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Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private

by paxys 2y ago

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

viewhub 2y ago
Massively agree with this. It can be difficult to create a culture where everyone talks in the open but it can save so many little and big mistakes!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
szszrk 2y ago
How to find comfort for and include characters that don't like the spotlight? At least not during early phase/brainstorming. I've worked with many great people that hate to handle things without their usual group first, and will stall until a reasonable approach can be presented. Which means creating shadow communication process - the more you push for "discouraging 1:1" the more they will hide. What your organisation did with such "incompatible" people, relate them until the team left likes how they work, or were there better ideas?
- brudgers 2y ago
  Core values are core values, and for better and worse, everything is not for everyone. If all-communications-are-public is the company culture, then the company culture is also not to accommodate that alternative communication style. Because any out of channel communications require multiple people to participate, not just the person who prefers it.
- paxys 2y ago
  No one is inherently "incompatible". It's mostly the environment influencing their behavior. There needs to be a culture where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and working outside silos, and that is always driven by management and senior eng leaders. For example do junior engineers get constructive criticism on a bad idea or design or are they yelled at and penalized? If the latter, of course everyone will think twice about being open. And even then you can only do so much. If someone really doesn't want to participate then, well, it's on you to decide how to deal with that.
- underwater 2y ago
  In my experience, most of the time this can be solved by resetting expectations. Once people learn that asking basic questions won’t open them up to mockery, things move a lot smoother for everyone. After all, a culture on 1:1 communication has a lot of downsides. The same question gets asked repeatedly, replies don’t become searchable, the same people (usually the most experienced) end up being constantly tapped for answers
  - swader999 2y ago
    That's key, it has to be considered safe to ask questions. Anyone mocking or showing contempt to another on a channel would be immediately reprimanded in private by managers at my company.
- em-bee 2y ago
  if i know a colleague is uncomfortable to speak in a group i can collect their ideas in person, and share it with the group, but ideally the protocol should be public. so create a public chat group with only the two people joining. if the issue is that the person is afraid to speak up because of being ridiculed for their ideas, you have a culture problem that needs to be adressed. if the shy person is new, addressing the problem can be as simple as having the new team member do pair programming sessions with everyone on the team, so that they can get to know everyone better, which will make them more comfortable to speak up. maybe their previous job had a bad culture that influenced their behavior. those pair programming sessions can also help you identify if there are particular people that cause problems by being intimidating in some way to others. sometimes pair programming can even fix those problems, by allowing the two to get to know each other better and learn to respect each other. that doesn't always work though, and care must be taken that the person who is "afraid" to work with the "bully" is not forced to an interaction they are not comfortable with. if the discomfort is that high a more cautious approach is needed. especially if the person afraid is a long term team member.
  - szszrk 2y ago
    I appreciate your insight (and all other commenters). > if the shy person is new > if the issue is that the person is afraid to speak up But that's my whole point: it's not always "fear". I'm talking about character. Personal preference. Or "people/character colors" or "16 personalities" or some other names it had. Enforcing a strict way to communicate and bashing exceptions (which is my way of phrasing the original comment) will work for some, but will also create an artificial leash for others. I think it's too strict and to generic to try to just implement it by force. Yes, whole team should be available to see details, be able to participate, but why enforce that on such a low level as forbidding 1:1 talks... From my recent experience, aside of excluding many personalities, it kills a lot of inertia that spontaneous prototyping and brain storming needs.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      not being willing to speak up is not a personal preference. being an introvert is not a preference. it can be a deep seating discomfort, that comes from negative experiences to speak up in the past. sometimes it is so deep that they are not even aware of it themselves. i was that person. i had no friends in school until i entered university. every negative reaction was a setback. fortunately my experience was mixed and i did have positive reactions too. i learned public speaking as a scout leader for example. otherwise i'd be a hermit now. people like us need more positive experiences. especially when joining a new team. to allow us to slowly change our preference. and even introverts need to accept that they need to cooperate with others, and that requires sharing their ideas. or they should find a different line of work.
notTooFarGone 2y ago
100% this. The fact that teams does not have an easy voice channel is a disgrace.
- vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y ago
  Every team needs a one-nine (CB channel for chat/truckers)
  - em-bee 2y ago
    what happens on that channel?
    - zikduruqe 2y ago
      ♫ ♪ ♬ It was the dark of the moon On the sixth of June In a Kenworth, pullin' logs Cabover Pete with a reefer on And a Jimmy haulin' hogs We was headin' for bear On 'I-1-0 'Bout a mile out Shakey Town I says, Pig Pen this here's the Rubber Duck And I'm about to put the hammer down ♫ ♪ ♬
      - em-bee 2y ago
        oh you mean this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UAAwTlCp3OE https://youtube.com/watch?v=UAAwTlCp3OE :-)
        zikduruqe 2y ago
        Oh no. I meant this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87r0CPQbFds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87r0CPQbFds
    - edm0nd 2y ago
      lot lizards
oc_elder 2y ago
I can appreciate the thinking here, but it not ideal. Different details are relevant to different people. And async is inefficient for many situations. Yes publish findings/results, but overcommunicating has a cost. Better to create different channels (sync, async, 1:1, broadcast), provide guidance and trust workers.
