I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.
I'm still searching for the golden goose "conversation" that's actually faster on Slack. Sure, a quick back and forth or check in is actually faster.
I have yet to find a meaningful discussion that's actually faster on Slack. It seems like they always drag out as sparsely filled, 45 minute threads. Nearly everyone of these would have been better served by a 10 minute call.
Faster can mean less clock time (Zoom will almost always win) or less “involved” time - each person reads the thread and responds when they have time, which uses less of their time but more clock time.
It can work either way, depends on the type of discussion. Often the best is to hash as much out in chat as you can and then meet to finalize.
My company's retention policy deletes emails after 6 months, as well as Teams chat logs. So unless we create docs in Sharepoint (who has time to add another layer of documentation?), everything becomes ephemeral at some point. Like tears in rain...
This, so much. Let's just jump on a quick Teams meeting almost always can be taken care of in an email. And then it's documented and can be referenced and sent to all parties who may need to know that were not included in the "quick" Teams meeting.
Quick phone calls are often more efficient than emails. For status updates, downloads of information, sure email works. But if you want a back and forth exchange of ideas, talking is often much faster.
Talking is indeed faster but if you're not recording the result in some document to share with others not on the call there's risk that valuable information will be lost.
I'd say talking is best at straightening out misunderstandings. In those cases there's not necessarily any extra information generated. It's kind of like attaching a debugger to your communication stream.
We create a teams chat that is separate from the meeting and document what we agree on in that chat, that way it is documented for everyone who forgets the details by tomorrow morning.
I hate—hate—when I'm trying to find something in Slack and right where I'm pretty sure it should be I see a marker indicating that a call took place there, often without any surrounding indication of WTF it was about. Fucking hate it.
