Slack, Zooms, and Meetings

Prior to the remote vs office debate, probably the most exhausting workplace debate was around meetings, calls, and Slack messages.

I am old enough that the beginning of my career meant that you were at your desk with a phone. And we’d gasp call each other when we needed something. Occasionally we’d send instant messages via our internal system, but phone was usually primary form of communication.

With the Slack era, more and more people started using messaging versus phone calls. It was a welcome change for most people… until unread Slack messages drove people’s anxiety through the roof. We now live in a world of abundance of workplace tools. We have slack for messaging. Slack meetups for quick calls. And Zoom/Meets for longer team meetings. It can be overwhelming.

At Secfi, we recently implemented Roam which is a virtual HQ where you can knock on people’s doors and see if people are “in the office”. It’s largely been a great tool, but the negative feedback we have gotten is almost always centered around the fact that they don’t want another tool for people to contact them.

I used to feel the same way. In my earlier career, I never wanted to be bothered. I wanted to be heads down and just grinding out work or client calls. Messages + internal calls always felt like a chore that interrupted my work.

Then I started managing people and everything changed. What I always tell people who give me this feedback is that unfortunately these communication tools aren’t always for you. They are mostly for your manager(s) and colleague(s) to get stuff from you that they need to do their jobs.

A successful startup cannot run with just individual contributors sitting in silos not talking to each other. There’s other implications that people need to realize beyond their bubble or silo. That is why these tools are very important, despite perhaps being annoyed that people are bothering you.

One of the things that we’re implementing is more guidelines on how we communicate and talk to each other in this ever-growing remote working world. That will help with the anxiety, but the most important thing is having everyone realize that communication is vital, maybe not for them but for everyone else.