- broken-kebab 2y ago
  It's not necessary about trust, or relevancy. I believe motivation is contagious, and making communications hearable/visible for all most of the time can be beneficial because of this.
- menaerus 2y ago
  ... and soon with this type of setting you will arrive at siloing the information. Having all communication public in the channels comes with its cost but everything is as transparent as it can be. Important distinction is that you get to choose if the detail is relevant for your work or not. And not your manager or whoever.
bdangubic 2y ago
I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive
- em-bee 2y ago
  you bring up a good point. what matters is the forum where decisions are made. you can talk about ideas in private. but the ideas need to be brought up in the group before any decisions are influenced. especially if the private conversation is with a team leader. if a team leader hears an idea in a private conversation they should ask that person to repeat the idea in public. but also they should discourage team members to specifically approach them to bring ideas. that is what is meant by discouraging private conversations. of course you can talk in private, but if the idea is not repeated in public then it is as if it was never talked about
- spaceisballer 2y ago
  I’m with you, then again Best Practices mean best for your work environment, not all. I’m currently making sure to cultivate an environment where my staff are comfortable sharing information openly. Not all of my people are comfortable announcing things to the group and want to bounce things off me or other supervisors. Sometimes you have to meet people where they are at. Like establishing the vision and just keep making sure you’re moving towards it.
- vundercind 2y ago
  The point is search needs to work, including for people not involved the conversations. Private and 1:1 chats break that. Use mute and let people @ you to pull you in when you're really needed. You don't have to leave notifications wide-open on every channel.
vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y ago
In addition slack search becomes a great onboarding tool.
- swader999 2y ago
  I'm sure there's features here or in progress where you'll be able to ask for an AI summary of all the recent discussion and decisions made on different topics.
KronisLV 2y ago
> Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. Working at an established org right now, where the team is still remote first. I tried suggesting this, but got pushback and the team actually settled on the opposite. For example, they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the time means calls. They seem to dislike discussion threads in Slack and want meetings for things instead. I’ve also noticed things like the person who reviews a pull request being the one who has to merge it and essentially take responsibility for it, versus just giving approval and the author merging it and making sure everything is okay after CD. I’m very much the opposite and prefer to have things in writing and like asynchronous communication. But when it is written messages, usually people either ask for a call or just do “Hey.” I actually made this a while ago hah: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev https://quick-answers.kronis.dev Either way, people also really seem to dislike writing README files, or all that many code comments, or making the occasional onboarding script or introducing tooling to do some things automatically. I don't get it.
- sillyfluke 2y ago
  The amount of strictness or enforcement behind the word "discourage" in "discourage 1:1 communication" in the parent post is open to interpretation. What you have is people using a tool for different objectives, and when their chosen behavior hinders your objectives things seem out of whack. I'm against shoving an eye of sauron communication hose down people's throats. I simply give my constructive feedback after the fact. E.g. when someone dm's me I say, "so-so is waiting for this to be done for their thing, so mention this part in the channel." or "the other team would need to know this for a refactor, so add this info to the wiki." If someone feels the need for dm'ing for some psychological safety so be it. But the cost of that safety is additional communication overhead for filling in gaps that the person should be ok with. And the people that value the psychological safety they gain usually don't object or have no grounds to object to a duplication of communication to fill those gaps when someone points out those gaps exists.
  - KronisLV 2y ago
andrei_says_ 2y ago
Basecamp is incredible for this. Encourages grouping people by projects, with all communication on a project being public. All activity on a project listed in one place. Catching up with work takes minimal effort, including when someone goes on vacation or leaves the team. All it takes is skimming through the project. Slack is built around chat with high has its limitations when applied to the context of a longer term project.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  While Slack - if you pay for it - permanently stores all communications and makes it archivable, it's also ephemeral and anything said more than a day ago is effectively gone. They do have an AI summary tool to catch up though, if you pay for it, which is alright.
  - andrei_says_ 2y ago
    To me the difference is in the affordances and mental model. Basecamp - groups all communication, assets, participants, tasks in a project space. I open the project which establishes context for everything and everyone. This predefined context makes short efficient communication very powerful. It’s incredibly simple and sophisticated at the same time - allowing grouping activity by people projects tasks etc. The ephemeral nature of chat-centered systems makes me incredibly nervous about missing things or being unable to find them.
Jimmc414 2y ago
This contributes to stress and notification fatigue, especially when bombarded with alerts from every channel. Some will turn off notifications entirely or disengage to maintain focus on their workload.
- reureu 2y ago
