I find video chat to be the worst business communication tool, unless you need screen sharing.

It's still a mystery to me why people so often prefer it over the traditional phone, which has better audio and reliability and doesn't force everyone to regulate their posture, get in a professional looking location, etc

For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call. I have had my hearing tested, it's not it.

Also I feel that on video chat it is way easier to interject (if the camera is set up properly) than on a audio call with multiple people.

I have exactly opposite experience. On the phone call I lower my head, close my eyes and focus on the sound of what's being said. While on video call when I don't understand someone when I see the person that expects to be understood it has a bit of "deer in the headlights" effect for me. My mind closes and I have no chance of understanding.

Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls. HD calls are still rare, even on VoIP. POTS is almost guaranteed to cut off at 3.2kHz which cuts out a lot of information.

> Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls.

That has not been my experience. Generally the audio suffers as the compression algorithm switches to accommodate poor network performance.

This all might be moot if you're on the same LAN, such as in the same office (that is, until you have dozens or hundreds of video chats eating up the bandwidth). But add in folks in another location and/or working remotely, and video chat is just terrible.

It's not that bad normally (I get to do that every day). ADSL 12mbit was enough to handle high quality Google hangouts up and down. More people only impact the centralised service, not your connection (unless you're using a really terrible conference implementation)

>For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call.

See the McGurk Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

I wonder how much of that is phone line quality, or visual clues like lip reading.

Probably a mix of both. I also have trouble understanding people in somewhat noisy environments so I think I just suck at cocktail party problems.

Curios! I have the same problem. My wife has the theory that I cannot filter all the other distractions well enough. Good to know I'm not alone ;)

> traditional phone, which has better audio

Now, I'm not sure what video chat tool you're referring to, but POTS audio is awful, even the more modern stuff available for cell-to-cell isn't great unless you happen to have VoLTE - any halfway decent mic and modern audio codec will be much better.

I wonder if the previous poster is actually referring to a perceptual issue around latency — because the video latency is perceptibly greater than a face-to-face conversation, we may perceive unpleasantness in the audio as well, even though a phone call or audio-only Internet call are generally acceptable.

Absolutely, being able re-read and take the time to digest the message is great in IM, especially for a non-native speaker. As mentioned else where, you can also do quick searches if there's something in there you didn't understand or want to double-check.

It's not an "awkward middle ground", it's the "perfect middle ground"

Great for you, but I'm sitting around waiting for you to finish chatting with somebody else. I'd rather just call you and get your 100% attention, or if its not important, email you, and let you respond in your own time.

How would that be different from waiting for them to finish their 4th consecutive audio call?

If I send them an e-mail, I can drop the topic from my head, because I dumped all the relevant context into that e-mail, and am done with it for the time being. I can focus on my other work while waiting for them to reply, which can be 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days.

Whereas if I have to wait for them to become free to talk to me, I have to keep all the context in my head, which interferes with my work, because my mind has a limited amount of "cache". Also, I now have to be on constant semi-alert waiting for the call because I don't know when they will become free. That makes it impossible to concentrate on any task too much. I am certainly not getting "into the zone" on anything.

Cognitive load is a real thing, do not waste yours or someone else's.

I think you can always send an e-mail when you need a detailed answer to a non time sensitive problem. Just because you can IM someone doesn’t mean that you have to.

To me IM replaces the “I could spend an hour searching for something or just pop up at your desk and ask”. It’s better because I can, like you say, defer answering for a few minutes.

In my previous job we had Slack, with General and Random channels. The discussion often went awry in these. Later we decided to create channels per team and more or less forbidden non work related chat. This basically fixed all of our problems with lost productivity and random pokes. Since people were not constantly on chat for random reasons, they did not use it for trivial work related stuff either.

Sure, I fully agree here, in general IM can be useful, if used correctly. We were, however, discussing a particular scenario where the choice is between e-mail or waiting for both parties being free for a phone/video call.

If it's really something critically important or urgent, you can still send an IM and just say some variation of "this is important / time-sensitive". If they don't respond or start typing within a minute or two, then you can try to call.

On the contrary, I would prefer to manage my attention, rather than have you manage it for me. That's where IM shines and phone calls fail.