RAFAC Communications - An improvement? šŸ¤ž

I mean this is a personal thing that Iā€™ve done but you can set up alerts on the RAFAC Announcements so it will send an email when anything new comes up on there.

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Staff cadets wouldnā€™t have access to this and with some of them in adj and training officer roles they might want access to it.

Genuinely impressed. Didnā€™t know anything about it though until reading the post on here, so a send to all would be good as not sure how its been pushed out but Iā€™ve not seen or heard anything about it in this Wing / Region.

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Were you not on it when they accidentally turned Viva Engage on a number of years back?

For a few glorious moments, the organisation from top to bottom, and across the whole org, could talk to each other. And then there was panic. What if ACC was now INSIDE the walls!?!

And thus, it was switched back off.

Once weā€™ve got the other platforms sorted, it could make a comeback. Its value lies in the crossovers with SharePoint, building communities of interest, whereas Teams should be communities of work.

SharePoint is on the Influence agenda to tidy up, we just need to ensure we have the support and resources of other departments, and especially need Digital team to be available and ready (but theyā€™re one of the indemand teams).

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I remember it, yes. Issue was the uncontrolled nature of ā€œreleaseā€; people took advantage.

Undoubtedly itā€™s a valuable tool if implemented correctly. Whether thereā€™s appetite at the top to use it for its ā€œOmniā€ properties I donā€™t know.

They seem very keen on the rigid and malfunctioning CoC communication method.

Fixing everything else and having everyone settled and majority utilising correctly first is definitely a must. Those left behindā€¦ Now isnā€™t the time to be leaving people behind though.

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@Wizzle moving the conversation about distribution back over here. (correct thread this time)

You are 100% being lied too if youā€™re being told it canā€™t be sent to all personal accounts. Just today Iā€™ve received two emails regarding teams going down. I assume that went to all personal accounts, not just mine!

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Came to our sqn generic account, not to my ā€œpersonalā€ Bader account.

Interesting. It came to both for me. Generic account and personal!

Came through today, albeit timed late yā€™day afternoon.

The latest newsletter has arrived!

ā€œThe Astra Hub also contains its own newsletterā€

Because what we need are even more decentralised comms, rather than a single version of the truthā€¦

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Yeah, slightly concerned about the number off different ways we are now potentially looking at to gain new information. Weve got:

  1. Sharepoint announcements
  2. IBNs
  3. RAFAC Logs Updates
  4. News letter
  5. Email Announcements
  6. Astra Newsletters

And probably more.

I think having all of those is fine, so long as there is a set system in place for how it works. For example, make it so that any time a(n) IBN/Logs Update/Astra Newsletter/Weekly Newsletter is added or updated, it automatically generates a Sharepoint announcements. Then, make sure that any Sharepoint announcement, including ones generated in the previous step, is then automatically emailed out to everyone.

I respectfully disagree.

My day job is working as a project manager in an organisational transformation & change capacity. I have to cut across the various silos within the organisation and ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the operational and project progresses. My experience in this area tells me that there must be just a single source of information for project members (CFAVs) in this case, else people act in good faith but entirely contrary to whatā€™s needed of them. They do this because they went to another source of information that was either out of date or unauthorised.

The risk with having multiple info sources is that their info is collected from different areas by different people and usually with different results. A uniformed data set enables singular reporting and is best served by there being one point of info for CFAVs. The risk of this is demonstrated, in very mild terms, on this forum - as a small (and in this case, inconsequential for us) example, do the Tutors need to complete 140 or 150 hours of flying?

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The quote of mine you have is only true with the caveat of there being a set system in place to centralise all of these different mediums. I suggested the announcements section, but it could be something else.

The other option of course is we look to move over to a similar system that DINs currently use. Standardise the letter/notification, but then categorise them. All you have to do is add another number to the IBNs.

DINs are currently formatted yyyyDINxx-zzz So 2023DIN08-006 is the 6th DIN of 2023 that sits in category 08. In the case of DINs, this is finance.

Do we just need to bring all these forms of communication into a single IBN/DIN format, but categorise it better? Then produce a weekly IBN/DIN digest, which is basically the newsletter?

Personally, that would be perfect for me. But Iā€™m a nerd when it comes to data management & structures.

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Email is a very dated form of communication. Some companies have banned it for internal communications altogether. Mine merely discourages it and makes sending bulk emails difficult.

(Meanwhile the MOD is measuring productivity by number of emails sent, and taking full Office licenses away from people for using Teams and SharePoint properly and thereby reducing their email output: but thatā€™s another battle.)

Maybe dated for organisations where you log onto their internal sites every day, but for a voluntary organisation email is easiest way to reach the masses, as long as it isnt done every 5 minutes and sometimes a simple prompt to the appropriate site where info is suffice. Not everyone has alerts set on sharepoint

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Precisely

Give me a digest email to my inbox once per week. Brief headlines and a few bullet points with a link to further information for each headline. Sack the rest of the emails off unless theyā€™re critically urgent.

We could even have a Wing, Region and Corps digest and that would be entirely manageable. Although Region & Corps digests would probably not need to be any more frequent than monthly.

But at least this way the updates wouldnā€™t be so passive.

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youā€™re describing Routine Orders which were a thing once upon a timeā€¦

edit: also there is a thread for comms RAFAC Communications - An improvement? šŸ¤ž

which was split from this thread - lets not have the topic return to it

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This is actually the approach my employer takes. All one-off comms must be through other means (SharePoint, employee portal, employee news app, etc.) and corporate comms, as the only people able to send emails to all, send a digest email with links.