  I'm struggling with this at my current job: nobody communicates about anything in asynchronous channels, doesn't want any form of daily synchronous meeting (e.g., standups), and won't agree to ad hoc meetings outside of our 1 hour once per week meeting. So lots of decisions and work get done in vacuums, which cause errors in various systems that would have been easily caught and addressed if someone just said "hey, I'm changing this column name from X to Y". So, just to say that the counterfactual here isn't "no stress because no notifications"-- it can be more stress from failed coordination. There are in betweens here, with the major one being threads in slack. Everyone gets notified about a single message at the start of the thread, but does not get notified for any subsequent discussion. Any interested party can read more and participate as needed. For someone like me (a leader on paper but not really in practice), I'd read all the message and look for dependency or similar problems, but for others they may not need to.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  And that's fine. You're not expected to stay online and respond at all times, that's the antithesis of asynchronous communication. Just reserve a block of time per day to catch up - like you would with emails - and go through things then. Only leave notifications on if they're addressed to you specifically.
lvspiff 2y ago
I'm at a company now where we are trying to do this but the CIO/CEO keep weighing in on EVERY conversation where they disagree with the approaach. The whole reason we are having the open conversation is for ideation and good communication but when a high level person comes along and says "well thats not the way I would do it" everyone decides to go back to 1:1s, direct messaging, and calls so as not to document anything publicly in feat of being called out by the higher ups.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  Sounds like they need to spend their time differently. Yuk.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. Had this setup at my last job and the CEO would chime in with irrelevant, outdated, not feasible, or already considered ideas. We'd then have to spend time communicating and explaining the shit we had already been talking about for the last month or whatever. It was incredibly frustrating because it gave a public impression that our team was either incompetent or combative. It was gross.
  - swader999 2y ago
    I wonder if they would behave the same way in an everyone in the same office situation. Team leads should take this as an issue to the CEO.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Private team channels sound like a good compromise Also someone with good standing in the company to politely point to the CTO that it's not his job to give his 2c at every conversation in slack (typical behaviour of people coming from the technical side)
- switch007 2y ago
  You need a private channel with everyone except the C-level. We find this very, very effective at our 2500+ person org
marliechiller 2y ago
I found this can have negative consequences for more timid employees, junior hires or new joiners. People dont like sounding stupid in public, especially not in front of people they dont know. No matter how much of a safe culture you instil, human nature tends to prevail here and you get the loudest personalities being the the users of those public channels whilst others either dont ask those important questions or seek back channels anyway
- vel0city 2y ago
  Yeah, I'd agree you want a healthy balance of 1 on 1 and group conversation. A quick aside is one thing, and if it is a question that should lead to documentation then documentation should be written for it instead of just assuming someone is going to search through a year+ of slack messages in some public channels. Even in person, not every conversation is good to be had in front of the large group for a variety of reasons.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  Then these employees should use it as a growth opportunity. If you want to be effective at work you need to accept you'll be uncomfortable at times.
  - 7k5kyrty45 2y ago
    Hamfisting an ideology to human nature just doesen't seem to work no matter how nice the end result could be. People don't generally do uncomfortable things unless they are forced to, take for example literally anything else in life; entire fields of professions exist because we don't like cleaning thing X or Y
- aen1 2y ago
  1000% agree. I'd rather spin my wheels for an hour on Google than ask a silly question in public
  - negus 2y ago
    I would like to work with you. Asking searchable things may be considered disrespectful to one's time
vundercind 2y ago
Teams badly fucks this up by not providing normal-ass chats that aren't private ephemeral-ish groups. Their "teams" only have these weird announcement-oriented chats with terrible UX and visibility for ordinary chat activity, so you end up having to do everything in meeting-tied chats (created by the meeting, not the other way around) or ad-hoc group chats. You can fake it with lots of manual "pinning" but that relies on everyone agreeing which chats are primary and should be pinned so they don't start splitting messages over other chat rooms, then you still end up with things like chat for one basic topic being split across multiple meeting-chats that all have the same membership or (worse) just slightly different membership. It's as if they designed the tool to make effective remote work hard—but this also (like most things that make remote work worse) makes using it in an in-office context worse. It's just flat-out bad.
- bsuvc 2y ago
  100% agree. The people making the decision to switch to Teams don't "get" slack. They think the features are the same, so what's the problem? Ironically, Microsoft Teams is terrible for teams. It's a Frankenstein cross between instant messanger and SharePoint.
lutorm 2y ago
My experience (being fully remote for over a decade) is that it's extremely distracting to have all discussions public. It creates a lot of noise and it's very hard for people to not get drawn into conversations that doesn't directly affect them. It's definitely good to have finished conclusions available for everyone, but the "sausage making" is more distracting than useful. Of course it depends on the size of the team we're talking about.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  It depends on your self-discipline as well, as in, leave Slack or whatever alone for X hours a day, leave channels that aren't important, and if the volume is higher than you can manage in a reasonable time, Slack has AI powered summarization tools nowadays which are pretty decent. Ultimately though, your attention span and information management is your own responsibility, nobody else will filter it for you.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  It helps to have lots of channels that specialise. I was effectively remote for 15 years (I was in London other in US). ` If you are concentrating then you don't notice the chats, unless they are made urgent. When your focus has finished look at the channels that are nearest your speciality or sub team.
jesterson 2y ago
How do you deal with unavoidable information overload and necessity to read bazillion channels with tons of irrelevant crap in it? Since that's teh inevitable state of communication via slack with this sort of policy.

