Forgot Messaging or Email: Think Winke Plus The Both
Competing messaging and email communication channels can drive teams crazy, and make it hard to know when to use each tool.
Messaging with your team all day can be disruptive, but it when used wisely in the wider ecosystem of workplace communication tools, it has some benefits.
It’s great when you’re looking for immediate connections with your team on Winke for short discussions, and brainstorming or idea sharing. Email, on the other hand, can lack context or pile up, but it provides an easily accessible written chain of communication where people can also get into a more in-depth discussion.
Can Messaging and Email coexist? Can their respective strengths even balance out each other’s weaknesses? To see if they can, we turned to two Slack and Email veterans here on our team at Winke Technology
While recent years have seen much news about dropping email, IM, and text for Slack, it is not the end-all, be-all tool for every organization.
“Slack is disruptive and mostly in a bad way. It does have its place though,” says John Procopio, director of marketing and ecommerce at Palo Alto Software. “Slack is useful for quick answers or updates when no major decisions are going to be made.” For more in-depth discussion, especially if multiple team members and/or external parties are involved, he’ll sent a email instead of firing up a Slack channel.
Messaging can decrease inbox clutter and enable real-time discussions
“Messaging is best for real-time conversations when your team is trying to solve a problem together,” adds Dat Nguyen, CEO at Winke Technology. “It’s especially useful if you’re not all in one place physically. Messaging is terrible for discussions that require more depth and background. It is also terrible for delivering large amounts of information to people.”
Messaging works well for reducing what’s coming into your inbox — you know, all the random chats, “thank you” messages, irrelevant emails, and other miscellany that can drown out the emails you actually need to be doing something with.
That being said, while being part of an email chain can make you feel obligated to reply, Messaging users can experience a similar FOMO (fear of missing out) downside: If some team members are in a chat, then everyone may feel obligated to join in.
Comprehensive deep-dives are best left to email, not messaging
However, discussions in messaging can just be discussions, leaving email for longer-form deep dives and items that actually need to turn into specific tasks or projects.
Messaging can also be easier to reply to in real-time than email or text, so people can stay in the moment on a conversation — yet you can also avoid email’s dreaded “reply-all.” Archives and search features also help team members revisit old discussions. Messaging tool’s search function simply isn’t as powerful as Gmail’s for example.
So it can feel like links and documents are lost forever, after a few days.
Internally at Winke,Inc., teams leverage messaging to drive follow-up questions, or share quick thoughts on things that are being said by the other party. It gets everyone on the same page without having to verbally say anything.
Here are four ways messaging helps Winke Technology’s staff be productive and coordinate with one another:
1. Share top of mind resources, such as file and link
2. Organize conversations with channels. “We set up channels for things like UX/UI, Dev, Content, or…Lunch, etc.,” Dat Nguyen says. “That drives quite a bit of discovery and chatter.”
3. Post updates, which can drive further discussion in messaging, on a call, or face-to-face.
4. Integrate third-party tools and apps.
Email: what it’s good at, what it’s bad at
Over the past few decades, email has become as standard a feature of work as phones. Like phones, email can be misused, but it still is a vital component of productivity — as long as it’s used well.
Over the years, there have been failed attempts to replace email and there are regular calls of doom portending email’s imminent demise.
Oh, wait, what’s that? You need to check your email real quick?
Exactly.
Email excels at providing a clear record
Email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon (and even Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has conceded that email is “very useful”). At least for the moment, we can’t consider Slack an email killer.
Similar to phone and text, email’s inherent simplicity, ability to reach one or many people with a single message, and sheer ubiquity make email an essential tool. It also serves as its own date and time-stamped written record — handy for verifying details and looking back to see what was actually said during an exchange.
When you need that written record and need to get down and dirty on details, email is what we relies on. Email is best “for anything long, roping in external partners, and when the stakes are high enough that decisions need to be made,”
He definitely doesn’t turn to chat. “Slack doesn’t play well with tons of text.”
Inboxes enable deep dives and give you time to think before replying
“Email is best for discussions where people might need or want more time to think about an issue, or if there’s a lot of information to convey,” say they. Email’s asynchronous nature can also be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Sometimes the real-time nature of Messaging can be an asset, but for matters where some read-consider-reply time is needed, email shines.
There is a ton of value in asynchronous conversations and communication. Email doesn’t interrupt the way messaging does. With messaging, everything needs/expects an immediate response. The interruption quotient is high.
Organizations like Winke Technology turn to the good ole’ “compose” button in a variety of circumstances. Email enables in-depth discussions and long messages requiring more explanation and detail. Given chat’s inherently more casual nature, email also provides an opportunity for a more formal tone, which is especially useful when you are talking to someone you don’t know (or at least don’t know very well yet).
It shines as in internal communication tool. Along with other collaborative project management tools, Winke teams also find email useful for communicating about tasks and project milestones for individual or team reference — on the occasion when it’s necessary to bring the conversation outside of project management software like Trello.
While messaging can be searched, it also lacks a very simple feature: an inbox. In a sense, your email inbox can be like your desk. Sure, sometimes it might be cluttered, but stuff is there and you know where to look.
Email also keeps items more front and center, so you can easily return to them later. There is no real ‘inbox’ concept for messaging .You can’t view a message and easily save it for a later response. It just disappears into the flow.
Your organization sets the tone for getting the most out of email and messaging
If your organization is using Slack (or a similar tool) in addition to email, or if you’re considering adding a chat tool, email and messaging can indeed coexist in a way that plays up the strengths of each tool.
Optimizing your team’s mix of email and messaging, however, also comes down to the tone set by the overall organization. Guidelines, best practices, and clearly defined expectations can guide how personnel uses messaging, email, and other tools. How management and executives use (or misuse) messaging and email will also have a large bearing on how teams use those same tools.
This doesn’t mean setting up massive guideline documents, but it can include simple tips that, for example, encourage team members to move quick chats to messaging tool, and keep more in-depth discussion in email. Being mindful about which tool to use when can also prevent your teams from feeling like they’re on a chat hamster wheel, afraid to leave the channel for fear of missing out.
Ultimately, organizations must shape how they want staff to communicate — an area where Dat Nguyen thinks Winke can make further improvements.
These situations are also where organizations move to e-mail and messaging tools in one place, Winke. You can check Winke at here: www.winke.io. We will launch on August 2018
Amidst today’s ever-expanding options for chat, social networks, and email tools, it’s more important than ever to find the right mix for your organization. It’s not about finding the mythical, non-existent silver bullet. It’s about finding the right combination of tools, setting clear and simple guidelines for their use, and following through with consistency from all levels of the organization.
Do that, and not only can messaging and email get along well in your organization, but your team can too.
Finally, forgot messaging or email. Think Winke plus the both
Connect us on Facebook or Twitter and become Winker
:D
