On Troubles of Team Communication
An email I sent to my team regarding internal communication:
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This got me thinking today (it’s actually a hot topic recently, started by this post), so I’d like to take this opportunity and share my $0.02. I really believe communication is an important subject, though it never seems to be an urgent one…
Let me start by saying I don’t remember team communication ever being optimal, anytime I worked with more than 2 people. It was never even “OK” and every team I’ve ever worked with kept trying to optimise it further, often desperately, in order to find the right balance between being in the loop and not being distracted.
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After 35 years of communicating, this is the algorithm I now try to use:
Maybe there are some exceptions (e.g., a crisis, where a chat log may help, etc.) but in most cases, most of the time, this works for me.
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In my humble opinion, most of the problems we have with communication have these two reasons behind them:
- One of the communication channels seems frictionless compared to others, so most people prefer it.
- Because it’s easy to communicate, people start to behave as if communication is cheap.
The main culprit is obviously Slack. It’s easier to post something to #development than Trello. It often seems we’ll be able to reach people sooner over Slack and we forget that most things aren’t urgent. Slack tricks us into thinking we’re communicating in real time when we’re actually not…
Communication is definitely not cheap. It is very expensive. Posting a gif in Slack is cheap. Starting a discussion about an important, urgent topic in #development is very, very expensive. People will be frustrated because they’ll lose an unpredictable amount of time trying to half-work and half-participate in a half-conversation, where their opinion will be half-heard. Having an important conversation via voice and within a limited timeframe is actually more efficient and, more importantly, much more mindful of the team culture.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe Slack is important. I believe every stupid gif or joke or a link I may not even open today is important for our culture. Even while we’re not using Slack at all, the feeling of being close and connected to the rest of the team is golden. That feeling alone is as important as anything we have to say to each other. However, when it comes to exchanging information, Slack is just one of the tools and is absolutely not the right one every time. Scheduling a group call or sending a group email is much harder than posting the first sentence to Slack, but I believe there is a very good reason why that is so.
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We may or may not all agree with the picture above but I believe we need a picture like that and we need to have it in mind every time we are about to post something to Slack, send an email or DM/call someone via Skype, etc.
Good night, my dear comrades!
Rod
