Effective communication

Status Quo

We believe we currently work at an async-remote company, however, this is a guise based on how we communicate today; and as the company grows this will get out of hand. The bulk of our communication should be asynchronous however, we often ping people in Slack expecting immediate responses, we are bombarded with customer queries which often distract us, and sometimes bombard each other with differing priorities of issues from customers. It is becoming clear based on my conversations with the team that we need to be mindful of how our communication habits might negatively affect others on the team. Overusing sync tools like Slack, and Tandem are obvious examples of bad behaviour that everyone can relate to.

Communication between humans is like bad APIs

Communication and meetings are like bad APIs. Imagine our customers had to call us every time they wanted a lab order to go through our system. A better API is one with no humans in the loop.

💡 Conclusion: We should have the minimum necessary amount of communication to move things forward and to get work done. We should try to find processes to enable people to make decisions without the need to collaborate or host meetings to reduce friction (i.e. the number of people involved) and increase the amount of work being done.

Communication Tooling

It's tools that straddle the line between asynchronous and synchronous communication that create problems, mostly stemming from misaligned or poorly defined expectations.

Slack, for example, is a synchronous tool that pretends to be an asynchronous tool. Because communication is in writing, they can claim that it's asynchronous, but anyone who's used Slack knows how disruptive is to receive notifications constantly and the fact that most people treat it like instant messaging, which has the expectation of immediate responses — especially for direct messages.

Similarly, because the information cannot be triaged, as soon as you open Slack, you're forced to stay engaged with it until a given conversation is over or you risk dropping the ball since there's a high probability you'll forget about the conversation once you move on to the next task. Conversations that could have happened in 5 minutes synchronously on a phone call can easily devolve into multi-hour back-and-forth conversations over Slack that reduce output and increase frustration.

Anxiety

People often feel anxiety around communication tools, but it's rarely the tool itself that's causing the anxiety. For most people, it's the knowledge that you might be blocking others that causes anxiety — and that's a situation that will always exist. So it's important to separate the baseline anxiety that communication induces from the added anxiety created by the tool itself.

For example, if you have an inbox of 300 emails and that's causing you anxiety, is it email that is causing you anxiety? Or is it the fact that you have 300 requests on your attention that's causing the anxiety? I would argue that if you had 300 text messages, that would cause just as much (if not more) anxiety — because text messages can't be triaged.

One form of communication anxiety comes from not knowing the state of a given communication. Did they see my message? Did they do the thing I asked? Are they working on it? If you ask a coworker, "Can you have this to me by Friday?" and you haven't heard from them in 3 days... what do you do now?

Another form of low-grade anxiety that comes from communication is related to the fear of missing out. Oftentimes, in a synchronous tool like Slack, someone opens a thread, discussion ensues in real time over the course of an hour or two, and anyone who did not have push notifications active on Slack while the conversation was ongoing would miss out on the conversation. This creates background anxiety that decisions are being made without your input — especially when you feel like your input would be valuable to the conversation.

Customer Support

Today we open a customer support channel for each Customer in Slack and invite everyone to the channel to provide truly superior customer support. Whilst customers love it, this is slowing the team down. It prevents deep work, it incentivises us to respond as quickly as possible and it causes anxiety every time we receive a message from a customer. Things will go wrong, there will be bugs and we need to get better at managing issues with customers. Our current status quo of creating tickets and pinging engineers doesn't work. Even the process of creating tickets, and initially responding to customers is significant overhead across multiple channels. Better yet, it does not make sense to use engineers to do this.

This does not mean we don’t want engineers to be involved with customers, it just means there is likely a better way to triage and handle customer issues.

Tools

There are a lot of tools already out there. At the end of the day, there are no good or bad tools. Each tool emphasizes one set of principles over another and each has a use case. As unsatisfying as it may feel, there is no right answer here and one needs to make the conscious decision to make whatever tradeoff is right for their company or organization.

Some communication tools are effectively slot machines — and slot machines are bad. Slack is the quintessential communication slot machine because it hijacks your brain and triggers variable reward addiction in the same way slot machines and social media do.

Slot machines are highly disruptive to deep work and make it very hard for people to stay focused. We are a company that says we value deep work but are currently not using tools effectively, resulting in expectations for team members to respond to queries instantly. This needs to change.

This doesn't necessarily mean that there is no use case for a tool like Slack, but it does mean that we need to be mindful of what the tool is doing to our brains and make an intentional decision about whether we want to continue using it.

Slack

Slack is great for some things and very bad for other things. Many of the things it's bad at can be solved through good habits... but it's hard to get one's team to maintain those habits when the tool itself leads to addictive behaviour that can be hard to overcome through force of will.

Slack is an information firehose, so for information that's intended to be ingested as a firehose, it's probably the ideal tool. It's great for channels like #testkits_production that get updated every time we have a new order come in. It's nice to be able to feel the buzz in the company of things that are happening.

We have no current 'how to use Slack' at Vital to help make communication efficient and onboarding folks well. If you have ideas on improving Slack then let us know in #people-ask and we will make some moves together.