I'm somewhat lucky in that Jabber is popular, but optional, in my workplace. So I can get away with never logging into it. I'm sure, though, there's some price I pay for opting out of the idea.
Personally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your chosen way to work is silly.
Chat allows you to read and respond at your own convenience. If you’re not using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like walking up in person or calling on the phone.
Yeah. There's a very different expectation for people in their 20's, 30's' 40's, 50's with chat. That is, our expectations around email response times is fairly close, but our expectations around chat (jabber, slack,etc) are less aligned.
Personally, I hate all "chat" channels. My attitude is that you can show up in person, or send an SMS...if it's that important. I get that doesn't align with the new global order and all, but it doesn't change my reaction.
> If you’re not using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like walking up in person or calling on the phone.
If they have to physically stand up to bother you, I think that also makes them more likely to answer the question for themselves without bothering you at all.
Some people ... when they have chat, their bar for interrupting you is so low. I have a coworker who it almost seems like he'll interrupt me every time he sees an error message or exception on his screen.
Maybe the higher cost of those "more disruptive methods" is a good thing, because it'll filter out those people who couldn't even be bothered walking up to you in person.
This is definitely an attitude you need to set within the company culture - chat != instant. At least not initially - once a conversation gets going, it's much faster in chat than via email.
We ask people not to use private chat (with varying degrees of success) but instead ask in channel, even if it's to a specific person:
1. It helps others reading the channel learn
2. If someone else is around and knows the answer, they can provide it
You sometimes have to reply in channel (and copy+paste the question) to get this point across, but it generally seems to work well.
Didn't even think of that. I still find instant messaging to be disruptive to my own work, but you're right: People would just find me and get up in my business if I couldn't dismiss them with a flick of the wrist.
I usually remain logged out of our Corp chat (Sametime) AND keep my phone unplugged. If you want me but can’t be bothered to stop by or send an email, then it’s probably not worth my time.
At work we use Slack, at least on the engineering side of the organisation. Not sure on the concrete numbers but I'd hazard a guess that we have 1000+ users on there.
There is Yammer too, but I've never seen anyone use it.
That is one of the worst examples of censoring names I've seen in an article. I have to laugh that the example HBR give is for an anonymous "midsize media company", when it is actually them. (e.g. Emily Ryan, product manager, Robert Black, etc, all HBR employees)
I love our company's internal slack for all the reasons listed in the article. Though we haven't reached the size that we'd actually need it (small company). We did decide to pay for it for the unlimited searching of archives. It is also nice because it gives me a permanent URL pointing to discussions that I can put in issues or commit messages.
But the first thing I do when I install slack anywhere is turn off all the notifications (or disallow them).
Letting anyone interrupt my thinking anywhere? No thanks.
Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link to the search syntax for Slack: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Search-in... , in particular the "Use search modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't feed it things like a channel limitation or something.
Occasionally, the search isn't great in my opinion. But I've sure found things from the past there. But unless you were personally involved in the discussion (so that you know what to search and look for) I'd assume it is impossible. Too much noise.
I agree about Slack's search - it can be slow too.
(I actually had so much of a problem with this that I built my own enterprise search tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io )
I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature.
I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.
For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."
And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a worse tool.
would you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team could see that this was an important message?
I might. I think the value for me would hinge on how easy it was to contextualise the information.
Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would not use it.
If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject, maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be compelling.
Thanks for sharing that. A few friends and I are trying to explore a product in this space, and what you said is pretty much what we've arrived at as well. If you have any other feedback you think we should keep in mind I'm all ears
I'm wondering, as well, if no archival leads to freer discussion with less fear of saying something stupid that will live forever. And if that's worth anything. Maybe it depends too on whether Slack is used strictly as an impartial way to coordinate professional communication, or if it is also social and informal, which the parent article has some interesting points in favor of.
I kind of agree with this, but I took a slightly different path and built my own 'enterprise search' tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io - so I'll always be thankful to Slack for giving me my idea :-)
I can only speak about how my company uses Skype (which may differ since I don't know the ins-and-outs) but my conversations end up in my exchange inbox in a folder titled "Conversation History".
