There’s a space between email and chat, and I’d like to find it.
The majority of companies rely on email for scaled communication, but there are so many problems with email:
- It’s “non-persistent”. Only the people who receive the email can search or access its contents at a future date.
- It discourages healthy debate. The sender holds a lot of power, and there are significant barriers to reader participation (i.e., it can be daunting to Reply All).
- It’s disconnected. You can’t link to an email, nor can you reference it in a more efficient way than, “As per the email sent by X on the 15th of October…”
Many start-ups, however, have moved the majority of their communication to chat (e.g., Slack). Again, there are so many problems with chat:
- It’s noisy. Chat lowers the bar for communication quality, meaning people put less effort into chat messages than email. The increase in message volume, and the decrease in quality of those messages, is a dangerous combination.
- It results in decisions getting lost. If a decision is made in chat, it’s 1) hard to find, and 2) hard to prove to anyone that wasn’t in the chat.
- It’s a distraction from the most important work. We rarely need to respond to chat messages right away, but it’s easier to write a chat message to a colleague than it is to sit down with a pen and paper and solve the hardest problem on our plates.
Unfortunately, I think the “golden place” between these two requires a massive shift in a company’s communication culture. It requires individuals and teams to commit to writing and publishing their work in a public space. For example, every team posts about their progress, everyone employee posts about what they’re working on, and the leadership team posts about upcoming changes or announcements. And underpinning it all is amazing search, navigation, sorting, and filtering functionality—allowing anyone to access any post or document.
I think P2 from WordPress is the closest thing I can find. Notion is another possibility, but I think it’s more text editor than team organiser. Additionally, since I’ve been at Facebook, I’ve found Workplace to be a powerful tool for public accountability between teams.
But I don’t think any of these completely crushes it.
And so I’m keen to hear from you. How does your company communicate? Email? Chat? A mixture of both? Would you say your company does a good job of scaled communication, or do they suffer from the above challenges?