The Tools And Tactics Behind How We Communicate Internally At Drift

How does your company manage internal communication?

Surprisingly, one of the most popular questions people ask us at Drift is how we handle internal communication.

And I say surprisingly because, well, internal communication isn’t exactly the most riveting topic.

But there’s a reason a lot of people ask us about it:

Internal communication is one of the few things that can impact everyone at a company.

And from Slack’s growth, to a push for increased transparency, to the fact that work can happen from anywhere today, a whole lot has changed in the workplace over the last few year’s that’s impacted internal communication.

So David Cancel and I sat down on Seeking Wisdom to share the tools and tactics we use for internal communication here at Drift, including:

• How we use Slack (and when we use Slack vs. email)
• How we use Confluence (our internal Wiki)
• How we use 15Five for weekly progress reports and feedback
• The format of our Monday Metrics all-hands meeting
• Why we end the week with an all-hands Show & Tell meeting

And three core principles that we have at Drift that impact how we communicate with each other everyday:

1. Limit meetings. Try hard to get whatever you’re working on done without a meeting.
2. Show your work. Avoid the big reveal. Communicate early and often about what you’re working on.
3. Autonomy. Teams and individuals should have full autonomy and ownership over what they’re working on.

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For more context: Drift is currently ~30 people.

This post originally appeared on blog.drift.com.