by paxys 2y ago

viewhub 2y ago

Massively agree with this. It can be difficult to create a culture where everyone talks in the open but it can save so many little and big mistakes!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

szszrk 2y ago

How to find comfort for and include characters that don't like the spotlight? At least not during early phase/brainstorming. I've worked with many great people that hate to handle things without their usual group first, and will stall until a reasonable approach can be presented. Which means creating shadow communication process - the more you push for "discouraging 1:1" the more they will hide. What your organisation did with such "incompatible" people, relate them until the team left likes how they work, or were there better ideas?

brudgers 2y ago
Core values are core values, and for better and worse, everything is not for everyone. If all-communications-are-public is the company culture, then the company culture is also not to accommodate that alternative communication style. Because any out of channel communications require multiple people to participate, not just the person who prefers it.
paxys 2y ago
No one is inherently "incompatible". It's mostly the environment influencing their behavior. There needs to be a culture where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and working outside silos, and that is always driven by management and senior eng leaders. For example do junior engineers get constructive criticism on a bad idea or design or are they yelled at and penalized? If the latter, of course everyone will think twice about being open. And even then you can only do so much. If someone really doesn't want to participate then, well, it's on you to decide how to deal with that.
underwater 2y ago
In my experience, most of the time this can be solved by resetting expectations. Once people learn that asking basic questions won’t open them up to mockery, things move a lot smoother for everyone. After all, a culture on 1:1 communication has a lot of downsides. The same question gets asked repeatedly, replies don’t become searchable, the same people (usually the most experienced) end up being constantly tapped for answers
- swader999 2y ago
  That's key, it has to be considered safe to ask questions. Anyone mocking or showing contempt to another on a channel would be immediately reprimanded in private by managers at my company.
em-bee 2y ago
if i know a colleague is uncomfortable to speak in a group i can collect their ideas in person, and share it with the group, but ideally the protocol should be public. so create a public chat group with only the two people joining. if the issue is that the person is afraid to speak up because of being ridiculed for their ideas, you have a culture problem that needs to be adressed. if the shy person is new, addressing the problem can be as simple as having the new team member do pair programming sessions with everyone on the team, so that they can get to know everyone better, which will make them more comfortable to speak up. maybe their previous job had a bad culture that influenced their behavior. those pair programming sessions can also help you identify if there are particular people that cause problems by being intimidating in some way to others. sometimes pair programming can even fix those problems, by allowing the two to get to know each other better and learn to respect each other. that doesn't always work though, and care must be taken that the person who is "afraid" to work with the "bully" is not forced to an interaction they are not comfortable with. if the discomfort is that high a more cautious approach is needed. especially if the person afraid is a long term team member.
- szszrk 2y ago
  I appreciate your insight (and all other commenters). > if the shy person is new > if the issue is that the person is afraid to speak up But that's my whole point: it's not always "fear". I'm talking about character. Personal preference. Or "people/character colors" or "16 personalities" or some other names it had. Enforcing a strict way to communicate and bashing exceptions (which is my way of phrasing the original comment) will work for some, but will also create an artificial leash for others. I think it's too strict and to generic to try to just implement it by force. Yes, whole team should be available to see details, be able to participate, but why enforce that on such a low level as forbidding 1:1 talks... From my recent experience, aside of excluding many personalities, it kills a lot of inertia that spontaneous prototyping and brain storming needs.