One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.
Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a (small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate more, etc.
Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ... they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)
Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.
BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands, instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)
One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.
Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a (small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate more, etc.
Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ... they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)
Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.
BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands, instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)
Anyway, thanks for all the comments. :)