Communications Channels in a Remote Work Setting

One of the things that we've been trying to improve at Extra is achieving a better sense of "on" and "off" at work. It's especially hard being remote first, with a fast growing team spread across 16(!) timezones.

Honestly, given the problem, I think we're pretty well--for now.

To cut off problems before they start, we've been asking: how do we let people know how to work with us, when each person is coming up with their own answer to tradeoff between work/life balance and achieving the bandwidth and latency demanded by their role?

I've realized that, personally, I haven't been using different communication channels as effectively as I can. Specifically, my email inbox is a total disaster. I figured it was okay, since the "important" conversations get handled via Slack. Now, I'm realizing that the reason everything (for me) runs through Slack is that people have figured out that's how to get me to respond.

This is leaving me down a key tool in setting expectations for response times around specific issues.

This post is an attempt for me to clarify how I think communication should work (for me). That way:

• I can use the channel of communication to set response time expectations
  • Letting the team make better decisions about their own working hours
• The team knows which channels to use to reach me for which issues
  • Simultaneously relieving some of my Slack bloat and letting me make better decisions about my working hours

The relevant channels are:

• Synchronous
  • Scheduled virtual meetings
  • Unscheduled virtual meetings
  • Scheduled in-person meetings
• Hybrid
  • Slack
  • Text / SMS
• Asynchronous
  • Email

Each channel affords a different tradeoff between intimacy and efficiency.

The asynchronous channels also are the best for allowing everyone to manage their lives.

The synchronous channels are best for handling highly urgent, complex, or amorphous matters (given they provide the lowest latency, high information transmission capacity, and best support for two-way communication).

The hybrid channels are in theory asynchronous--but in practice, they're primarily used for synchronous text-based communication.

Scheduled Virtual Meetings

Out of the synchronous channels, scheduled meetings are by far the most common. On average, I have about 75 meetings a week (my bandwidth). These span 1-on-1's, team stand-ups and numbers reviews, project-based check-ins, recruiting calls, etc.

I also don't separate out video calls or phone calls--meetings are virtual or in-person. It doesn't matter exactly how the phone is being used anymore.

Overall, the expectation I set (for myself):

• Anyone at Extra can set up a one-off 1-on-1 or team meeting with me, if they can find time on my calendar
  • So far, this hasn't been abused so no need to filter
• Anyone seeking to find time should be able to do so within the next 3 business days
  • Not sure how long I can commit to this!
• These should be reserved for topics that establish/require more intimate communication

Unscheduled Virtual Meetings

Unscheduled meetings are far less common, mostly because it's rare that I have a useful opening in my calendar anymore. But back when we were less than 20 people, they were great. I definitely encourage them for my teams.

These should be reserved for:

1. Communication around urgent in-progress projects
   • Financial model revisions that have a deadline
   • Quick syncs before a meeting with an external party
2. Urgent feedback on a problem that can't wait
   • New technical outage or fraud issue
3. "Fill-In" otherwise unused time in scheduled meetings
   • Status updates that otherwise might have required separate Slack conversations
   • Quick alignment on small decisions
   • Good time to just check in with people on how they're doing (I feel so corporate writing that!)

By far #3 is the common form of unscheduled meeting now. If we had 30 minutes for a group topic but ended 5 minutes early, I usually try to take that 5 minutes to hold an unscheduled 1-on-1 with someone on the call, if there's anything that can justify it. It's one of the ways I try to preserve some of the intimacy into my communication with people as we scale.

If #1 and #2 are happening too often, that probably means there's a role I'm filling I need to hand off to someone else or hire for.

Scheduled In-Person Meetings

I love these, but they're nearly impossible to do more than once every few weeks. They're reserved for relationship-building and discussion around the most sensitive or complex topics only.

I only now realized that hybrid channels exist. They're asynchronous channels that are primarily used in a synchronous way. This a classic example of a "desire path", where the way something is used differs from the original design:

This seems to me like a very likely culprit for potentially "screwing up" our intentions around allowing people to manage their own time while getting their jobs done. I might slack someone, intending it to be asynchronous, but it gets treated like its urgent enough that they must reply immediately--even if it's just my catching up on the day after putting the kids to bed (and they live in the UK).

Slack

Slack is by far the most commonly used hybrid channel. My personal expectations for it is that:

• Group discussions that can be done in a channel should be, so others can see
  • In practice, people use direct message groups to "save" the channel from noise
• The comms there should otherwise be for things that need responses within about half a day
  • Though more urgent discussions are fine
  • In practice, people just put all discussions there, including the non-urgent ones

Text / SMS

Text has been used as a specific high-urgency or high sensitivity version of Slack. Even though it's primarily text-only, the separation of the noise of Slack is used to indicate higher importance of these messages--and that does give them a more intimate feel.

I'm realizing that don't have any truly asynchronous channels. They're all being used to replace the conversations that would have happened in person if we weren't a remote-work company.

Email is the perfect async channel, but I have to get control of my inbox back to make use of it. In practice, I get to email when I get to it (which is often never)--so no one can rely on me there.

This is a big gap.  I thought I was using Slack to replace email, but I'm actually using Slack to replace in-person conversations (and not using email at all). I'm missing a whole form of efficient communication.

If I can do my part to make email useful again, that should allow me to have a message that--by its very use--conveys the opposite message as SMS does. Rather than this message being more important and urgent than an average Slack message, if it's coming by email, this message is less important/urgent. Please prioritize your workflow needs vs the business demands.

Here's my plan to help reduce my Slack bloat and to give people I work with a truly asynchronous channel to communicate with me.

1. Signed up with Superhuman to learn how to use email better
2. Start using email to kick off asynchronous conversations
3. Establish times in my day specifically reserved for reviewing email
4. Become far more responsive on email, including letting people know when they can expect a response from me there (even if I can't address the email content itself)
5. Once I've managed to consistently do 2 and 3, I'll start asking people to move relevant conversations to email and saving Slack for more synchronous type conversations

Hopefully, once this is executed, both my Slack experience and others people's experience of working with me improve.