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    not being willing to speak up is not a personal preference. being an introvert is not a preference. it can be a deep seating discomfort, that comes from negative experiences to speak up in the past. sometimes it is so deep that they are not even aware of it themselves. i was that person. i had no friends in school until i entered university. every negative reaction was a setback. fortunately my experience was mixed and i did have positive reactions too. i learned public speaking as a scout leader for example. otherwise i'd be a hermit now. people like us need more positive experiences. especially when joining a new team. to allow us to slowly change our preference. and even introverts need to accept that they need to cooperate with others, and that requires sharing their ideas. or they should find a different line of work.

notTooFarGone 2y ago

100% this. The fact that teams does not have an easy voice channel is a disgrace.

vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y ago
Every team needs a one-nine (CB channel for chat/truckers)
- em-bee 2y ago
  what happens on that channel?
  - zikduruqe 2y ago
    ♫ ♪ ♬ It was the dark of the moon On the sixth of June In a Kenworth, pullin' logs Cabover Pete with a reefer on And a Jimmy haulin' hogs We was headin' for bear On 'I-1-0 'Bout a mile out Shakey Town I says, Pig Pen this here's the Rubber Duck And I'm about to put the hammer down ♫ ♪ ♬
    - em-bee 2y ago
      oh you mean this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UAAwTlCp3OE https://youtube.com/watch?v=UAAwTlCp3OE :-)
      - zikduruqe 2y ago
        Oh no. I meant this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87r0CPQbFds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87r0CPQbFds
  - edm0nd 2y ago
    lot lizards

oc_elder 2y ago

I can appreciate the thinking here, but it not ideal. Different details are relevant to different people. And async is inefficient for many situations. Yes publish findings/results, but overcommunicating has a cost. Better to create different channels (sync, async, 1:1, broadcast), provide guidance and trust workers.

broken-kebab 2y ago
It's not necessary about trust, or relevancy. I believe motivation is contagious, and making communications hearable/visible for all most of the time can be beneficial because of this.
menaerus 2y ago
... and soon with this type of setting you will arrive at siloing the information. Having all communication public in the channels comes with its cost but everything is as transparent as it can be. Important distinction is that you get to choose if the detail is relevant for your work or not. And not your manager or whoever.

bdangubic 2y ago

I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive

em-bee 2y ago
you bring up a good point. what matters is the forum where decisions are made. you can talk about ideas in private. but the ideas need to be brought up in the group before any decisions are influenced. especially if the private conversation is with a team leader. if a team leader hears an idea in a private conversation they should ask that person to repeat the idea in public. but also they should discourage team members to specifically approach them to bring ideas. that is what is meant by discouraging private conversations. of course you can talk in private, but if the idea is not repeated in public then it is as if it was never talked about
spaceisballer 2y ago
I’m with you, then again Best Practices mean best for your work environment, not all. I’m currently making sure to cultivate an environment where my staff are comfortable sharing information openly. Not all of my people are comfortable announcing things to the group and want to bounce things off me or other supervisors. Sometimes you have to meet people where they are at. Like establishing the vision and just keep making sure you’re moving towards it.
vundercind 2y ago
The point is search needs to work, including for people not involved the conversations. Private and 1:1 chats break that. Use mute and let people @ you to pull you in when you're really needed. You don't have to leave notifications wide-open on every channel.

vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y ago

In addition slack search becomes a great onboarding tool.

swader999 2y ago
I'm sure there's features here or in progress where you'll be able to ask for an AI summary of all the recent discussion and decisions made on different topics.

