The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.
Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours.
I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.
Question: do you think this would still be a problem if only 1:1 chat was allowed (no group chat existed).
I've often wondered if the real problem is group chat / channels, and not per se the 1:1 type of chat messages.
I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email
I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on.
If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through".
The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack
by all means, use teams/slack/etc for discussions, but understand that they don't replace email, they enhance it.
1. Lots of random DMs/Group DMs. Everything is messy, and gets lost easily. The 'closed' nature of DMs and small groups then often builds up cliques and creates office politics.
2. Move everything into open channels -> descend into pure chaos with 1,000s of channels that no one can keep up with.
Also, is there an underlying problem with retention, re this comment:
>Developing a rapport with “Bob” could help me anticipate when the lack of promotion opportunity is about to make him jump so we can line up potential replacements.
In the vacuum that is reading the article, this reads like there are problems at the organization with people getting promotions and the person writing in is willing to let them leave and replace them than work out how to keep them.
Something about the write in doesn't sit well with me more generally, but I can't put my finger on it.
daily checkin, in person can happen in a minute. It’s helpful. Teams succeed together, not at the direction of 1 person coordinating. Removing them is just dumb.
> 2
lol no. That’s a dumb suggestion. It makes people less productive. Trying to replace a 30 second conversation with slack/teams etc is really just dumb.
> 3
Teams that socialise work better together. Period. You remove any socialising factor and you end up with silos, lost knowledge, depression. Etc.
> 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office
> 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document
> 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with
For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each:
> 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet
> 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships
But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work.
Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software
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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-wo...