So at least, for me, Skype for business has this functionality.
Personal skype stores your chat history local to the device- I found that out recently when I was looking at my non-existent conversation history on my new phone.
I can understand the points about social aspects at work, but some of the content concerning more tangible business benefits seems too idealistic. e.g. "I suddenly remembered that I’d seen a communication exchanged between these two guys.." -- how often do you happen to remember seeing that kind of conversation? Imagine these tools are barely making a dent in the amount of duplication and lack of "metaknowledge" that goes on in any mid to large sized company. And that comes with the oft-cited costs of distractions, etc. Or am I just using them wrong?
I'm not sure how effective or distributed the best knowledgebase softwares are (ours is OneNote and it isn't working IMO), but I think having the knowledge at your fingertips would be far less distracting than a minimum of two people occupying each other's mental resources long enough to exchange IP. Then what if people leave and take the IP with them. Have there been studies specifically measuring distractability or overall work performance with/without distracting instant messaging...? I'm not convinced these IM tools are the answer, but maybe with some sort of "Guide"/KB integration coupled with ML.
OneNote is probably not working as KB software for you because it's not meant to be that. Consider it as a personal scrapbook with pages you might show to other people, and get a proper KB platform.
OneNote works pretty well as a glorified wiki in small groups.
Naturally, these days, if that's what you need why not get a proper wiki going? I do know for some MS shops the pre-paid OneNote licenses make it a tempting substitute.
Well, I only have experience with chat apps, but I think it's the advantages of chat (rooms/subs basically for teas + private messages), but without the expectation of immediate feedback. Also probably great searchability.
Not OP, but threading. So many collaboration tools I've worked with are indistinguishable from the comment section of a blog or newspaper. The vast majority of the comments are useless, with people arguing over ridiculous things, but there's no natural segregation of useful comments and useless, so all you can do is scroll about hope to encounter something worth while.
tl;dr it talks exclusively about the benefits of ambient awareness and nothing of the cost. No discussion whatsoever of the distraction tax of listening in on all those cross-department threads.
Turns out one of the authors is a paid consultant who has a vested interest in pumping corporate social tools.[1]
[1] “Paul Leonardo is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and consults with companies about how to use social media and other technologies more effectively.”
Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do the same to email with the right UI.
EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
Of course - in theory - you can turn email into a chat tool. But they do have pretty different norms of how they work.
Having said that, they aren't very natural substitutes at all. In Slack etc, the natural element of dialog is a single sentence or less. In email the natural element is a paragraph or at least a couple of sentences.
In email it is normal to select who you are sending an email to, and the recipient chooses how to organize the messages. In chat it is typical in channels organized by the sender and recipients choose to join or not.
They're not. They promote knee-jerk reactions and just-in-time decision making. I see some value in Slack interactive message buttons for BPM approvals but that's about it. Don't get me started on Chatops.
> Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email?
Communication tools exist along multiple axes of effort, permanence, content-bandwidth, and discoverability.
A conversation takes little effort, is high content-bandwidth (body language, tone, whiteboarding, pointing, etc), but is impossible to discover for others and is impermanent. A formal specification is more permanent, and more discoverable, but has a bit less content-bandwidth and is a high effort activity. Old school SMSs are low-effort and permanent, but not discoverable and prone to confusion because of low content-bandwidth.
Email is kinda 'middle of the tree' all round. It's primary failing for the Entperise is the point-to-point nature of discussion (removing the ability for third parties to discover it). This can be mitigated with use of appropriate groups or tools (internal mailing lists, Sharepoint-ish blobs), but that's a challenge in and of itself...
