Could your company use a glossary?

“That’s ridiculous!” you reply?

You might be surprised.

As a consultant, I must go into a company and quickly learn as much as I can in order to come up to speed rapidly on foundation knowledge.

More often than you might guess, as I’m going through the rapid-cycle learning process as I begin a project with a new company, I’ve found that employees don’t know, or don’t agree on the meaning of some of the company’s most-used terms and acronyms.

Consider these examples:

For one project I had one day to “crash learn” as much as I could about the basic technology and terms involved in a major process. I was leaving the next day for a three-day offsite where I was helping the client company finalize a cross-company product delivery process.

To learn as much as possible, and as rapidly as I could, I dove right into all available information about key terms, processes, roles, responsibilities and other knowledge that was important to have for the process design and improvement work to be successful.

Eventually, I’d gone as far as I could in the process of learning on my own. I needed to clarify some things and met with a few people to close the gaps in my understanding.

I asked one manager fairly high up in the organization what one key acronym meant.

She admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that she didn’t know.

And the tough thing was, she was outside of what might be considered, unofficially, as the “statute of limitations” on when she could safely admit she needed to learn some of basic information at the company, too. I could ask the question she needed to because I was clearly in learning mode. She was supposed to have “graduated” it already.

At some point, it’s somehow assumed that people know what they need to know to do their jobs.

But if they don’t, and they’re afraid to ask, where do they go?

And who asks the question of the employees who work for them (and makes it safe for them to answer it honestly), “What do you need to learn, or know, that you don’t, to be successful in this job?”

In a second example, I was helping to create onboarding tools for a rapidly growing company.

The learning processes and tools I was helping the client company create were designed to help the cross-functional teams get established quickly and consistently, and start performing well together as quickly as possible.

We were editing a final draft of one product in the set of team tools.

In a meeting with two fairly senior people in the group, we discovered that each thought a key acronym meant something different.

They realized that many people in the organization were using the same acronym to mean different ways, and that it may have been just one of many miscues in a job and role that required excellent communication.

Is it possible this is happening at your company?

Eliminate the primary causes for miscommunication wherever you can.

One easy place to start is to make sure is to make sure that commonly used acronyms and terms are consistently defined.

In addition, make sure that other foundation knowledge that it’s important for employees to have is readily available. At a minimum, this is important to have when new employees join the company, or move to new jobs inside the company and need to get up to speed quickly and consistently.

Here’s how you can make your own glossary:

1. Make a list of key terms and acronyms.
2. Assign a person to complete the glossary by gathering and writing the definitions for the terms.
3. Ask a few people to review the glossary, noting additions or changes that they think need to be made to it.
4. Refine the glossary, reconciling any differences of opinion about what terms or acronyms mean.
5. Post the glossary on your website in a place where it will be easy to access and use.
6. Include contact information for anyone who needs to get more information about any of the terms, or to contribute new terms to the glossary.

In the process of creating and publishing the glossary, you may find other information you need to share, or to train people on.

Do everything you can to ensure that communication is clear and effective for the people working in your company. It can make a far bigger difference in effectiveness and business results than you expect.

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