Team messaging is broken

Remote work became quite a standard. Although huge companies like Amazon are now forcing their employees back into the office, I still have the feeling that a majority of employers and employees appreciate the benefits of remote work. They realized how unnecessary and unproductive it is to plaster everyone’s calendar with meetings that could have been an email, or a asynchronous discussion within a team messenger app. People want to work. However, they also want to have control over their own time, and remote, and especially async remote work is the perfect setting for it. While there are fewer remote job listings these days, they still receive far more interest and applications compared to onsite ones. Remote work peaked during the pandemic, a lot of people suddenly found themselves working remotely, and setting up a home office. However, we are now settling for a new normal. Therefore, remote work is not going anywhere, it is here to stay. A lot of companies are settling for hybrid work, having people onsite and spread across the whole world. In that scenario, nailing team messaging and work communication is as important as ever.

In contrary to that, most companies and teams default to the big players, Slack and Microsoft Teams, the two team messaging and collaboration apps that feel overwhelming, bloated, and distracting.

Effective team communication needs clear communication channels, which are designated platforms just like team messaging services, among other tools. What most of those services and apps got wrong is that they transformed in-person communication to a digital tool, so they decided it has to be instant, with a lot of notifications, in your face, so your work and your focus gets disrupted. Instead, people should embrace the idea that not all communication needs to be immediate. If you learn to structure and organize your work, you do not have to rely on the answer of one your colleagues whenever you post a question, since you can park that project and work on something else in the meantime. I do not say that all communication has to be async, there are a lot of situations in which direct and immediate communication is the better choice, probably needed. But a lot of day-to-day communication at work would work and even benefit from async communication.

I am not getting in the details of async communication now, I just want to make clear that it does not only need an async-first mindset to make it work, you, your colleagues, and the whole company need to embrace it, you need to set realistic expectations for response time, and encourage thoughtful, complete messages over rapid-fire conversations.

Slack, Microsoft Team, Discord, and a lot of other team messaging apps are suboptimal for async communication, in fact they are suboptimal for team messaging in general. They were designed primarily for instant messaging, encouraging immediate responses, but also creating an expectation of constant availability. Team messaging is broken. All it does is leading to interruptions and context-switching, reducing deep work time, information overload as you have to work across loads of different channels and conversations, while important messages get buried in the constant stream of chatter. With tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, it became hard to prioritize messages and distinguish urgent from non-urgent. However, the app in which we spend so much time every single day, should assist us with work, and not create even more work, information overload, and in general overwhelm us.

Besides that, with the default settings provided by those tools, they set the stage to encourage frequent notifications, which can led to people constantly checking the team messaging apps, even during off-hours. And ultimately, that leads to the difficult task to balance staying informed with maintaining focus.

The biggest issue I personally have with Slack is that it feels so incredibly bloated. With every single update, it becomes more complex, as it tries to become an all-in-one solution no-one has asked for. Instead of focusing on the core messaging functionality and making it less overwhelming, I can now create a canvas in Slack, or a todo list, or workflows, or whatsoever. Instead of making those featuring unobtrusive, they are front and center, and obviously Slack wants to make sure that we all give it a try by sending us notifications and using banners reminding us about all those features.

There are countless Slack alternatives, but most of them are simply Slack packed in a different UI. The alternatives that get me excited are Twist (by the team behind Todoist), Campsite, Noor, or Inline.

Twist has been around for quite some time and it is probably the one team messaging app with the strongest focus on async communication. The team at Doist has been building Todoist and Twist with a fully remote team and async communication since years, and it simply works. While Slack disrupts your focus, Twist was built and optimized for deep work and more thoughtful conversations, which lead to better and more efficient work as 81% of teams report after switching to Twist.

Campsite has been designed and built for distributed team to cut through the noise of daily work, and move faster with more transparent, organized, and thoughtful conversations. While it started out as an app to share work-in-progress with your team, it now transformed into a full-fledged team messaging and communication platform, powered by posts to keep conversations threaded, organized, and easy to find, one-click calls, automatically summarized and ready to share, DMs and group chat for everything else, and powerful integrations for the rest of your toolkit.

Noor created some buzz by building a team messaging app that features a beautiful, structured, and clear interface, packed with powerful features like infinite threads, backlinks to threads, getting silent updated on things relevant to you, rich previews, a dedicated inbox, and a lot more. The team behind it, consisting of Mo Rajabi and Dena Sohrabi, announced that they are now working on building a native, high-quality messaging app for teams who crave the best, delivering a lightweight app, designed for speed, simple, powerful, and intelligent. The app is called Inline and early access will start in october 2024.

Now, although the title says that team messaging is broken, and thinking of the apps that are the most popular ones, it definitely is broken, however the alternatives are there, and it is exciting to see that I am not the only one who gets annoyed by Slack every single day, and that creative minds set themselves the goal to build the team messaging app that supports you and your work instead of disrupting your workflows. More companies should give those alternatives a try instead of defaulting to apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, just because everyone else is using them. Remote work is here to say, and to get the most out of your remote team, communication, messaging, and the work itself, it needs tools build for that. Twist is a great example of a tool like that, as it got built and designed by a team that can be considered as remote and async experts. However, there is still room for innovation, there is room for more apps like that, more alternatives.

And I am all here for it.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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