| I was a phone hater, and always had good reasons why. It’s synchronous, requires meetings to be setup in advance, is cumbersome, and is painful. But I’ve come to the realization after having the company switch to alternative means (slack) that these issues are its greatest strength. The universal annoyances of setting up a phone call means that people only reach out for it when it’s absolutely necessary. Instant messaging means that others will ping you for the slightest of things. And the expectations around instant message means that if I don’t respond within 15 minutes at most, the assumption is that I’m not actually working at the time. And email works great for everything else that can be done asynchronously and requires a written record. And email has far fewer expectations about immediate responses (in fact, the spate of email is bad commentary over the past few years means that saying you check your email once an hour is not considered bad), being open means it fits into your workflow with the many clients and tools available for consuming it, and is immensely flexible. Good threading and search capabikities, the fact that each mail contains the entire discussion thread which you can then save as a file allows you to then incorporate that information in any alternative workflow using existing tools everyone is comfortable with. Compare this to the new email replacements, which instead of fitting into your workflow require you to fit your workflow into them (because you’re limited to their clients to use them), and have expectations of not synchronous but almost immediate responses, and take up a lot of your time. Some caveats though. If you regularly communicate with sales types, they love being on the phone and are willing to call you for anything. My way to avoid that is to basically insist on a calendar invite that I have accepted to take a phone call. The invite must contain a high level agenda so I can make a decision whether it’s worth taking the call, or can potentially be resolved in an email. TLDR: I agree phone (not necessarily through phone calls, but usually through Skype or Google Hangouts) + email is easily my preferred universe of work communication tools. |