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Freer and easier

Chat has many mer­its; I find there is some­thing lib­er­at­ing about being able to be more suc­cinct there than in emails with­out sound­ing rude, and many of my clients tes­ti­fy to how nice it is to get the email vol­ume down when some of the cor­re­spon­dence has moved over to chat.

Or, much messier than before?

At the same time, the intro­duc­tion of Teams and Slack can mess up com­mu­ni­ca­tion big time, because now there are con­ver­sa­tions about all sorts of things in both chat and email, back and forth, back and forth, and there is no order to it at all. We lose ​“where we are” in the var­i­ous con­ver­sa­tions, we find it hard to find our way back to a thread we had some­where, and when we talk about an issue in sev­er­al places we might end up say­ing the same thing over and over but in dif­fer­ent channels.

Make the dif­fer­ence clear

The solu­tion lies in draw­ing a clear line between email and chat so that it becomes more obvi­ous to those work­ing togeth­er what they should use chat for and what emails are for.

If that line is not clear today for you and your col­leagues, that is what I would encour­age you to address now.

Do this

Dur­ing the next appro­pri­ate meet­ing with your col­leagues, dis­cuss what would be an appro­pri­ate bound­ary between chat and email for you.

What are the pos­si­ble bound­aries to choose from? Well, here are four vari­a­tions that I have picked up on from clients — and from how I work myself, in addi­tion to that:

• External/​Internal — You con­duct the exter­nal con­ver­sa­tions in emails while all inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion hap­pens in the chat.
• Chan­nel not available/​channel avail­able — If there is no chat chan­nel for what is to be dis­cussed (and it is clear that there should not be one), you com­mu­ni­cate via email. If there is a chat chan­nel for the mat­ter, the chat should be used — not the email.
• Long/​short - You use email for longer, more exten­sive exchanges of infor­ma­tion and chat only for short ques­tions, issues, and so on.
• Non-imme­di­ate response/​quick response — If the answer is not urgent, you use email, but if the mat­ter is urgent, you use chat.

Agree on a bound­ary for you to try out — if only among your team. Nat­u­ral­ly, you might need and want to try some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from the four exam­ples of bound­aries list­ed here.

Decide on a test peri­od — a month, for exam­ple — and then eval­u­ate how it has worked for you. Has it become eas­i­er to dis­tin­guish the tools from each oth­er? Has it been eas­i­er to fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions? Is the bound­ary set­ting com­pre­hen­sive enough? Make any nec­es­sary adjust­ments and try again.

Smoother col­lab­o­ra­tion

If you clar­i­fy the bound­aries between emails and chat, you will be able to make bet­ter use of both tools. You will use them more for what they are made for, the way you use them will be smoother than before, and the use you get from them greater as well. If you col­lab­o­rate a lot dur­ing your work­day, this will make a big difference.

How do you do it?

In fact, is the line between chat and email already clear to you and your col­leagues? Great! What have you done to draw the line? Please write to me and let me know. 

(Do you some­times feel over­whelmed by unan­swered emails, chats and texts? Find out in this short video how quick­ly you are expect­ed to respond.)