So how is Slack better than Email? It's better in the way my cheese knife is better than my bread knife. And Slack is as much a threat to email as my cheese knife is to my bread knife... They are complimentary tools that address slightly different needs on a related spectrum, and will be painful if misapplied to the wrong problems. I can cut cheese with a bread knife, I can cut bread with a cheese knife. I can make Slack my total communication system, I can pretend that email is enough ;)
Right tool for the job, don't do dumb things, and if you can't figure out how immature use of a pling-pling-pling-pling-pling chat system is gonna wreck your day-to-day work experience... ... I assume we have worked together before and you were in charge of choosing the internal communication system...
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[ 153 ms ] story [ 1301 ms ] threadPersonally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your chosen way to work is silly.
So you get the worst of both worlds. Intrusive messaging and disjointed and irritating email.
Personally, I hate all "chat" channels. My attitude is that you can show up in person, or send an SMS...if it's that important. I get that doesn't align with the new global order and all, but it doesn't change my reaction.
If they have to physically stand up to bother you, I think that also makes them more likely to answer the question for themselves without bothering you at all.
Some people ... when they have chat, their bar for interrupting you is so low. I have a coworker who it almost seems like he'll interrupt me every time he sees an error message or exception on his screen.
We ask people not to use private chat (with varying degrees of success) but instead ask in channel, even if it's to a specific person:
1. It helps others reading the channel learn
2. If someone else is around and knows the answer, they can provide it
You sometimes have to reply in channel (and copy+paste the question) to get this point across, but it generally seems to work well.
There is Yammer too, but I've never seen anyone use it.
But the first thing I do when I install slack anywhere is turn off all the notifications (or disallow them).
Letting anyone interrupt my thinking anywhere? No thanks.
Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?
While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link to the search syntax for Slack: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Search-in... , in particular the "Use search modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't feed it things like a channel limitation or something.
(I actually had so much of a problem with this that I built my own enterprise search tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io )
I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.
For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."
And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a worse tool.
Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would not use it.
If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject, maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be compelling.
So at least, for me, Skype for business has this functionality.
Personal skype stores your chat history local to the device- I found that out recently when I was looking at my non-existent conversation history on my new phone.
Naturally, these days, if that's what you need why not get a proper wiki going? I do know for some MS shops the pre-paid OneNote licenses make it a tempting substitute.
We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.
Sometimes I wish we had that again.
Turns out one of the authors is a paid consultant who has a vested interest in pumping corporate social tools.[1]
[1] “Paul Leonardo is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and consults with companies about how to use social media and other technologies more effectively.”
EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
Having said that, they aren't very natural substitutes at all. In Slack etc, the natural element of dialog is a single sentence or less. In email the natural element is a paragraph or at least a couple of sentences.
In email it is normal to select who you are sending an email to, and the recipient chooses how to organize the messages. In chat it is typical in channels organized by the sender and recipients choose to join or not.
There are many other differences too.
Communication tools exist along multiple axes of effort, permanence, content-bandwidth, and discoverability.
A conversation takes little effort, is high content-bandwidth (body language, tone, whiteboarding, pointing, etc), but is impossible to discover for others and is impermanent. A formal specification is more permanent, and more discoverable, but has a bit less content-bandwidth and is a high effort activity. Old school SMSs are low-effort and permanent, but not discoverable and prone to confusion because of low content-bandwidth.
Email is kinda 'middle of the tree' all round. It's primary failing for the Entperise is the point-to-point nature of discussion (removing the ability for third parties to discover it). This can be mitigated with use of appropriate groups or tools (internal mailing lists, Sharepoint-ish blobs), but that's a challenge in and of itself...
So how is Slack better than Email? It's better in the way my cheese knife is better than my bread knife. And Slack is as much a threat to email as my cheese knife is to my bread knife... They are complimentary tools that address slightly different needs on a related spectrum, and will be painful if misapplied to the wrong problems. I can cut cheese with a bread knife, I can cut bread with a cheese knife. I can make Slack my total communication system, I can pretend that email is enough ;)
Right tool for the job, don't do dumb things, and if you can't figure out how immature use of a pling-pling-pling-pling-pling chat system is gonna wreck your day-to-day work experience... ... I assume we have worked together before and you were in charge of choosing the internal communication system...