I have an odd interest in organisational communication. How companies do it, what tools they use, and how their choices help or hinder them.
My interest stems from disappoint in the current set of tools.
Email is the default (and is here to stay for inter-company communication), but it’s woefully inadequate for intra-company use cases. Slack and Teams have helped chat-based communication grow, but this medium is inefficient, scattered, and non-persistent.
Over time, I’ve built a personal thesis that the ideal form of organisational communication is (1) asynchronous, (2) open, (3) searchable, and (4) persistent.
(1) Asynchronous communication means we don’t require immediate responses. Chat—which is the most common form of synchronous communication—is the biggest culprit here. The immediacy of chat gives people the illusion that they’re productive. It also creates anxiety to respond quickly to look good in front of others in the thread. Asynchronous communication on the other hand gives people the time and space to respond thoughtfully. I’d much rather receive an answer a few hours later that’s well considered than get a half-baked answer now.
(2) Open communication means information is accessible to all. Email hides things between people, and often gets lost between who is Cc’d and Bcc’d. For small organisations, I think everything except HR should be accessible to all employees.
(3) Searchable content only works when a company is doing (2) well (i.e., when a company is open with its information). Again, email and chat fall short here. They’re closed ecosystems of communication that lose their value as people quit and move jobs. A searchable content ecosystem on the other hand allows employees to find and see the history of company’s decisions and mistakes.
(4) Persistence is the preservation of documents, decisions, and information. The argument should be familiar by now: email and chat are impermanent and gated to a few individuals. Just like stories and lessons are passed down in families from generation to generation, we need to do the same in our organisations.
There is software that tries to do all of the above: Workplace by Meta creates a historical hive mind, but many companies feel it looks and works too similarly to the Facebook consumer app. Slack and Teams have implemented good search functionality, and the use of channels provides some persistence, but in my experience information still gets lost. There are also smaller products like P2 from Automattic, which use posts and pages to create internal blogs centred around common projects and themes. I like the concept behind P2, but it still feels a bit janky.
I don’t have answers. Only observations. But I do think organisational communication can still be much better.