KronisLV 2y ago

> Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. Working at an established org right now, where the team is still remote first. I tried suggesting this, but got pushback and the team actually settled on the opposite. For example, they want any optional changes (e.g. suggestions) in pull requests not to be left as comments but discussed in private which 90% of the time means calls. They seem to dislike discussion threads in Slack and want meetings for things instead. I’ve also noticed things like the person who reviews a pull request being the one who has to merge it and essentially take responsibility for it, versus just giving approval and the author merging it and making sure everything is okay after CD. I’m very much the opposite and prefer to have things in writing and like asynchronous communication. But when it is written messages, usually people either ask for a call or just do “Hey.” I actually made this a while ago hah: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev https://quick-answers.kronis.dev Either way, people also really seem to dislike writing README files, or all that many code comments, or making the occasional onboarding script or introducing tooling to do some things automatically. I don't get it.

sillyfluke 2y ago
The amount of strictness or enforcement behind the word "discourage" in "discourage 1:1 communication" in the parent post is open to interpretation. What you have is people using a tool for different objectives, and when their chosen behavior hinders your objectives things seem out of whack. I'm against shoving an eye of sauron communication hose down people's throats. I simply give my constructive feedback after the fact. E.g. when someone dm's me I say, "so-so is waiting for this to be done for their thing, so mention this part in the channel." or "the other team would need to know this for a refactor, so add this info to the wiki." If someone feels the need for dm'ing for some psychological safety so be it. But the cost of that safety is additional communication overhead for filling in gaps that the person should be ok with. And the people that value the psychological safety they gain usually don't object or have no grounds to object to a duplication of communication to fill those gaps when someone points out those gaps exists.
- KronisLV 2y ago

andrei_says_ 2y ago

Basecamp is incredible for this. Encourages grouping people by projects, with all communication on a project being public. All activity on a project listed in one place. Catching up with work takes minimal effort, including when someone goes on vacation or leaves the team. All it takes is skimming through the project. Slack is built around chat with high has its limitations when applied to the context of a longer term project.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
While Slack - if you pay for it - permanently stores all communications and makes it archivable, it's also ephemeral and anything said more than a day ago is effectively gone. They do have an AI summary tool to catch up though, if you pay for it, which is alright.
- andrei_says_ 2y ago
  To me the difference is in the affordances and mental model. Basecamp - groups all communication, assets, participants, tasks in a project space. I open the project which establishes context for everything and everyone. This predefined context makes short efficient communication very powerful. It’s incredibly simple and sophisticated at the same time - allowing grouping activity by people projects tasks etc. The ephemeral nature of chat-centered systems makes me incredibly nervous about missing things or being unable to find them.

Jimmc414 2y ago

This contributes to stress and notification fatigue, especially when bombarded with alerts from every channel. Some will turn off notifications entirely or disengage to maintain focus on their workload.

reureu 2y ago
I'm struggling with this at my current job: nobody communicates about anything in asynchronous channels, doesn't want any form of daily synchronous meeting (e.g., standups), and won't agree to ad hoc meetings outside of our 1 hour once per week meeting. So lots of decisions and work get done in vacuums, which cause errors in various systems that would have been easily caught and addressed if someone just said "hey, I'm changing this column name from X to Y". So, just to say that the counterfactual here isn't "no stress because no notifications"-- it can be more stress from failed coordination. There are in betweens here, with the major one being threads in slack. Everyone gets notified about a single message at the start of the thread, but does not get notified for any subsequent discussion. Any interested party can read more and participate as needed. For someone like me (a leader on paper but not really in practice), I'd read all the message and look for dependency or similar problems, but for others they may not need to.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
And that's fine. You're not expected to stay online and respond at all times, that's the antithesis of asynchronous communication. Just reserve a block of time per day to catch up - like you would with emails - and go through things then. Only leave notifications on if they're addressed to you specifically.

lvspiff 2y ago

I'm at a company now where we are trying to do this but the CIO/CEO keep weighing in on EVERY conversation where they disagree with the approaach. The whole reason we are having the open conversation is for ideation and good communication but when a high level person comes along and says "well thats not the way I would do it" everyone decides to go back to 1:1s, direct messaging, and calls so as not to document anything publicly in feat of being called out by the higher ups.

