My Online Chat Philosophy

This post has been stuck in my "drawer" since September 2019. Drew DeVault's recent blog post on the same subject motivated me to finish and publish it!

Situation

Since April 2019 I've been working fully remote for ePages. Pre-COVID-19, I still visited the office once a while for important discussions, interviews, on-boarding and team lunches. When the west started reacting to the pandemic, it had pretty much no impact on my work situation.

For online chat, we use Mattermost. Further used knowledge management and communication tools are Confluence, Jira, GitHub and email. Before, I was writing a lot already and I am aware that over-communication is helpful in a remote environment.

My approach

... is pretty much the same as Drew's:

• Asynchronous: While typing indicators help to get a conversation going, it's unreasonable to expect all addressees to read a message immediately. Chat tools are asynchronous by nature, but can be used in a synchronous fashion until a conversation ebbs away. It helps to provide more information at once, so no delayed message ping-pong is needed to gather relevant pieces.
• Ephemeral: I don't read up on longer conversation I missed ("go with the flow"). If there is important info in the chat, it should be persisted elsewhere, too!
• No notifications: Plays in with the asynchronous approach: Same as email, I check chat tools on my own schedule to reduce distractions and increase focus.

To me it seems, that sometimes those points are misunderstood by deciders introducing Slack o.s. to their organization and expecting communication problems to drop, maybe trying to get rid of email in the same stroke. Whereas chat tools are another helper from the box, they don't supersede face-to-face conversations, video calls, email, or proper writing, documentation and knowledge management.

Merry Christmas!