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Sort of. But the problem highlighted above are the people that say "Hi", you reply with "hey, how's it going?" and then you sit there waiting for something more from them that never comes. You don't expect them to go silent on you so you sit waiting for a bit - firing off a quick response and immediately context switching back to what you were doing before is quite difficult.
Many "modern" (e.g. IT/Media/etc) work places don't use email or phones for internal comms. Pretty much all of my internal comms is done via:
- Slack
- Video calls
- Editing Google docs/sheets/slides
Email is only really used for sending occasional company/division wide announcements (think one per week max) or for sending things that require audit trails (e.g. mostly stuff to HR like changing pension contributions, etc).
In 2.5 years I don't think I've ever made a single phone call to someone else in the company, or received one. Any 1:1 communication like that is done over a video call that is agreed upon and setup prior to happening - even if it's just "Here's a meeting link, let's jump on it" - there's no concept of a cold calling a video call here.
Looking back in my Sent email folder I can see an email to my manager a couple of weeks ago (for something where an audit trail will be useful) and then previous email I sent was to payroll in November 2023 asking for a copy of my P11D.
Going back to Slack, most of the time my Slack's to individuals are like:
(not urgent) Just wondering if you worked on the FooBar system in the last week. Having some problems with it \<error message\>, I've tried searching for that and saw that you dealt with something similar before \<LINK\> but there's no summary of what the root-cause was. If you've got 5 minutes I wouldn't mind talking to you about it. No problem if busy right now but I'd like to get this looked at by the end of my day (which is at 1600 UTC)That means they can glance at the notification, see
(not urgent)and know they can go back to what they're doing if it's more important to them. When they do read it there's enough info for them to have an idea of what it is, they can see what I've done to try and fix it myself, and there's a clear expectation of what is required with rough timescales. - Slack
Greenbank-
Any 1:1 communication like that is done over a video call that is agreed upon and setup prior to happening
The dream. I have a potential client who has created this situation where they might just call at any moment, and they clearly expect me to answer. If I'm nicely tucked into a task, I am not picking up. Book a fucking appointment. Not that I have told them to do this.
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(not urgent) Just wondering if you could fix that really long inline code tag. Having some problems with layout on my client. No problem if busy right now but I'd like to get this looked at by the end of my day (which is at 1700 UTC) -
Email is only really used for sending occasional company/division wide announcements (think one per week max) or for sending things that require audit trails (e.g. mostly stuff to HR like changing pension contributions, etc).
Which really pisses me off. If someone needs my input on something sometime in the next few days then send me an email. A chat message interrupts what I'm doing, an email I can get to when I have break in another task.
jackbepablo
chez_jay
jellybaby
Isn't this because most businesses don't have phone systems now (or that awful computer based one that no-one uses) so people use teams/slack as an alternative to the phone and that initial 'hi' is really to be understood as 'are you online now and able to help me out quickly' - the person can't be arsed typing their full question because they want to know first whether or not you're there and able to help.