. Some of them I had not anticipated.
Problems can start already at the onboarding. One issue is that, especially in the tech world, we use the same terms to describe different solutions. Why? My guess is that we just invent things as we go. So concepts were often created at similar times, by different people. Every company tried to make them their own – so they used their own names. Now, if you are moving from one company to the other, you need to be aware that the term you know may have a whole other meaning in a new place.
It may be tough, but I find this problem quite easy to catch.
It starts getting annoying, when different departments in the company use different names for the same concepts. Or they use the same word, but it has a different meaning. And no department is an island.
When I first started calculating quarterly results for our sales team, I lost so much time on extracting data and not getting the right numbers. Just because I was using some specific terms that I learned working as a salesperson. After painfully long conversations and adjustments I realized the same term was being used by finance. Only it had a slightly different meaning. The difference was so subtle, that we used the term often, both departments thinking we know what we are talking about. But the numbers didn’t want to add up. Due to small inconsistency in terminology our results were looking completely different. Thankfully we caught it in time, but I still remember the stress it caused me and my peers.
Our time was wasted, our energy consumed by frustration and we had to get back to the drawing board, just because of one word.
The definitions matter, and if your company works in silos where departments don’t cooperate unless they absolutely have to, I can bet that you have seen this issue. Maybe you even didn’t realize what was the cause of the problems, maybe you decided it was ego, or some personal agendas.
So, what now? I mean is there a way to make sure 5,000 employees in 14 different countries sit down to write the company dictionary? Should they even do it?
For me, the start to undo this mess would be to start and write down your own processes. Start with the basic ones, the things that everybody knows. If you can write down your own repetitive tasks, you can look at them from a completely new perspective. Then, see where actions of your department connect with others and talk with them, check if they see and understand their part, if they agree on their part, and if they understand the whole process: start to finish.
When you are in doubt, you can easily refer back to the process you described, and confront it with how others understand the tasks.
It does look like a lot of work, but if you start with the basics, or even when creating a new department, while your organization still grows, you can save yourself a lot of time (and time is money) in the future.
If I struck a chord, let me know. I am planning on something special where I will show you how to start and create your own process book. No matter how big or small your operations are, it is always a good time to start and define your processes.