dgfitz 2y ago
Sounds like they need to spend their time differently. Yuk.
bongodongobob 2y ago
I was going to say the same thing. Had this setup at my last job and the CEO would chime in with irrelevant, outdated, not feasible, or already considered ideas. We'd then have to spend time communicating and explaining the shit we had already been talking about for the last month or whatever. It was incredibly frustrating because it gave a public impression that our team was either incompetent or combative. It was gross.
- swader999 2y ago
  I wonder if they would behave the same way in an everyone in the same office situation. Team leads should take this as an issue to the CEO.
raverbashing 2y ago
Private team channels sound like a good compromise Also someone with good standing in the company to politely point to the CTO that it's not his job to give his 2c at every conversation in slack (typical behaviour of people coming from the technical side)
switch007 2y ago
You need a private channel with everyone except the C-level. We find this very, very effective at our 2500+ person org

marliechiller 2y ago

I found this can have negative consequences for more timid employees, junior hires or new joiners. People dont like sounding stupid in public, especially not in front of people they dont know. No matter how much of a safe culture you instil, human nature tends to prevail here and you get the loudest personalities being the the users of those public channels whilst others either dont ask those important questions or seek back channels anyway

vel0city 2y ago
Yeah, I'd agree you want a healthy balance of 1 on 1 and group conversation. A quick aside is one thing, and if it is a question that should lead to documentation then documentation should be written for it instead of just assuming someone is going to search through a year+ of slack messages in some public channels. Even in person, not every conversation is good to be had in front of the large group for a variety of reasons.
mvdtnz 2y ago
Then these employees should use it as a growth opportunity. If you want to be effective at work you need to accept you'll be uncomfortable at times.
- 7k5kyrty45 2y ago
  Hamfisting an ideology to human nature just doesen't seem to work no matter how nice the end result could be. People don't generally do uncomfortable things unless they are forced to, take for example literally anything else in life; entire fields of professions exist because we don't like cleaning thing X or Y
aen1 2y ago
1000% agree. I'd rather spin my wheels for an hour on Google than ask a silly question in public
- negus 2y ago
  I would like to work with you. Asking searchable things may be considered disrespectful to one's time

vundercind 2y ago

Teams badly fucks this up by not providing normal-ass chats that aren't private ephemeral-ish groups. Their "teams" only have these weird announcement-oriented chats with terrible UX and visibility for ordinary chat activity, so you end up having to do everything in meeting-tied chats (created by the meeting, not the other way around) or ad-hoc group chats. You can fake it with lots of manual "pinning" but that relies on everyone agreeing which chats are primary and should be pinned so they don't start splitting messages over other chat rooms, then you still end up with things like chat for one basic topic being split across multiple meeting-chats that all have the same membership or (worse) just slightly different membership. It's as if they designed the tool to make effective remote work hard—but this also (like most things that make remote work worse) makes using it in an in-office context worse. It's just flat-out bad.

bsuvc 2y ago
100% agree. The people making the decision to switch to Teams don't "get" slack. They think the features are the same, so what's the problem? Ironically, Microsoft Teams is terrible for teams. It's a Frankenstein cross between instant messanger and SharePoint.

lutorm 2y ago

My experience (being fully remote for over a decade) is that it's extremely distracting to have all discussions public. It creates a lot of noise and it's very hard for people to not get drawn into conversations that doesn't directly affect them. It's definitely good to have finished conclusions available for everyone, but the "sausage making" is more distracting than useful. Of course it depends on the size of the team we're talking about.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
It depends on your self-discipline as well, as in, leave Slack or whatever alone for X hours a day, leave channels that aren't important, and if the volume is higher than you can manage in a reasonable time, Slack has AI powered summarization tools nowadays which are pretty decent. Ultimately though, your attention span and information management is your own responsibility, nobody else will filter it for you.
pasc1878 2y ago
It helps to have lots of channels that specialise. I was effectively remote for 15 years (I was in London other in US). ` If you are concentrating then you don't notice the chats, unless they are made urgent. When your focus has finished look at the channels that are nearest your speciality or sub team.

jesterson 2y ago

How do you deal with unavoidable information overload and necessity to read bazillion channels with tons of irrelevant crap in it? Since that's teh inevitable state of communication via slack with this sort of policy.